Gary’s Safe

I am generally cranky when Gary wakes me up, which he did right before midnight. He barged into my room, which is my room because I was thrown out of the marital bed for keeping him awake with my “energy,” and said, “Well I’ve got mine.”

”Got your what? Why are you waking me —“

”Vaccine appointment.” He held up his iPad.

That woke me up. I went from muttering into my pillow to sitting on the edge of the bed.

He said, “Oh no, it’s tomorrow. I can’t go tomorrow. That’s too soon.”

”Too SOON?”

“I was going to sleep tomorrow. And I want to wait until it’s warmer and do a drive-through vaccination.”

To summarize what I said in response, it was multiple iterations of, “So you’re going to put the rest of us at risk so that you don’t have to get out of bed?” and that seemed to convince him.

He said it was a 40 minute wait, but people were distanced, and he got the Moderna Vaccine. I feel I plumped up just from the the unwinding of every muscle. I might have gone boo-ii-ing.

Comments

[KC]

I got my first today, but it was 100% not distanced. ~8ft wide hallways, dozens of workers/volunteers, and people in chairs at 6-8ft intervals along the hallways. I've been within 6 feet of literally dozens of people today, and that is... weird. But everyone was wearing masks, and no one was coughing, so that's nice. But oh, the shared air. But I'm hoping it will be fine.

[TheQueen]

KC - Gary said the same thing about his mom’s vaccination. He was pushing her in a wheelchair and it was not at all distanced. I hear you shouldn’t take Tylenol to help with the side effects. (Don’t know if that’s true.) Hope they aren’t too bad.

[KC]

Sore shoulder a la tetanus vaccination, and also a larger-than-usual slice of tired and cold, but honestly, not bad given the whole construction of a practice Death Star... https://xkcd.com/2425/

I wonder whether there are location "types" that tend to not be as distanced? This was a university medical center and they were aiming to get 1100 people through about 6 exam rooms *today* using only part of the building because they still need to fulfill the rest of the medical center basics, so... yeah, like, this makes sense. And they presumably wouldn't want to just move the whole vaccination thing to a completely separate location, because if someone *does* have a reaction, they'd want them in the medical center and not, like, in the stadium or something? But it was a zoo. An *extremely* efficient zoo.

[TheQueen]

KC - Well, that’s a good point, but I can say Gary’s was in a sports arena. The local hospital conglomerate is taking over arenas and stadiums in the area - I guess they consider nearby hospital access.

[KC]

The hospital conglomerate probably also has enough access to staff that they can staff each area - some to vaccinate, a few armed with epi-pens at the vaccination site - without short-staffing their hospitals, whereas a university health services center that's already likely kind of swamped (see: pandemic) would have a harder time sending off 1/3 or 1/2 of their actual-medical staff off to the stadium/gym without leaving themselves pretty short. As it was, one of the vaccinators - the only one who got a chair, apparently - was also doing data entry for allll the forms. I assume if someone has a medical emergency requiring more medical staff than the one or two people who were roving the "wait for anaphylaxis" areas, then half the vaccination staff go deal with that and everything slows to a crawl until they're back? But I don't really know.

[TheQueen]

KC - Gary said every singe person in the arena he was in was a “twenty year old nurse.” That’s all I know.

[KC]

Ah, but what about the married persons? (<-bad pedantic joke)

(like, aside from him, all the people getting vaccinated were twenty year old nurses, or all the medical staff were twenty year old nurses? I am curious. I thought they were mostly through vaccinating medical personnel, at least with the first shot, but maybe not in Missouri...)

[TheQueen]

KC - ahahahhaha. And it was the medical staff.