My Vaccination Isn’t About Me, It’s About Us
Lessons from the most beautiful day of my life that almost didn’t happen
Every fall, from the first year I left home until the year before I got married at 29, my mom would start calling me to ask if I’d gotten my flu vaccine. She would keep calling, hounding, to the point that sometimes I would lie and say yes, and sometimes I would actually go and get it. Mostly I didn’t, though. I rarely got (symptomatic) flu, and the idea of being laid up for a day with some side effects from the vaccine was unappealing. I was young and healthy and prided myself on being able to push through illness (the service industry will do that to you). I was highly educated, but if I’m being completely honest, way in the back of my mind I wasn’t quite sure if getting the flu shot could maybe give me the flu..? (I later learned that the flu vaccine injection uses dead virus, so that’s a no.)
Then, two months before my wedding, I got one of those phone calls that changes your life. I had to step out of work to take it. It was my dad, and he was telling me that my mom had just been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a rare form of the disease with a 25% survival rate. If she had any chance to live, they would have to start treatment immediately, so he was packing for the hospital. The news pulled the ground out from under me: a feeling of nauseous, emotional free-fall that I imagine is familiar to anyone who has gotten similar news.
The course of treatment for AML is something as close to death as I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. In preparation for a bone marrow transplant, which on its own is a strange and harrowing affair, the goal of the doctors is to reduce the patient’s immune system to nothing with back-to-back-to-back chemotherapy. By the time I was able to fly from New Orleans to Baltimore to see my mother, she was visibly shrunken and sick. Before the end of the treatment, she was almost unrecognizable: a hairless, skeletal version of the big, boisterous, red-haired woman I’d known forever. Survival in this condition depends entirely on care of the terrible symptoms that arise, and my mother was exceptionally lucky to have received her treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
To my utter bewilderment and sometimes anger, through the first part of her treatment my mom insisted she was going to come to my wedding. I wasn’t remotely sure I even wanted to have a wedding anymore, much less imagine her getting on an airplane to come to it. A lot of back and forth, electrically charged conversations ensued from this topic. In the end, it was the advice of one of her providers that won the day for me. His professional experience, from years of treating people with this diagnosis, was that the will to live was as important an ingredient as any for patient survival. And to that end, inclusion in the “flow of life” kind of moments — marriages and funerals, graduations and reunions — could be a powerful ally, despite the risks.
So my husband and I had our wedding, my mother and father came, and it was, quite honestly, the most beautiful day of my life. My mother wore an n95 mask on the planes (before it was cool), she limited her physical contact with others that weekend, and she got lucky. If she had contracted a cold or flu virus from one of the wedding guests or in an airport, she almost certainly would have died. Without an immune system, there’s not much your body can do to fight off even the most commonplace pathogens.
Even after her bone marrow transplant, my mother lived without the immune protection we mostly take for granted. She had to wait until she was strong enough to receive all of her childhood immunizations again (minus the polio vaccine, as we have thankfully eradicated that horror through one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in history). For well over a year she lived mostly at the mercy of our shared herd immunity to viruses — our flu vaccines kept her safe when she wasn’t able to get one herself.
I know I’ve referred to the role luck played in her survival several times already, but I haven’t yet mentioned the fortune she had in my father: a tireless, loving caregiver, and a retiree who could hold down the fort in every way. She rarely needed to risk exposure to public places because she had someone there with her 24/7 who could do the shopping, get the car fixed, pick up the infinite prescriptions. In the rare cases she went into stores, my mom wore a mask, and recounted stories of children pointing at her and saying, “What’s wrong with HER?” Parents anxiously shushing, looking away.
Until I was on the inside of this family trauma, I know I was one of those people looking away. Or maybe more accurately, not seeing people like her at all. It was only in the aftermath that I realized a curtain had been pulled back to reveal this world, a world apart from what we consider “normal life,” and yet one that almost everyone gets sucked into eventually: a world of diagnoses and treatments, relapses and existential uncertainty, periods of incredible pain and moments of profound catharsis.
The truth about this ghost world of serious illness, happening just apart from sports practice and anniversary dinners, is that it IS normal life. It’s normal life for every family going through it, yet feeling utterly alone with it. It’s normal life for children born with congenital differences, and for adults living with chronic conditions. It’s normal life for everyone who is lucky enough to live to old age, or lucky enough to have people they love. And tragically, most people coping with serious illness don’t have all the resources my mom did: world-class medical care and insurance that paid for all of it, great caregiving and community support. The fear and anxiety we went through as a family is only the very tip of an iceberg that plunges to depths many people don’t care to fathom.
