August 2nd 2022
Went for my fifth vaccine today. The clinic is now on an industrial estate in a part of St Helens you’d only visit if you wanted to drill or demolish something.
Dad drops me off as I’m feeling especially tired today. I go into what looks like an office attached to an industrial unit. I imagine David Brent’s round the back doing his dance. There’s no-one in apart from me. The hustle and bustle, the camaraderie, the sense of something important happening has ebbed away with every vaccine visit. Now it feels routine. I remind myself how lucky I am to get a fifth vaccine when half the world hasn’t had any. My sense of gratitude overlays a despondent feeling that this will be the way of life for me, as someone who’s immuno-compromised, for quite some time. The truth is, although I’m not as ill as in the dark days of 2020, I haven’t fully recovered by any means. I still struggle with fatigue, brain fog, breathlessness. The steroids I took have caused all sorts of health problems. My body feels like something I have to drag around.
As I get in the car and Dad drives me away from this drab box, we pass McDonald’s, its drive-thru heaving with cars; I see traffic coming in and out of the retail park, there’s a happy song on the radio. Everyone else has moved on, trying to put Covid behind them; going to the pub, planning holidays, buying tickets for Glastonbury. I don’t blame them. Me? I’d just like to go to the doctor’s and back without catching Covid. I find it hard to move on because my body won’t let me.
Ever since restrictions ended, the sense has grown that Covid is now my problem as someone who is clinically vulnerable, rather than our problem. That’s it a problem for me and people like me to deal with, as the rest of society takes off its masks and gets back to normal. No-one knows much about the clinically vulnerable because we tend to keep out of the way. Not because we want to but because we have to. Fewer people will die thanks to the vaccines but more people will get long Covid, or have health conditions made worse by Covid, as the virus spreads unchecked. And more people will have to rely on an NHS which is on its knees. And for how long this division carries on for is anyone’s guess.