I swear–the worry and the shit I am doing to myself freaking out about this vaccine process is probably sending me to an early grave with each moment I sit focused on getting it. I know, I’ve mentioned I know I am lucky to live this long and I know I won’t be here forever but I’ve always been one to kind of rely on myself to keep myself alive, and it seems pretty damn unfair that I have literally done EVERYTHING I can to do that and it’s going to be someone else’s carelessness which might get me killed. Hell, if my husband and I have avoided infection even with all the death around him and me going to the grocery, dentist and doctors as much as I have, then yes, it is sometimes carelessness that got some people infected and killed. Sometimes it was their own, sure, sometimes it wasn’t, but if you were as careful as I have been, you SHOULD be okay. You certainly wouldn’t go admit yourself to any clinics or hospitals without that vaccine to protect yourself if you didn’t want to get it. And that is why I am where I am right now.

I calmed down about it last night for the first time in literal months once someone told me the way they got help was to go to the pharmacies directly and beg for any extra doses of any no-shows and that’s how they got it. I was like, hmmm, that’s the one thing I haven’t tried so I went out this morning. I got shot down at the first one I visited–CVS–those guys actually fill my damn prescriptions but told me there were 500 people on the waiting list (!!!). The other one I went to before I gave up on the big pharmacies was my grocery store–the woman I talked to seemed the most empathetic and took my name and little slip explaining my predicament, and though I feel a sliver of hope, I am still feeling ultimately shot down. I mean JFC, I have been doing ALL of the stuff I was supposed to, I actually wear goggles and masks always as I just don’t trust my luck, but when you have literally no friends and your only ally is your husband because you live in a place where you feel you actually KNOW nobody–it is a bit disconcerting. And I am very lonely admittedly, but there’s nothing I can do to really fix that because any new friend I would or could make could kill me and I just don’t want to take 25 years of surviving strokes and open heart surgeries to just get killed by my own loneliness. It’s kind of the opposite stance most people are taking–threatening their mental health and well-being not being able to be with their friends, but mine is my friends are all over the country, I can’t be with them, and I certainly can’t go making any here I would let in to close, because they could ACTUALLY kill me.

That feels kind of a privileged stance to take, you know, being able to not have to worry about children or anything besides myself and having a husband at all AND being alive after so much disaster to even BE here to beg. Not that I didn’t want children, but I realize even being alive, though it was through my own fortitude, seems privileged because I AM still alive even with all this rotten code running through my veins and DNA.

So I am back to square one. Maybe they will call, maybe they won’t, and though I have learned you have to be your own best advocate to save yourself, oftentimes that is not always entirely enough. But, ultimately, I know I cannot just sit here and EXPECT the VA dept of health will call me and fix me without doing something else. It’s the same stance I took with the need for this heart surgery at all–them all being in DC and me being over here seems short-sighted if I am as unwell as I feel. So I made that appointment for this Wednesday with the new primary connected to the heart hospital in Virginia so that if I am struck down with a chest pain I can’t talk myself out of–then I will have an option which won’t require I drive myself to DC. Man, being so hyper aware of your own mortality is the least fun thing I could ever wish on anyone–everything you do is trying to avoid the inevitable end your life seems to be steering you towards.

In the meantime I just want to be free and not have to worry about being killed in a population of me me me people–I want to be able to dream about going places and being someone better than I am–someone who does some important stuff. Someone who can enjoy and savor this life rather than constantly trying to avoid its end. Someone who has friends again, someone who can dream of the future. Someone truly living this life vs the escapism that is currently my focus. Someone not dying every day, basically.

Send me your good vibes someone will help me because you really can’t get out of this life alive without any help. It’s the one more lesson I know to be true, on top of the do something different to skew your path, don’t just sit on your ass. xoxoxxo