If you’ve watched my Youtube episode on my first Moderna shot, I mentioned that there were some weird positive things that happened with the first shot. But, I wanted to wait until after the second shot to verify it wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
Well, it’s been over a month since my second vaccine shot, and by now, you’ve probably heard about the positive side effects of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine. Well, for my clients who have been able to obtain one of these shots and me, it seems to be true.
Getting the vaccine is a personal decision. Yet, if you got sick over the last year and a half, you may want to assess if getting one of the mRNA vaccines might be an option for you. Most importantly, the Pfizer and Moderna are mRNA technologies. The Johnson and Johnson and the AstraZeneca vaccine are different technologies and use an adenovirus to transport the vaccine into the body. The positive effects I experienced with the mRNA vaccines may not be experienced with the adenovirus vaccines. In fact, there is no guarantee you’ll get any positive effects with any of the vaccines. But, here is my anecdotal story of how the Moderna mRNA vaccine impacted my life.
If you want to understand why I chose the mRNA over any of the other technologies, check out my Youtube “Genetically Engineering Vaccines to Fight COVID-19“
So, I’m going to go over three things. First, did I have COVID last year, and did you have COVID? There wasn’t any testing available. Well, the second part talks about long-haulers. If you think you had COVID, long-haulers syndrome is a very real complication of COVID. Lastly, the impact of the vaccine on me. I’ve got each section labeled so you can pick any section.
DID I HAVE COVID LAST YEAR?
O.k., why do I say, “If you got sick over the last year and a half, you may want to consider getting the vaccine.” Well, because the flu hasn’t been around. The flu season from Oct 2020 to Jan 2021 has had 132 hospitalizations and 292 deaths. The 2019 flu season had 35 million people getting influenza. There were 404,646 hospitalizations and 21,909 deaths. So, if you ever wanted to know what you could do to reduce your chances of the flu, wash your hands and wear a mask.
So, if the flu hasn’t been around and you got sick, you got to wonder what it was? That was the question I was asking myself when my husband and I got so deathly sick beginning of last year – before the pandemic was called.
At that time, there wasn’t any testing available. And by the time the COVID antibody test became available, it was five months after I was sick. With the lack of available science, I resorted to logic to determine if I had COVID-19.
I know my immune system. I don’t get the flu unless there has been a mutation in the flu virus – not a drift. A drift is a minor change in the virus. A mutation is a significant change making it a different virus. This was the H1N1, and I already went through that party and wasn’t expecting to be sick. So, I can’t tell you the surprise I experienced when I did get sick. It made no sense, and I had a hard time believing it was just H1N1.
But that wasn’t enough. I needed more information. I watched that mutated strain of the U.K. COVID-19 virus. It took that virus three weeks to transmit to 22 U.S. states even though the U.S. had travel restrictions.
Well, the first documented case of COVID-19 was something like December 1, 2019. The first ban on travel from China came eight weeks later, on the last day of January 2020. So, it had a much easier time transmitting.
And, in the middle of December 2019 the second wave of the flu started hitting the U.S. It was a very virulent, highly contagious H1N1 strain that hung on for weeks or months and had people flat on their backs. Now, COVID-19 likes other coronaviruses and the flu is a coronavirus.
And I’ve always wondered about the death rates. Well, this is just a hypothesis that myself and some of my Western medical friends have been kicking around. It could be that COVID-19 is dose dependant. The larger the dose, the more virulent the virus. And population matters when it comes to dose. China commonly has large cities of over 11 million. Bejing has 20 million people. New York is our largest city with a population of 8 million. In these cities, the virus can quickly shoot out of control. In our more spacious regions, the virus can get out of control, it seems to take more effort.
O.k., based on all that, it may be reasonable to assume if you got sick last year, it was COVID.
LONG-HAULERS
Wow, all the stories on long-haulers, right? Creepy, yet distant from you. Long haulers have debilitating, lasting effects of COVID that seem to be progressive and can end in death. It’s like it turns on an aging switch consuming your resources until you pass away. If your normal life expectancy is 80 years, COVID will help shave off 10 to 20 years.
The focus on long-haulers has been on those who have debilitating symptoms, and it started with those who had post COVID heart issues and died months later from some significant heart event. But, what if long-haulers is for everyone? My clients, including myself, have mentioned that they never got back to their pre-illness health.
My husband and I were on Chinese formulas for eight months. Our immune system was weak. Something out of thin air would attack us. It always felt like allergies where the sinuses would plug up, the head would feel heavy, and we felt tired. Overall, we would get tired easier. Our digestive issues became much worse. The body aches increased and begin to seem unmanageable.
My clients, my friends, and my colleagues, all were saying the same thing. No one had returned to their peak, pre-illness, health, and everyone was feeling just a little off or a little tired or a little something. And it had a progressive nature to it. Given more time, it would get worse.
I got the COVID testing. I got the antibody test, and everything came back negative. Yet, something didn’t seem right…
This was when I started to hypothesize that many people received some form of long-haulers.
THE VACCINE
So, with that background, my husband and I rumbled on down to the nearest vaccine administration site that would let us get the vaccine and got our shots.
The day I was headed down to get my first vaccine my body aches were going into overdrive. I could feel knots in my back forming. Getting the shot was easy, and I just remember the indifference of the person administering my shot. It wasn’t like she was for or against the shot. I knew she got the shot. But she had an interesting detachment to whether or not I got the shot.
In a universe that currently has an opinion on everything, I found her response interesting and unexpected.
Well, a half-hour later, I was all shot up and on my way home. I had been noticing since about 15 minutes after the administration of that shot my body aches were reducing. In the car, I turned and looked at my husband and said, “You know, all those body aches and knots I had coming down here…they are reducing.” I could actually palpate the knots and felt they had reduced by about half. My husband’s comment was, “Makes you wonder what you had.”
Sure does…
Over the next week, my body aches subsided and disappeared. That was weird because I had the aging and personal sports abuse body aches. My feet were a problem due to decades of riding Dressage and Jumping. I hadn’t been able to run for years. But, I could now.
My stomach problems reduced significantly and I took that opportunity to wander over to my favorite fast food joint…that I hadn’t visited in three years because of my stomach pains…and get a burger and fries. I could eat more crap again. I started sleeping again and wasn’t so wiped out and fatigued.
Of course, I wasn’t going to skip the second shot. The first shot was such a surprising shot of vitality both my husband and I raced to our second shot. The second shot reaffirmed the first shot. It wasn’t near as amazing because I wasn’t near as messed up.
O.k., in Chinese Medicine, if you have a physical change, you have to have an emotional or mental change, and I did. It wasn’t even a subtle change. It was just a change. I saw things differently. The world became less black and white and more shades of grey.
Remember the health care worker who administered my first shot? I was interested in her expression. I was interested in her indifference to whether I got the shot or not. I think that is part of the shades of grey because I feel her indifference. This shot really worked for me, but I don’t really have a buy-in to whether you get the shot or not. I think that indifference is why it’s taken me so long to even talk about my second experience with the mRNA vaccines. I wouldn’t have talked about it at all except in my episode, “My First Covid Shot,” I promised to talk about it.
So, there it is – my second COVID vaccine. What a wild ride! Good-luck to you and your decisions.