Hello dear ones & happy October,
This week, I got my Covid booster in an attempt to protect myself against this season’s variant.
I’m a Pfizer gal & every Covid vaccine I’ve had really kicks my butt. I don’t know if it may have something to do with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) & an overactive immune system or what, but I spend about 36 hours with intense body aches & chills & a headache, then round out 48 hours with a migraine & fatigue. It pisses off my POTs, too. Often the lymph node under the armpit of the arm that I got the injection in swells. This time that didn’t happen, but I was left with a baseball-sized, hot & itchy red welt over the injection site. Full disclosure: I am still in a Benadryl haze.
It is worth it to me to be protected from the virus the best I can be. Here’s a cautionary tale. Last year, I kept putting off my flu shot. I usually get it in the fall, but for some reason didn’t. When Santa, or my very sweet, adorable, curly-haired niece, gave me the flu for Christmas, I got so sick. Driving home from my mother-in-law’s house, I told my husband I might need to go to the hospital. I ordered fries on a touch screen at a gas station McDonald’s & it felt like a psychedelic experience. I got my flu shot very soon after that.
People with MCAS are at greater risk for severe illness from Covid-19, because we are more prone to something called a cytokine storm, which is an inflammatory immune response that can compromise your organs. I’d rather have a 48 hours of reactionary discomfort than a cytokine storm, so I bear it.
On the day I got the jab, I awoke with a fever in the middle of the night & curled up on the couch with my nurse Dino, a chubby black cat who doesn’t leave my side when I’m unwell –or when I’m well, for that matter. Under my heated blanket, I watched the night turn to morning. From the couch, I watched the day unfold until it slowly turned back into night & my aches began to ease up.
My little vaccine illness has me reflecting on the intimacy of illness. When I was recovering from jaw surgery, the bandages wrapped around my head muffled sound. It was like I was living in a humid terrarium of my own intense healing. I’d wake up in the hospital, where I had to stay for longer than anticipated, & see the familiar, comforting characters of my mom, my sisters, & a rotating nurse. They’d flutter over my bed, where I lay cocooned in gauze & pain medicine. Then I would drift again, back into a fairy tale poison-apple kind of deep sleep.
It turns out, I am allergic to morphine. My sister Michelle, who was in nursing school at the time & who is now a brilliant nurse practitioner, told the nurse that other people in my family are allergic to morphine & asked if dilaudid might be a better option for me. I remained on morphine & Michelle, of course, ended up being right.
I woke up in a haze, scratching myself raw. They stopped the morphine & my mom & sisters rubbed medicine with menthol & camphor all over me. I’m sure I didn’t help, as I was in wet-noodle mode. I went back to sleep, slipping again into that deep well of healing.
When we’re sick, we’re so close to ourselves. It’s a strange sensation to try to articulate, but being in intense pain or physical distress requires an immediacy, a kind of presence & mindfulness we often easily pass over in our “look over here” culture.
When I’m in it, I mostly hate it. I hate feeling the cramping in my calves or pulsating of nerves in my head. I hate when fever & inflammation cause my skin to hurt. But I try to remember that there may be a beauty in caring for myself, too. A solace in tuning into the quiet, disjointed rhythm of my body.
What are you teaching me, body? I ask. The importance of presence, my body may reply. Just be here with me, she might say. Stay close. Bring water & wait with me while I move through this into the next hour or day, the next phase of being.
Do you remember being a child & how it felt when your parents or other adult loved ones comforted you when you were sick? I remember once when I had an ear infection. I climbed into bed with my parents, that sacred little kid temple of supreme comfort. My dad distracted me from my throbbing sore ear by rubbing the well-worn, soft corner of my favorite blanket across my face, while I nestled into the gentle scent of my mom’s hand lotion & fell back asleep.
Can I care for myself that tenderly? Can you? If there was a time in your childhood or life where you needed care & didn’t get it, can you go deep into the recesses of your memory, the dark cave of your own wounded heart scarred as they all are with human error, & give yourself what you needed then, now?
Every day holds an opportunity. Sometimes it stings & it’s hard to find, but I believe it’s there–not to sugarcoat or romanticize what’s objectively uncomfortable–but to love ourselves & so, each other more deeply.
Until next week,
Annie
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