When I was younger, I resisted getting the flu vaccine because the small discomfort or uncertainty I felt around it outweighed the risk to my person. I took my mother’s nagging as nothing more than her fear for my safety, and I rejected that fear on principle. Only after she got sick did I start getting the flu vaccine religiously, finally realizing that it was never about me — though one day it may be. I think about the times I worked in a restaurant while brutally ill (which, as an aside, most service workers will continue to do until we have universal sick leave), and I have to sit with the reality of all the people I was in contact with, and all the people they were, and on and on. I might have seen the ripples from my actions, but I hadn’t seen the mirror side of the pond. I never thought about the tens of thousands of people each year for whom the flu isn’t an inconvenience, but their death, and the expanding circles of people who love them.
When COVID came roaring across the globe last spring, I was as scared as anyone, mostly for my parents. My mother is thankfully, miraculously, still with us, but lives with a bevy of comorbidities. In those early days though, it seemed to me, it really felt, like a sudden raising of collective consciousness: an electric shock of cultural understanding that our actions, as healthy people, have the power to save or take another person’s life. The fact that our fates, all of us humans, are inextricably bound together through iron-clad webs of connection: vectors of disease that are also vectors of commerce and service, love and longing. I thought, for a time at least, that we were all learning to see the invisible burdens of people living with illness and disability…and naively, I thought we agreed they mattered.
I will never debate the safety or efficacy of a vaccine. I’m not a doctor, or an epidemiologist, or a biomedical researcher. And to be clear, no one who has ever wanted to debate vaccine safety with me has been one of those things either. What I do want to discuss, what I wish we could look at, straight on, is the alternative to herd immunity through vaccination. I want us to look at the future someone is actively, sometimes loudly choosing when they decide not to take the COVID vaccine when it is made available.
Here are some realities of a world where the coronavirus continues to run rampant: More people having to go through cancer treatment with the layered stress of a highly contagious, deadly virus on the rise. More women laboring without a birth partner. More weddings and funerals and graduations and reunions postponed or canceled. More caregivers (mostly mothers) forced out of their jobs — more families falling deep into poverty. More and more divorces. Hundreds of thousands more preventable deaths, most of which will occur in overburdened hospitals with no family to hold the hands of the dying.
Then comes the very likely arrival of virus variants (through massive replication in the bodies of unvaccinated people, who may or may not get sick themselves) that manage to outwit the available vaccines. Meaning, yet again, grandparents having to continuously weigh the risks of holding their own grandchildren. An entire generation of children falling further and further behind with interrupted education. Elders and disabled people in nursing homes forced to live in what is essentially solitary confinement indefinitely, unable to see their families regularly or have any meaningful form of social life. Hospital workers thrown back into hell by any other name.
Other possible outcomes include the eventual arrival of a variant that primarily affects otherwise healthy young and middle aged people (like the 1918 influenza), or god forbid, children (like polio). If you don’t believe these are real possibilities, I strongly encourage you to read historical accounts of people who lived through those events. They’re not just possibilities, they are the lived realities of our predecessors. The choice to overlook them is the unfortunate privilege and dubious gift of living in a time of effective vaccines.
With these all-too-possible futures looming, and at the risk of offending some, I’ll say that the outside chance of a serious side effect did not weigh into my decision to get the COVID vaccine at all. I made my first appointment the day I became eligible, and received my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine this week. I spent half a night and the better portion of the next day in fever and misery, but my fully vaccinated parents were able to come over and watch my toddler for the first time in more than a year. Laying in bed upstairs I could hear the three of them…chatting, playing, reading stories, negotiating snacks. Sudden tears leaked out of me, taking me by surprise. More than three million human beings around the world have died from COVID so far, more than half a million of them in our country, but downstairs I could hear the voices of people I love mingling together. We are still here. What could we possibly do to give a grieving family this gift, to bring their loved one home to them? There is nothing, truly nothing we can do. The only lives we can protect are those yet to be lost.
I don’t tell the story of how I started getting the flu vaccine imagining I’m going to change anyone’s mind. I’m driven to tell it simply because it’s all I can think about, as the issue of “vaccine hesitancy” washes into every conversation I have, dividing families and friend groups and workplaces all around me. I wish I still felt the strange optimism of last spring, but I no longer believe in my heart that we are all on the same team, that we will all do what we can for each other. All I know with certainty is that I will do what I can for others, regardless of whether they’re willing to do the same for me and my family. And I don’t think that makes me a sucker, I think it makes me human.
