Getting the Covid Vaccine

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

On August 3rd, 2021, I finally got my first Covid vaccination.  I got it at CVS.  Despite the fact that I inject insulin and prick myself every day to test my blood sugar, I still hate needles.  When watching people get vaccinated on TV, I was always surprised by how long the vaccine needle looked -- 2" to 3" was my estimate.  I couldn't imagine that such a needle going into my muscle wouldn't hurt.  Partly because of that, and partly because I don't have a car to get to a vaccination site, I didn't get the vaccine for months after one became available.  But the rise of the Delta variant really scared me, and I decided I had to get it done.  I am 70 years old and have at least a dozen significant health problems, and that made me vulnerable to dying from the Covid virus.

However, I think it was significant that I survived more than a year without getting Covid -- although it's possible that I got it and wasn't aware I had it.  In early to mid-2020, there were two occasions when I felt "under the weather" for about a week, and it could have been Covid.  But I couldn't be sure, and the Delta variant sounded really dangerous, so I took concrete steps to get vaccinated.

When I got the vaccine, I barely felt it.  In fact, it didn't hurt at all, not even the slightest bit.  I had expected it to hurt at least as much as an insulin needle does, but it didn't -- some of my insulin shots are quite painful.  I asked the technician after he injected me, and he confirmed that it went into my arm a couple inches at least, right into the muscle.

Not only didn't it hurt, but it was the third vaccine that I have gotten in the last two years, and none of them hurt.  For a long time, I believed that insulin needles were cut differently from other needles, and that was the reason they hurt more.  But I just searched the internet looking at close-ups of needle points, and all of them seem to be cut the same way, so I have no idea why vaccines hurt less than insulin shots do.

Indeed, in recent years, the two times that I received shots of anesthetics for minor surgical procedures, those shots were incredibly painful.  So why is it that vaccine shots are so painless?  I may never know.

In any event, in one month I'll get my second vaccine shot.  That doesn't mean that I won't get Covid, but it does mean that if I do, I'm not likely to get seriously ill from it.  I can hardly wait for that second shot.

I should add that I had no reaction to the shot -- no dizziness or any other symptom.

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