Someone I love is vulnerable to the severities of COVID, so every year I get the vaccine. Despite my optimism that maybe this year will be different, the roller coaster starts as soon as the needle leaves my arm.

The vaccine was administered on the sixth floor of the office building I work in on Monday, at 11:00AM. I returned to my usual floor to do my usual work. I had a meeting which required some higher level thinking. My brain cooperated. I biked home at 3:30PM. I drove my daughter to synchronized swimming at a suburban high school at 6:00PM. After she is there, with my car windows down and my vehicle in park, I called the vice president of the church board that I am the president of. We had a lovely conversation. We always do. Around 7:00PM, I then went to a nearby grocery store with the goal of getting the week’s food for my family. Chills start to set in, but because I am in denial, I decide it is because of excessively aggressive air conditioning. I returned to the suburban high school get my daughter. When the usually sweltering upper deck of the pool failed to be warm at 8:00PM, I knew.

I returned home. Weakness set in. Carrying the groceries into the house felt like lugging bricks by the dozen. I could barely tolerate how cold I felt. I climbed into bed. I shivered despite multiple layers of flannels and fleeces. I tried to sleep. I woke up overheated, not sweating, but very very hot. I threw off the blankets and went back to sleep. I woke up shivering. I pulled the blankets on. I woke up overheated. So it went, the entire night. All of my joints ached. I felt all of my lymph nodes on the right side of my body from soreness. I had a splitting headache. My whole body felt weak. I could not do much but lay there.

I am most acutely aware of having a body when it hurts.

I called in sick to work. I stared at the ceiling. I read. I slept. I pulled blankets on and tossed them off. In some moments, after hours of semi-comfortably laying there, I started to think maybe I could have gone tonight work if I was tougher. Then I got out of bed. I was quickly corrected on my perspective. I tried to ignore the soreness and the aches. I felt depleted so I forced myself to eat. I felt terrible afterwards. I forced myself to drink water. I mostly stayed laying in bed. I didn’t have the strength to do much. I got up to walk around the house and then was immediately depleted. This went on all day.

And then around 7:00PM, the fog lifted and the weakness I felt stops feeling like my body systems were disabled and more the consequence of limited eating. I was still tired, but it felt more normal and less like a spell.

I have a young cat who clearly lived a sheltered life, having spent kittenhood in a Ten Lives Club foster family and then was immediately adopted into our home with a beloved elder lady cat. He pursues all things like it never occurred to him that something bad could happen. I can’t tell you how often he has launched himself at wasps to pounce. This is me with my body. I am used to being in excellent health. I am used to my body being a strong, effective vessel through which to experience the world. I am used to being able to bike and walk when I want to go somewhere, lift heavy things when they need to move, and balance when I am in an awkward spot. I am rarely sick. This is incredible fortune. It is also notoriously temporary. I am describing to you having lived while being young. Being young is poor practice for aging.

The COVID vaccine is thus a yearly ritual in viscerally learning that I am vulnerable, that I exist in a body, and that good health is not guaranteed. The irony is that I learn this in an effort to protect this body, and my loved ones, from far worse. It leaves me with one sense of being really lucky, and another where the soft animal of me gets scared for what potential futures are out there.

We get to be alive, and that is a joy. The terms of being alive is having a body, a vulnerable body, through which to experience the world. I can always be tougher, and increasingly I am learning that I will need to be.