This week marks one year since the world shut down and it’s hard to tell whether I can’t believe it has already been a year of living in a pandemic or if it has only been a year of living in a pandemic. Regardless of if this year has felt long or short, we all have to admit that it seems there are two periods of our lives: Before Covid and After.
I will never forget the fear and confusion I felt on the morning of March 11th, 2020. I opened my email to see that my school was shutting down and I had to move home. Before that moment, coronavirus was scary but it felt so distant, so irrelevant to my life. I never would have believed that within the next 365 days I would have gotten both sick with the disease and vaccinated for it.
I am very fortunate that for seven months, COVID hadn’t directly affected anyone in my life. But by October the pandemic felt close to home. My mom is a marketing director at an assisted living property so when they were hit with COVID, they were hit hard. In just two months, she was directly exposed five times and lost six residents to the disease. It was a scary time so my whole family felt a breath of relief when it was announced that she would be vaccinated in early January.
When her vaccination date rolled around, I had been back in Boulder for just under a week after a month of being at home, but my mom was so excited so I decided to surprise her at work to say congratulations. As my mom and I stood outside chatting, six-feet apart with masks, her boss poked her head out of the door and said, “Hey Rachel! Do you want to get your COVID vaccine?” I can’t lie when I say I hesitated for a moment. I was scared of the side-effects and I felt like I didn’t deserve it. When my mom’s boss explained to me that it was an extra dose that was about to be thrown away, I gave her an eager yes.
Within 30 minutes, I had a shot of the Pfizer vaccine in my right arm and I was on my way back up to Boulder. That night, I felt fine– zero side effects. If anything, I was invigorated because I thought the threat of COVID was behind me. But three days later, I woke up and something felt very off. I had a pounding headache and with every breath, I took my nostrils burned. I knew that these symptoms were not side effects of the vaccine so I booked a rapid test. Sure enough, it came back positive. I immediately started bawling. I had spent the past 10 months doing everything I could to avoid catching COVID. I was never in a group of more than five people and I didn’t go out once. But in that past week, I had seen my family, my roommates, and a few friends from home. I felt angry that I got sick after being so safe and I was terrified that I could have given it to someone else. Within two days of my diagnosis, all three of my roommates and my two friends had tested positive. But luckily, none of our families got sick.
Nonetheless, it was a terrible 10 days. I was fortunate to have fairly minimal symptoms. Besides the headache and burning nostrils, I had no other symptoms (but they were brutal enough on their own). Between the other five, there were fevers, loss of taste and smell, coughs, and body aches. The stress of the whole situation definitely didn’t help the symptoms either. We all eventually made it through our isolation period and were free to re-enter society.
A week after my recovery, I was able to get my second dose of the vaccine. The symptoms were definitely worse with the second shot than with the first. I was exhausted and had some mild chills but it was nothing like having COVID. Let me say that again – VACCINE SIDE EFFECTS ARE NOT AS BAD AS HAVING COVID. Within a day, I felt 100% better.
I’ve been fully vaccinated (that means two weeks after the second shot) for three weeks now. My lifestyle hasn’t changed much– I still mask up and social distance– but I am relieved that the whole process is behind me. The wisdom I hope to give with this article is essentially “GET VACCINATED!” If you are fortunate enough to be eligible for the COVID vaccine, please please please get it. I know and understand that it may feel noble to wait because there are other people who need it more, but at the end of the day, vaccines are getting thrown away daily and the more people who get vaccinated, the better — regardless of who it is. Having COVID sucks, so I say do whatever you can to avoid it. Vaccine side effects are a bummer, but it is very brief suffering in exchange for a big reward.