How was getting the second Covid-19 vaccine? I climbed a mountain the next day.
I was actually kind of hoping to get sick after my second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. It’s been so long since I was down with a good old-fashioned cold that the idea of lying in bed for a day in a cough syrup induced haze was pretty appealing.
Alas it was not to be. My second dose went as smoothly as the first, and instead of sipping on some sizzurp I spent Monday evening watching Gonzaga play basketball as if they’d chugged enough NyQuil to put all of Spokane in a coma.
The next day the only effects were a slightly sore arm at the injection site, but nothing more than the pain of a mild charley horse. On Tuesday I tried my damndest to convince myself I had some kind of noticeable side effect but came up empty. The only one of note was an odd sympathetic pain in my left shoulder, which I’m chalking up to psychosomatic causes.
I felt good enough in the afternoon to climb 3,510-foot Flattop mountain in Chugach State Park despite unseasonably cold temperatures in the teens and heavy snow that has the Chugach still in mid-winter form.
I’m unspeakably grateful to have received the vaccine and couldn’t be happier to admit how wrong I was about the potential for this day to arrive so quickly. A year ago I speculated that a vaccine would be many years off — if at all possible — and I’m glad I’m so dumb. Modern science is a marvel and the leaps we’ve taken with mRNA vaccines have the potential to be game-changing additions to the world of medicine that will save countless lives.
One thing I’m bothered by is the absurdity of the anti-vaccine movement, many of whose adherents seem to believe the vaccine is some kind of plot to reduce the human population. That’s like trying to argue firefighters are the reason so many houses burn down because they’re the only ones you ever see hanging out at fires.
Modern medicine — and in particular vaccines — has vastly improved the lives of every single person on this planet over the past decades. Many of today’s anti-vax crowd were not alive when polio tore through the nation like a misery tornado, leaving a swath of broken children in its wake, but they’d be well advised to speak to someone who lived through that era. Had it not been for the efforts of scientists, how many more lives would have been destroyed by that plague?
For decades scientists have been studying the application of mRNA technology to vaccines, and its use in the new SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is the breathtaking denouement of literal lifetimes of work. The new vaccine will save millions of lives and put an end to this fever dream of social distancing far earlier than we could have dreamed just a few years ago. Further, the technology underlying the vaccine has the potential to be used in against other viruses and even cancer, making it potentially one of the great breakthroughs of modern science.
Though I’m bummed to see so many people so blindly suspicious of these vaccines, I’m stoked to be on the road back to normal. I want to see the streets of downtown Anchorage filled with sweater-clad tourists eating overpriced hot dogs; I want to shake hands with new acquaintances, hug friends, pet people’s dogs and throw little kids up into the air.
They say don’t sweat the little things but whoever ‘they’ are obviously never experienced the small and infinite joys of meeting a friend for an after-work beer or sitting elbow-to-elbow with strangers inside a movie theater.
The pandemic has been a lot of things to a lot of people and someday I’ll tell the story of my own strange trip through the Weirdest Year of Any of our Lives (™). For some it’s been transformative, for others cathartic, for many a hellish nightmare. None have been spared the impact of the pandemic, and we’ll all have the stories and scars to prove it for the rest of our lives.
But today I’m just happy that it’s looking more and more each day like the pandemic may be approaching something close to an end. Thank you, science. Again.
Anybody else looking forward to road trips? Bring on the Roaring 20s…
Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer and photographer from Anchorage, Alaska. Write to him at matthew.tunseth@gmail.com.
