Can We All Just Admit that Covid-19 is Really Really Weird?
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I’ve been getting shots pretty much since I was born, half a century ago. Add some years in 3rd world countries and my vaccine passport has multiple editions. Measles/Mumps, Tetanus, Polio, Hepatitis, Rubella, Chickenpox. Rabies shots once, and a Tuberculosis vaccine because my grandfather lost a lung to it. So I know my needles.
But the Covid vaccines are just plain bizarre. We started with J&J, supposedly the ‘normal’ one. On day three my right ankle, only the right, developed a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before. It wasn’t debilitating, but sharp, like a razor along a bone. It only lasted a few hours. The shot itself sent a hot throbbing punch all the way down my arm. Then we got the Moderna booster. Holy shit. My fingers hurt. The lymph nodes in my armpit swelled; there was itching and a rash. No pain right after the shot, but two days later I woke up in the middle of the night thinking someone had hammered the arm with a club.
I’m used to getting a ‘fluey’ feeling after shots, a little fatigue around the eyes, the sense of a fever. With the Johnson and Johnson, I felt as sick as if I actually had the flu. Many of my work colleagues received J&J on the same day; half called out the day after. The Moderna was better, but my wife was laid up, and for a week strange little symptoms kept arriving for a bit and then vanishing. Aches in strange places, a hip, an elbow. I got a cold sore. An oddly localized dizziness, as if just one eye thought I was falling down.
That’s just the vaccines. The virus itself is damn bizarre. It ain’t the flu, that’s for sure. Crystalized lung tissue? Psychosis? Multi-organ impacts? Brain fog? Permanent organ damage? Guillain Barre Syndrome?
Is the whole ‘losing your sense of taste and smell’ even worth adding to the list?
The long-term effects are so widely reported that we now have a specific term, Long Haulers, for people who show symptoms more than 3 months later. And that’s the early stuff. There are reports of a year or more. Sometimes the effects don’t even show up for six months. Think you got Covid and are done…
