Island Life: Trying to Get Shot (in the Arm)

Silly me. Last year, when the pandemic hit, we dutifully canceled travel and took precautions and hunkered down. We washed our hands, and bought and wore masks, and learned how to make crumpets and how to Zoom. Our family indefinitely postponed my stepdad’s memorial service and my brother’s wedding; my husband Mark and I even put off dental checkups and grocery shopping trips to the mainland. And all through it, I kept thinking, Oh, I cannot wait for there to be a vaccine.

“When there’s a vaccine, we will do all those things again!”

As I say. Silly me.

There’s a vaccine now! Several of them! Very promising ones!

If only…we could get one.

I know we have to be patient. I was even pretty clear on the fact that when the vaccines were announced, that didn’t mean a nice doctor in a white coat was going to show up at our doorstep the next morning, syringes in hand. “Right, here we go, roll up those sleeves…”

But then distribution started! Front-line health care workers first: yep, that’s perfect, that makes sense. Then older people: absolutely. In some places, essential workers; each state has their own specific calculations and priorities. Most of which even make sense.

I looked up our state: Washington. There is a clear list of phases and eligible folks…whoah, wait, what’s this? Mark and I are both under sixty-five…but since we have his nearly eighty-eight-year-old mom living with us now, we qualify!

I went online and filled out the forms for all three of us.

Woohoo!

Then I called our clinic. “Oh sure, you qualify, absolutely. We’ll put you on the list.”

THE LIST.

Am I the only one wondering if this “list” is somewhat…hypothetical? Aspirational, maybe? It’s not the clinic’s fault: they can’t give out vaccines they don’t have.

So we waited a bit. Being patient and all, you know.

Then we ran into a neighbor on the road, on our daily walk to check the mail. “Go online with the county health department,” they told us. “There are doses being distributed just at the county level, and you can sign up for slots.”

Long story short…we did that. Two hundred doses were allotted for the whole county. I know we’re a small county, but…there are considerably more than two hundred of us.

Here’s what the county website says now:

Ah well. More being patient and all.

A number of other friends and neighbors tried for those two hundred slots. I actually know one person who got one (and she’s in her eighties, so I even feel good about it).

I’m also good with being patient–we’ve been home for nearly a year now, content and comfortable and busy and well-provisioned–but there’s something about having the finish line in sight that makes it all…just kind of so much harder. I miss my family. I miss my friends–even local friends, all hunkered down in our separate homes. I miss shopping in stores; I miss eating in restaurants; I miss riding on the passenger deck of the ferry, rather than huddling in our freezing cold cars on the rare occasions when we leave the island at all. I miss having people over for dinner.

I miss the gym, I miss the Barnacle Bar, I miss the Seaview movie theater.

One of the few friends I still see in person (outside, masked) forwarded me an email from a friend of hers, who has made an exhaustive, tenacious study of all the places to potentially get the vaccine within a hundred-mile radius of here. (All on the mainland, of course.) Safeways, pharmacies, various hospitals, other counties’ health departments. I got weary just reading her email.

I’ll take my chances with the list.

But then! Through an improbable series of events, my husband encouraged his mother to check her current email, rather than the three-years-old email she’s been working her way through–and there was a note from the health clinic! She had twenty-four hours to return their message to let them know whether she would like an appointment to get shot in the arm.

Yes! She would!

We’ll take her in Friday, and she already has her second appointment for four weeks after that. Sadly, nothing for us yet, but having her vaccinated will go a long way toward making us all feel better.

And as for Mark and me…well, we’re still on the list.