Inhale, exhale
With the simple request to take a deep breath, I completed my quest. A needle in the upper arm, hardly painful, filled with the best hope available from our leaders in health. I have been vaccinated, before coming into close contact with the dreaded virus.
Quite by accident, I awoke hours before the “regular time”. Someone else was starting a load of laundry, and I had the parental responsibility to counsel a return to rest. Of course, my fragile lock on sleep had ended. On a whim, I checked the government website, and given that clinics were scheduled for the afternoon, I headed back to the same centre where I’d missed out on the treasured coupon lottery.
Try to imagine standing in the rain at 05h20, halfway across a large parking lot with hundreds of others. S0metimes, one does things that lack in common sense. The authorities did unlock the doors to the mall within a few minutes, and I joined the queue of hundreds to await the start of distribution. MP3 players might just be one of the best inventions of our times.
The rules had changed, again, and I was permitted three coupons; me, my spouse and our youngest son. Different reasons, same goal. Nothing left to do but return home for the next seven hours and wait for our scheduled moment. Time passes quickly. When we rejoined the queue just before 13h00, there were just as many people, but this time we had the promise that we would be innoculated in due course.
It takes a lot of people (trained people) to handle better than 300 patients per hour. People to run the queue, people to prepare the questionnaires, people to test the quality of your responses, people to run a second queue and so on. My time beside the student nurse was short; roll up my sleeve, inhale, exhale. Admire the full bins of used syringes (first time in my life that I have seen so much material discarded so quickly). Then, wait for fifteen long minutes to assure no side effects and done. All in the same day.
I’ve got another ten days or so before the inoculum takes effect, but the wait for the mechanical part is over.
