COVAX

My current feelings surrounding the COVID vaccine can’t be summed up in a pithy Instagram post, so here we are.

I haven’t posted a ton about the pandemic from a healthcare provider perspective, and (for lots of reasons), I’m not really planning to make this a trend. I’m also writing this at the tail end of a long work weekend; I’m definitely not at my most eloquent or my most composed, and it’s quite possible that whatever words come out right now aren’t what I would say if I had another couple of days to think about it.

But in some ways that’s appropriate. This is a uniquely emotional time we’re living through, and I deserve to be able to remember that aspect of 2020 too.

I’ll start by saying that I can’t describe how incredible it has felt to see this week’s steady stream of social media posts from friends and PA classmates who are receiving their first shots. I have literally cried tears of happiness at seeing those familiar pairs of eyes — most of whom I haven’t seen in years — smiling over the tops of their masks as the needle enters their arm. Even though I can only see half their faces, I can see their joyful relief, and it mirrors my own, and it’s overwhelming.

This is the beginning of the end. We have a long way to go, but we’re going to get past this thing. Science is amazing, technology is amazing, and incredible things can be accomplished (quickly!) when public and private sectors work together to build upon years of preceding achievements.

But in stark contrast to the first delicate individual strands of protection is the aggression of the communal struggle. All around us, case numbers are exploding, and in my corner of the world, far too many of them have been medical providers. It feels like the universe is underscoring the urgency of getting us vaccinated fast. A friend from high school, an OBGYN who has been leading a COVID organizational team in his hospital system all year, tested positive two weeks ago; this past week, I had to break the news to an emergency room nurse (“I’m supposed to get the vaccine in” [checks watch] “literally two hours.”), along with another healthcare professional, who accepted the news almost blankly, saying, “I kind of can’t believe it. Like, I can’t believe I made it this far, and now…”

Can you imagine how that feels? The joy at seeing your friends protected, contrasted with the burden of telling healthcare colleagues you’ve never met that the thing we’ve been fighting all year long has finally caught up to them?

My heart is breaking along multiple fault lines at once.

And then there’s the ‘vaccine guilt’. I’m not the first one to talk about this. We’re healthcare workers; we instinctively put others first. There is major guilt involved with knowing we’re prioritized for something for which the rest of the world has to wait. A friend who is a hospital pharmacist refused his dose because he felt that it should go to other staff members first; another friend (emergency room physician) told me I ‘need it more’ (in my outpatient clinic) than she does; in turn, I tell my LPN (who is actively testing +COVID patients) that she needs it more than I do; she argues that her paramedic sister needs it more than any of us, and round and round we go. Almost everyone who is entitled to a ‘first wave’ dose will likely choose to accept it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t Big Feelings involved.

And, I won’t lie: for me personally, underscoring all of this is also no small amount of “but what about me?” I suspect there’s more to the situation than I currently understand — there usually is — but suffice to say that my organization is not affiliated with a hospital and has outside political/financial allegiances. For now, we providers are not being offered the vaccine via our workplace.

Try to imagine how that feels, too — to technically be in the first wave, and yet not? There’s some extra guilt there, because it’s hard for me to know where objectivity leaves off and entitlement begins — but objectively: I am a patient-facing healthcare provider, seeing symptomatic patients face-to-face, during illness season, in the middle of a pandemic. My name is on 30+ COVID testing orders each day. And, like every medical provider around the globe, I have spent this year with N95 divots on my face, while pivoting and shifting and adapting and pivoting again. So although I want my inpatient colleagues to go first and I don’t want to receive the vaccine until it’s truly my turn — I admittedly do also want some acknowledgement that my hard work this year has mattered, and that I’m important enough to protect. If I had caught COVID before, I would have chalked it up to “luck of the draw; I did everything I could.” But if I catch it now, it will be very difficult for me not to blame those who could have protected me and decided not to.

This has been a long hard emotional week to (almost) finish a long hard emotional year. So I’m not going to reread this a thousand times like I usually do; I’m just going to press Publish and move on. Because I do know that this will all work out in the end one way or another. We will all be vaccinated; the pandemic will end; this year will live in infamy in the history books. But when I look back on this week in a year, or in five years, or in a decade, I’ll want to remember how I really felt, not read some polished version that I decided sounded more PC.

I’ll leave you with this. Tomorrow is the winter solstice — the shortest darkest day of the year — beyond which the daylight starts lasting a minute or two longer again each day.

Feels pretty metaphorical right now.