Vaccine creates good cheer

Who would have thought that getting a shot could feel like a Christmas party?

Along with other health care workers, I received my first coronavirus vaccine recently. Everything was very orderly, but the atmosphere was almost festive. The nurses administering the vaccine were likely there on their day off, but were smiling and chatting. Those of us getting the vaccine came in on a Saturday, but nobody complained.

When I mentioned to friends about getting the vaccine, some asked, “Aren’t you nervous? I don’t think I would do that.” But there was no nervousness among my fellow health care workers. Just the opposite: Most I spoke to were excited.

We are not excited primarily for ourselves. We are excited because we know firsthand what the coronavirus can do. When we signed up to work in health care, we knew that we would see and experience suffering. But during the pandemic, suffering has taken on an unending, day-afterday-after-day quality. It is an excruciating monotony.

Health care workers have been exhausted by suffering, sometimes overwhelmed, yet it keeps coming. Often, we have been the only physical presence for our patients as they suffer and die in intense loneliness.

I have been proud of my colleagues, in awe as I watch them continue in the face of such suffering. But the sorrow exacts a huge toll, one we cannot pay forever.

So this is why getting a vaccine is a festive occasion. There are some who still think the virus is a hoax, or just another flu, or blown out of proportion. We know differently; we have seen too much of death.

This vaccine represents something huge: the beginning of the end, the tiny light glimpsed at the end of a tunnel. This is why we can say of something as mundane as immunization: “This is a great day.”

Let the party begin.

— Dr. Joseph Gibes, Gurnee