DISCLAIMER: THAT CORPSE

IS NOT MINE

Yes, I assure you in advance. If you see the corpse of an additional victim of the Coronavirus, the likelihood is next to nil it is mine. I have fought to get the Coronavirus vaccine injection with the same zeal that drove me to get all the vaccines recommended for my age group to fight the deadly pandemic illnesses.

Yet when the health officials declared a vaccine safe and ready to immunize my age group from the deadly Coronavirus, a vaccine shortage developed and mounted. The shortage was right before the infamous Texas Ice Storm. But let me tell you about these two disasters, one at a time.

 I lodged in front of my computer screen, searching the internet for a vaccine location in Austin. The sites of some pharmacies mentioned plans to provide the vaccines—in the unforeseeable future. Other sites mentioned that they had got it, but ran out of it. No worry, right? I swivel my desk chair left to my phone, and start calling clinics and doctor offices. If someone answered after the standard hour-long hold, he or she did not know the plans. Some were kind enough to leave a taped message of no-vaccine available.

Night after night, I start with a book to read in bed. I dose reading it. So I realize that reading is not in the cards. I put the book aside and switch off the light. I keep twisting and turning for what feels to me like all night long. Eventually, I get tired from sleeping. I free myself from the bed sheets that somehow got entangled around me, turn the light on, pick up the bedspread from the floor, and start my day.

Fortunately, social service centers stepped up to tackle a vaccine for seniors drive. And one lucky afternoon, I, with thousands of other seniors, gathered around a huge building, circling it at a maddening slow pace, under the hot afternoon sun. Depending on where you were allowed to join the circle, everyone circled between one and four times.

It was four hours later when an angel in a white coat delivered the first dose of the vaccine into my arm.

Then, as the weeks between the first and second vaccine dose were going by, record low temperatures hit. It was February, in Austin, in Texas!!!

 Ice made roads impassable and kept me home-bound. Worst of all, the State’s electric grid operator lost control of the power supply, and the blackouts extended from hours to days. I stayed shivering under a pile of blankets and bedspreads, using flashlights to move at night.

And let me tell you, if you have a choice between losing electricity and losing water, chose electricity. I kept the few bottles of water I had for drinking. It was a heck of a job to go out of the house in the cold, to harvest dirty snow in containers and wait for it to melt. Wasn’t used for bathing either!

By the time the snow stopped accumulating, it was time to notice that the two huge ash trees in front of the house have been stripped out of their branches. Several huge limbs landed right at the garage door.

But this problem had to wait. My son-in-law volunteered to drive me four hours to and from a pharmacy somewhere in Texas. Yes. I got the second dose of the Coronavirus vaccine!

That corpse is not mine.