On Getting a Booster Shot when You're Sixty-Something and Sick in Deutschland

My Venus Fly Trap, Elizabite, was inert all summer. Her companion, another carnivorous plant whom I call "Sticky Fingers," traps tiny flies--and recently, a gigantic water-fly--with amazing regularity. If Sticky Fingers, with her long tendrils glistening with dewy, fatal, glue, is the Olympiad of fly-trapping, Elizabite is a lazybones--not a fly to her name (and all those lovely red interiors in her cozy-looking traps!)

When she finally trapped a fly, a big one, I felt astonished. And proud. I told her how very proud I was, and took her success as a sign that I should take my health in my hands and trap a booster. 

The attentive reader will see Elizabite's prey on the left. Worried by CDC reports and the earnest face of Anthony Fauci trying, as usual, to do the right thing, I considered my options. I could wait and follow the rules. I've never been particularly good at that, though I've usually done so. But now I felt my life was at stake. I could wait until mid-to-late October, in other words after I'm likely to face students who are probably but not one hundred percent safe, plus a co-worker who doesn't believe in vaccinations. I wandered over to the area known as Vaccination Street and cased the joint. Would they recognize me? What a paranoid thought. I lined up among those without appointments, requested a third shot, offering my history of metastatic cancer. I got the answer I expected. They're not giving third shots. No exceptions. I went back home, called my internist, my gynecologist, my oncologist again. They're also not giving third shots. I looked at myself in the mirror. Was I really going to do this? 

After waiting a few days, I pulled my hair into a pony tail, put on dark glasses, walked back to Vaccination Street and got in line. 

"Is this your first vaccination?" asked the yellow-jacketed guard.

"Mmmm-hmm!" I squeaked. As usual, I expected to be sent home at every step of the way. When I showed my ID card. When I "forgot" my vaccination book. When I filled out the form wrong. When the doctor, needle poised over my arm, told me to expect a hematoma and I said, "Oh, I know--I mean, my friend told me that's what would happen!" I even expected, as I sat among the vaccinated for the required fifteen-minute wait, either to plotz on the floor for my sins--Zeus would zap me with a thunderbolt--or be arrested. The police would march in and announce: "You Did Not Follow The Procedures Or The Rules." 

I swung my arm around vigorously right after the shot. I'm told the notion that this helps with pain is an urban legend, but this time around I did not wake up moaning in pain when I turned over on my vaccinated arm. I pressed it, as the doctor told me to do, and I put on an ice pack as soon as I got home. Body aches and chills came; my temperature rose to 37.1 and 37.3. I lay in bed, took paracetamol, ate ice cream and read Peter Pan.

I recovered.