Me, and the Vaccine or A Hypochondriac gets the shot

I am a hypochondriac.

It’s probably not the first thing you would realize upon meeting me — that would likely be that I have amazingly hip glasses (Thanks Warby Parker!) or that I am taller than you thought (6'3"!) — but, if you spent any sort of time at all around me, you’d figure it out pretty quickly.

I’ve been a “worrywart” — in my mom’s words — for as long as I can remember. I spent my childhood always worrying that I was going to get (or already had) cancer. My teen years were filled with fears of viral meningitis.(Look up the symptoms; it’s basically like you start to get a headache and then WHAMMO possible death.)

My worries became worse — and more debilitating — as the end of college neared and, well, the rest of my life started. In my early 20s I was often crippled with anxiety — not exclusively but often centered around health worries that an eye twitch was a brain tumor, a sore throat was meningitis (I told you!) and a weird noise I could hear only in one ear was the first signs of oncoming deafness or a lifetime of tinnitus.

Talking to someone — actually several someones — has helped. Somewhat. I am no longer paralyzed by worry about my health or, as has more often been the case since my two kids were born, worries about theirs.

But, I think about health and wonder when the other shoe is somehow going to drop every single day. Sometimes it consumes me. Other times I am able to keep it at bay, a whisper banging around just in the back of my head.

Which brings me to last March and the outbreak of a previously unknown virus that was rapidly spreading around the world — without any proven treatments, much less a vaccine.

All I kept thinking of in those early days was Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station 11,” a novel that begins with a slow-starting and then rapidly accelerating virus that wipes out a large chunk of the population. And it scared the hell out of me.

Uncertainty — not being able to know exactly what that eye twinge means or whether my son’s sneezing is allergies or something worse — fuels my (and I assume) everyone’s anxiety.

And the Covid-19 pandemic was all uncertainty, all the time. Were masks helpful? (Remember that we were told there was no need for the average person to wear a mask in the early days.) Did we need to sanitize every item in our grocery order? If we bent the curve would everything go back to (relatively) normal (relatively) quickly?

No one had answers. Not even the medical professionals.

(This is not a political essay but the fact that Donald Trump went out of his way to downplay the virus didn’t help our search for best practices to deal with what we were facing either.)

The early part of the pandemic was, relatively, easy. I have a job where staying home wasn’t a big deal. The shutdowns were such that no one was doing anything, which made it easy to tell my kids that we, too, couldn’t do anything.

(Side bar: I am very aware of how lucky I — and we — were during this pandemic, both in its early stages and as it dragged on and on. This essay isn’t an attempt to suggest I had it hard — or harder — than most people. I didn’t. And I know it.)

And with us basically seeing no one, my level of worry was actually pretty low.

It started to worsen as the months dragged on and a series of judgment calls — School? Travel sports? Dinner out? — presented themselves. No blueprint. Lots of uncertainty.

The worst period of time for me though? The last 3 weeks or so as Twitter filled pictures of people proudly showing their post-vaccine Band-aid or their vaccine card.

I wanted the vaccine. But it was more than that. With every day that passed where I didn’t get an email qualifying for one, I became more and more convinced I had come down with Covid.

Every damn day.

One day it was the faint scratchiness of my throat. (Allergies!) Another it was a clogged ear. (Allergies!) Still another it was a headache. (Allergies!)

No matter how many times my worries came back unfounded, the next day I would find myself right back in that same cycle of fret. That’s the truly insidious thing about anxiety: It convinces you (or at least me) that THIS time is different than ALL the other times when you had those worries. THIS time it’s for real.

It wasn’t. I didn’t have Covid. And, on Monday, I got my first vaccine. It was surprisingly uneventful — although I would not advise you to chug a large celebratory cookies and cream milkshake right after getting the jab. Just trust me on that one.

For me, getting the first vaccine shot felt like the beginning of an end. An end — or at least a cessation or slowing — of the worries about me and everyone I love coming down with this awful illness.

I know from hard-won experience that this won’t be the end of my health anxiety. Like Craig Finn, the lead singer of the Hold Steady, wrote in his song “Jackson”: “Anxiety’s persistent/It’s an ambitious politician/It keeps knocking at your door until you come and let it in.”

That’s it right there. Anxiety never stops knocking. And sometimes I let him in. But, today those knocks are a little more faint than they’ve been for more than a year. And that’s enough for me.