Second dose twice as nice, even if recipients are not
Ontario’s moral thrift — use up every last shot of this AstraZeneca vaccine shipment by May 31 or live in infamy — will be, I suspect, successful.
I got my first AZ shot in early March as the storied (vilified? contentious? ambrosial?) product neared its bestbefore date, and my second shot last week as the Monday cliff neared. My lazy but rule-based strategy paid off, if you can give hopeful inertia such a pompous name. It was pure undeserved luck. They needed arms, any arms.
Perhaps “despairing lassitude” might better describe my stance. It took me back to booking seats for standup comic John Mulaney in Toronto in 2020. He kept cancelling shows for no good reason, then snowstorms, then he had a better offer, and now he has left rehab to divorce his heartbroken wife and has to write all new material about his home life, blown to smithereens.
Clearly, I will never see Mulaney perform live. But I was also expecting to be fully vaccinated by September 2021, with no hope of sooner.
Things happened. I called three pharmacies to get my first shot, and only one called back for that glorious event. This week, several appointments for the second shot were cancelled without warning, something outside the standard Ontario experience where medical appointments are rigid, billable and packed with threat. But we are living through a kind of wartime.
There’s a militant atmosphere in neighbourhoods where visitors have behaved badly at public clinics. The friendly Chinatown pop-up for locals getting a first dose was made miserable by “vaccine vultures,” people from outside the area — apparently conspicuous by their visibly expensive cars — clamouring for their second.
They were told to come back later for leftovers, but instead they moved across the street and stared, possibly balefully, at people legitimately in line. I’m not saying it was like Bloods and Crips or even “Lord of the Flies,” mainly because reporters weren’t able to get the killer quote from the supposed intruders.
But there was a bad vibe.
Well. When I arrived for my second vaccine appointment, there was already a beef at the pharmacy door. There were only supposed to be a handful of people inside, but one irate older woman seemed to be arguing that she and her husband counted as one person.
That didn’t seem terribly feminist to me. I watched them argue and went in for a prescription and my vaccine appointment at 10 a.m.
The woman was also booked for 10 a.m. When I was called over by the pharmacist first, beating her to vaccination by six whole minutes, she cursed just as I imagine they did over the last helicopter out of Saigon in 1975. “You f---ing b---h,” she said to me. She then got sweary through the whole process, distracting me from what might have been a personal moment of great fabulousness. I had initially planned to blow bubbles. She became my “flattering adjacency,” burning resentment next to my humming good cheer. Readers, would you have cared if the vaccine had gone mouldy? I love my AstraZeneca, whatever shape she’s in.
I was so rattled, I forgot to ask the pharmacist if he had a spare glass vial I could glue corklike to the bottle of champagne we drank the night before after receiving his call. You can hardly drink champagne at 10:30 a.m. — although if you were going to, this would have been the day.
I wanted a symbol, a memento mori for the agony the pandemic had put my family, friends and colleagues through. I had been keeping the bottle of Les Fumées Blanches for autumn.
“Ma’am, you’re about to be fully vaccinated,” I told the woman as I left. “Isn’t that wonderful? Aren’t we lucky to be Canadian? Stay well.”
Well, that really set her off. She wishes her Canada Heather-free, and who I am to deny her? I’d love to go on a European vacation.
I left her to it. I’ll keep masking even after the recommended two weeks, but I can hug family now. A new future awaits us all, much like the old future but full of dental appointments and home repairs, happily so.
What? They just called your name. It’s your turn.