I don’t mean to lord it over the rest of you with my conspicuous consumption of preventive medical care, but there it is: I got the bivalent shot on Friday, and now I have not one, but two vaccine cards.

This is due to an error someone made on my first card, and had to scratch out. I don’t understand what the problem was, but it eliminated a vacant spot on the first card. Also, I’m just noticing that a space was skipped on the front, because the little stickers they put on were too wide. Anyway, I had to get a new one Friday.

And now, I’m finally protected against the variant that I probably had back in January. Better late than never, right?

I meant to boast about this on Friday itself, but I didn’t feel like it. I was doing OK until I took my usual post-stroke afternoon nap, then woke up feeling like someone had hit me in the arm with a baseball bat. And then I felt lousy generally, as though I had a minor bug of some sort, for the next day or so.

That pain thing is weird. I don’t understand it. As someone who got a lot of shots as a kid — I started on allergy shots as a toddler, and got a truckload of vaccinations before moving to Ecuador when I was 9 — this doesn’t fit the pattern.

In my experience, the world record for soreness is held by the typhoid shots I got that summer of 1962. If I remember correctly, it was a series of six, and we got them about a week apart. I specifically remember getting one at the old state health department office on Market Street — next to the hospital where I was born, which is now long gone — and then getting into the car, and having trouble closing the door because my scrawny arm was already so sore.

Seems like someone once told me that the soreness had to do with the viscosity of the fluid being injected into the muscle. So it makes sense that the typhoid injections hurt immediately.

Then… why do COVID shots not hurt right away? I’ve had five of them now, and the pattern seems to be: Get the shot, feel some relief over the next few hours because it doesn’t hurt, then WHAM! It starts hurting not quite as badly as a typhoid shot, but it’s not great, either. This is weird because it seems that the alien substance would have spread out by that time, and therefore hurt less.

Anyway, it’s way better now, so I’m not complaining…

It occurs to me that maybe so many Trumpistas avoid vaccination because there’s so much Spanish on the card…

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