With all due respect to Don Ho and Leon Pober:
Oily Bubbles in the saline
Make me feel happy
Will make me feel fine
For possibly the first time in my life I was full of oily bubbles. To be precise the oily bubbles in my body were really lipid nanoparticles. As these particles were wrapped around a whole bunch of messenger RNA molecules, I was happy and going to feel fine because the messenger RNA molecules are the cornerstone of the Pfizer vaccine, and I received my first injection the other day.
As I sit here writing this, my trusty oily bubbles, aka lipid nanoparticles, have randomly bumped into other cells and released a whole bunch of messenger RNA, eventually leading the other cells to build spike proteins and destroying the messenger RNA.
The spike proteins were the goal. As the cells died or if some of the spike proteins poked out of the cell walls before they died, my body realized that it was under attack and began to mount a defense. I know this because my arm hurt for about 24 hours after I received my shot.
I am no scientist and, frankly, I never took a biology class in school, so I find it more than slightly humorous that I am even typing these words. But, hey, my arm muscle, not the bone, was killing me.
The mere fact that I received a vaccine so early in the vaccination process is a testament to two things: My advanced age and my saint of a wife. As I have written about before, Pam, the saintly one, is rather adept at getting things on the internet.
The reality is that anyone can shop and buy things on the internet, but Pam has a knack for getting things that are hard to come by, like concert tickets, pretty consistently. I have no idea how she does it. Generally, it has been a good thing, but, ironically, her greatest coup with respect to getting concert tickets, snagging unbelievably good Adele seats at Staples just before the ticket website crashed, was for a show we cared about the least. I am not complaining, though, as that show gave me something to complain about for months.
Pam started scouring the internet for vaccination appointments earlier in the month when Ralphs offered appointments to get vaccinated in their stores. Pam’s friends, Daryn and Candace, were successful in getting appointments, so Pam dove in to the Ralphs site and eventually snagged some appointments for us at a market in a scary part of town. Appointments that, thankfully, we were never going to need.
When the county began offering vaccinations at the Forum, Pam and I thought it would be a good place to get the vaccines. It was close, and it was not as large as Dodger Stadium. In addition, we have seen numerous shows at the Forum since they refitted it for concerts, and Pam has always gotten us good seats there, so we felt good about trying. As we never buy Dodger tickets or see shows there, Dodger Stadium was off limits.
At first we were hopeful. Pam logged on to the site and thought she had an appointment, but the site crashed before she could complete the process. I tried to log on, too, but got nowhere. We waited for the new appointments that were to become available the following week, and despite the fact that our other friends were getting appointments, we got nowhere yet again.
Though I was less hopeful, Pam was not to be deterred. After dinner last Sunday, Pam tried again to get a reservation at the Forum. Shockingly, she did. It was for the following Friday. She said, “Harry, get on your computer and log into the county site. There are reservations open at the Forum!” Needless to say, I logged in and noted that nothing was available. Big surprise.
As I mentioned earlier, Pam is a saint. She is also never content with getting beaten by a web site. So she ignored my frustrated cries of dismay and logged back into the county site, this time for me. Next thing I knew I heard her say, “Harry, I can get you an appointment on Thursday! Do you want it? Or should I try to get one on Friday so we can go together?”
Being the Debbie Downer and realist that I am, I told her to snag the Thursday reservation while it was available. She did. Then she tried to go back in and get one for her on Thursday or one for me on Friday, but there were none to be had.
So I got my vaccination Thursday. It was pretty easy, as the county has the vaccination process working much better than the web site. Interestingly, I received an email from Ralphs just after I got back from getting my vaccine letting me know that they were cancelling my vaccination appointment in their store in the scary part of town. I just smiled.