#what no antidepressants and two vaccines does to a guy

[lynksease]

can someone please please please please please come over to my house and shoot me in the head now

[sera-cb]

My vaccine experience has been terrible and stressful and it’s put me in a really weird spot where I 100% believe everyone should get this thing if they’re at all able, but also am terrified to try again myself. Which I have to do, it turns out! Because even with this capitalism’s efforts to do things cheaply and as automated as possible has just absolutely fucked me apparently.

Like first off, I have a day job five days a week and every other weekend I am scheduled to do art streams, one for backers and one for comms, which both are typically needed to make ends meet.  Work won’t pay me to miss time for side effects, and I’m finding it very difficult to do these big-ass seven hour streams two weekends in a row on top of my usual work weeks, so finding the right time to get the first dose was a nightmare, but also

that nightmare began with like an hour wait inside of a Walgreens to see if the last appointment would show up or not, because “walk-ins open” is sort of only half true I guess, but largely because if they just gave it to me they’d need to open a new set of the things and they’d all go bad for my sake and that sucks.  Fine, I get it, but the dude didn’t show so they scheduled me for the next day.

Then, as I was walking away, the dude shows up, and the guy flags me down and goes “hey let’s do it now after all.”  Rad, I thought. Progress.

Another hour waiting in Walgreens.

I finally get the shot. She hands me some papers. I need to wait around for 15 minutes to be observed, they said. Alright, fine. I read the papers while I wait; the side effects of the shot possibly killing you are basically 1:1 with what happens to me during a panic attack. I’ve developed this weird history with needles where I get panic attacks or something adjacent with some weird and mildly random delay after getting any kind of shot.  Now I’m thinking about that and the room is spinning. I call my wife hoping she’ll talk me down. I get about two sentences into that call before I wake up to my phone ringing on the floor.  Nobody on staff notices.

Three hours after getting there, I hobble out of Walgreens. I’m basically wiped out for three days - even without the shot, the weird lightheaded shit I get from these pass-out sessions does some vile stuff to the rest of my body that lingers for a day or two sometimes.

I was advised that since I got the shot day-of after all I’d need to reschedule my appointment, though, and this led to problems.  Walgreen’s vaccine setup only does appointments in pairs; if you missed the first, you won’t get the second, and there was to our knowledge no way to do just the second, especially via their robo phone tree. Kaz deals with Walgreens all the time for her meds, so she knows how to get through the phone tree - it’s by being so hostile that I feel bad for the robot, for the record - but when asking if we could schedule just a second shot either they hung up on us or the line went dead.

I said “screw it, I’ll just show up in a few weeks,” but then I just never did, because I didn’t have a hard deadline to my knowledge and I was quite stressed out from the whole experience, but it turns out that the day I finally worked up the will to get the second dose? Where I had people willing to be there for me in case things went south again?

Three days after the six week deadline before the whole thing is moot, which nobody told me about.

So now I’m back to square one, barely able to work my will up for one more shot but staring down two, wondering if this means I now have the option to go somewhere else or if that counts as mixing vaccines, which even I know to be bad, and feeling incredibly lost and frustrated with the whole thing.

And the brutal truth is that none of these places have accommodations for Kaz that would allow her to get the damn shot anyway! She can’t stand around a Walgreens for hours. She could barely walk back to where the pharmacy even is, and all like two chairs back there are made for skinny little asses so she’d have nowhere to sit while her spine declares war on her. (And this is all ignoring that she basically can’t go out during daylight without a bunch of excess precaution since her antidepressants have rendered her some sort of vampire in the skin department, by which I mean the amount of time it takes for her to get sunburnt is less than the time it takes to walk to the car from the house.)

So I’d still need to act like I haven’t had the shot, because even though it’d stop me from getting sick, I could still bring something home and transmit it to her. Nothing about my life would change. I cannot go back to “normal.” At this rate, ever.

So on the one hand I’m with everyone going “hell yeah get your shot”

but on the other I am effectively one of the people who hasn’t, with someone else who hasn’t and seemingly can’t (I do not understand why we can’t just set up an appointment with her doctor, who does have accommodations, for this??? Why does it need to be some retailer pharma??), and the whole thing is both deeply frustrating, confusing in implementation, and leaving me feeling like a hopeless statistic that’s here just to frustrate everyone else.

Like, I’m probably never going to have a group of people over again? Game nights are gone. Socializing is gone. Web calls never replaced it, we’re not that important to anyone. Holidays are well dead. My family has tried to talk us into attending church for several things, including Christmas and Mother’s Day, and just doesn’t understand how not plausible that is. Kaz is high risk; I have been assured that if she gets COVID, she almost certainly will die. I can’t play fast and loose with this shit like everyone around me wants to. I’m forced to come into work every day as it is and still dread coming up the stairs and being forced to be within five feet of another person, none of whom have ever masked during this thing. If I thought there was a safer job available to me that wouldn’t leave us homeless, I’d take it in a heartbeat.

Sorry for the long post. I just feel so defeated by this whole mess and I keep seeing post after post saying anyone who doesn’t get the shot is an idiot, basically, and while I realize we’re outliers I feel terrible all the same.