I’m not vaccinated. It’s not a political statement. It’s doctor’s orders. In 2006, I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis. I’ve written a couple blogs about it. I’ve had my ups and downs with the disease, but with medication and various treatments, I’ve been living relatively well with the disease in recent years, and it’d been a somewhat quiet seven years or so. But like all good things, that had to end too.
In mid-March my brother had an appointment to get the vaccine and could get me one, too. At that time it was still difficult to secure appointments for the vaccine. Despite really wanting it since I am one of the immune-compromised vulnerable ones, I listened to my body and it was telling me that something wasn’t right. I won’t go into details, but I suspected it wasn’t a good time for my body to take on a vaccine.
Two weeks would prove me right as I was in the midst of a full-blown flareup. Emails to my doctor put me on more medication and orders to stay away from the vaccine until things got better. This was the last week of March and as we head into mid-July, I am doing better, but not well enough to get vaccinated yet.
I’m hoping a few more weeks changes that, but I’ve been hoping that for months now. I’m not writing about this to get sympathy. I don’t need that. We all have our health issues. I’m writing this to thank the people who have gotten vaccinated. Because of you, people like me are safer. I know some people are unvaccinated by choice, but I am sure I can’t be the only one unvaccinated for health reasons.
It is frustrating that politics have played such an integral role in the attitude to this virus, as well as to its vaccine. If the former idiot in the Oval Office would have just worn a mask at its inception, without complaint or political divide, and did not take his own vaccine in secret, maybe over 600,000 Americans wouldn’t have died and today more people would be vaccinated, thus helping to put a stop to this mutating deadly virus. But we’ll never know if that would have happened because, like I said, we had a dangerous idiot in the White House.
So this blog is to simply thank those who had the good sense to get vaccinated, because while you did it to protect yourselves, you are also protecting vulnerable people like me by slowing the spread of this virus. I read an article a couple weeks ago (I’m sorry but I forgot where) that showed statistics that the more Republican a county is, the less vaccinated they are. The unvaccinated would be at a high risk in those counties, and as I read about the more contagious Delta variant, I am grateful I don’t live in those counties.
Thank you to everyone who got the shot.
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aliciajoseph 