Our Shot!!!!

Who am I?  A daughter of God, loved and adored.  A wife to Superman.  A mom to our crew of beautiful, complex, hysterical, chaos-inducing babies.  A daughter, sister and granddaughter. A niece.  A friend.  For all my life my core identity has been wrapped up with these identifiers.  And along with them, for the last half of my journey, a scientist and physician.  Somehow this year those last two roles have caused unique strain in my life that I’ve never experienced before.  Well, maybe once, in tiny proportion when I was pregnant with Naomi and was cut with a bloody blade in med school.  For those few weeks I feared that I could have introduced HIV into my home.  But this year stands apart.  For months on end I have carried the weight of concern that I may bring a lethal and destructive virus into my home.  And I have not been alone.  Medical providers and emergency personnel all across this country have feared the same.  And we have continued to show up for our patients despite the risk.  Sometimes sleeping in campers, spare rooms, rentals, hotel rooms, or in our beds alone.   Fewer hugs and kisses from our cheer teams….our physical and emotional life lines.  We’ve missed family dinners, birthdays, vacations, and holiday dinners.  We’ve eaten alone, longing for some glimpse of normalcy to return.  Our young children have not understood our distance.  Some of our families and friends have felt slighted by our removal from their lives; as if we have meant to wound them.   Which could not be farther from the truth.

The truth is, “Above all, do no harm.”  Sacred words.  An oath we swore when they gave us the right to care for the life of another precious human. For almost a year, we have stumbled through the dark, using the tools of science we know and understand to attempt to fight an unseen monster we’ve never met before.  We’ve prayed.  We’ve begged everyone to do the right thing.  We’ve been blamed for destroying fun.  Accused of being torchers of society, lacking interest in suffering. We’ve given our lives to battle suffering of the human body and soul, but this year somehow we’ve been accused of wrongs that are at best completely unfounded, at worst malicious lies.  We’ve been told the cure cannot be worse than the disease by those who haven’t seen (or have been unwilling to see) the reality of this disease.  There are in fact worse things than dying, but we’ve been told our recommendations are worse than Covid.  We started out as heroes, with meals and cheering neighbors.  Nine months in, we are just those bothersome reminders that this pandemic isn’t over.  

I have seen photos of my colleagues with bruised noses and faces from masks and PPE that we have prayed would protect us; tear streaked faces and faces worn from defeat and sleep that is disrupted by the nightmares of “catastrophic” codes.  Nurses have wept in my office as they lament their feelings of inadequacy to ease the pain of those who have died alone.  They often feel that their efforts are not helping.  Which is untrue, but just as much else in life, feelings of failure are hard to sort from the truth.  Patients have died.  Patients have suffered.  Patients have also survived.  Some survivors are still suffering.  It’s become hard to know what success in this war actually looks like.   Healers have been asked to make choices that are best left to soldiers in a war, and last time I checked, medical education and training has been devoid of wartime preparations (with the exception of a few ethics debates over imaginary organ transplant recipients).  

But this week has felt like a clear success and victory.  Just before Christmas, I have been overwhelmed with waves of repeated joy. Post after post of another arm bandaged, or vaccine verification card, or smiling eyes filled with RELIEF have brought me to tears.  My fellow healthcare workers are feeling HOPEFUL!!!!  And on a week when more people have died from Covid each day than on 9/11, healthcare providers across America are showing up for their shots.  We are ensuring that we can stay in the battle, because it isn’t over yet.  #thisisourshot and #iamnotthrowingawaymyshot have filled my social media feeds.  These shots mean we can stay healthy. We can love on our families more freely and with less concern even as we continue to care for people who are sick (and despite some news sources downplaying that reality, people are still getting sick).  We can help lead the charge forward out of 2020.   

And this leads me to a question:  Do you trust the healthcare workers who have taken an oath to protect you?  We are not the politicians, or the lobbyists, or the drug companies.  We want this virus to go away.  We want to live freely as society, as we used to.  And we are showing up in droves to bear our arms to take a vaccine that was created with sound science.  You are not going to be the guinea pigs.  WE are showing up for our shots first.  WE are the guinea pigs and we have read the data and feel happy to have a turn in line.  We are trusting the science that we live our lives working with. We have always tried to make the human existence better, that didn’t change just because some conspiracy theorist has floated a cancerous idea that we are trying to microchip the world, or give more people Covid, or overthrow a particular leader.  That is all rubbish.  What is true is that we believe that this shot, OUR SHOT, is a huge victory for human kind, and is a critical key towards unlocking ourselves from the chains of Covid.  

In the meantime, we will continue to mask and protect ourselves, our families, friends and our patients.  We will continue to ask you to do the same.  We will continue to follow the best scientific data available.  We will pray that our families can get their shots as quickly as possible.  We will pray that our fellow humans will do their part to slow the spread of Covid until they can get their shots.  We will continue to show up.  Even without the cheers and parades.  Just as we have done before.  

If my opinion on this issue makes you uncomfortable, that was not my goal.  I am including some links to reputable scientific papers on the Pfizer and Moderna immunizations.  If you chose not to vaccinate, that won’t change my heart towards you.  Hopefully my embrace of science won’t change yours towards me.  I do not see science at odds with God. I believe God made science, and the brains of each person who studies it.     

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577#:~:text=A%20two%2Ddose%20regimen%20of%20BNT162b2%20(30%20%CE%BCg%20per%20dose,vaccine%20efficacy%20greater%20than%2030%25.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer/clinical-considerations.html

https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download