Sharp Scratch

            No blog spanning the Covid-19 crisis would be worth its salt without a mention of my vaccination. At this stage I have had one of two injections. I am 45 years old and that first vaccination was on 28th April 2021.

I booked both appointments online on 16th April and had a choice of places I could go to. I’d tried to secure appointments before that but could only get the first one and the system wouldn’t allow you to just have one, so I had to give up and try again a week later. This time the choice of clinics (for want of a better word) was different and there was more choice.

The place I picked was Whalley Range Tennis and Cricket Club in South Manchester. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from home and I chose it because I didn’t know there was a tennis club in Whalley Range and I was being nosey.

As usual, I set off early and marched there with the help of Google maps. Also, as usual, I arrived early. I thought I’d just hang around outside, take some pictures, and wander aimlessly, but as I approached the gates to the club’s grounds a masked woman approached me and asked if I had an appointment.

            “Yes, but I’m fifteen minutes early,” I explained.

            “Dun’t matter,” she replied. “Come on in. The more the merrier!” From the way her eyebrows lifted and the cock of her head, I assume she was smiling. But you never know these days, do you?

I fished a blue paper mask out of my pocket, stashed my headphones away, and entered the building. 

            “Just stand on the red dot,” she called after me as I went through the doors.

Another (possibly) smiling woman sat at a computer. She greeted me. 

“Good morning,” she said enthusiastically.

“Hello,” I replied, conscious of how far away from her I was standing.

“What name is it?” 

“Richard Douglas,” I called over.

“Date of birth?” I didn’t like the idea of yelling all my personals across a room. You never know which horrors are going to steal your identity while they’re having a Covid jab.

“It’s alright, you can come closer,” she offered.

I noticed they had rebranded the whole place as a vaccination centre, and not just by putting a few posters up. The walls were not the walls of the club but new walls that had been shipped in to create a clinic. They had brought the desk in, there were cubicles with curtains and retractable barriers to guide you in the right direction which had no place in the Whalley Range Tennis and Cricket Club.

Information proffered, the woman pointed towards the barriers which formed a snaking line of only a few feet towards a couple of shallow steps. 

“Follow the line,” she said, “and stand on the red dot.”

I did as she asked me. It occurred to me that this must be what sheep must go through when they’re getting ready to be dipped. 

A third masked woman approached me and asked me a question. I forget what it was now because I was distracted. It might have been if this was my first or second vaccine, it could as easily have been had I eaten this morning or what my star sign was. By this stage, though, I was fixated on the booths. There were five of them with curtains, and behind each a clinician and somebody receiving their inoculation. I wanted to hear what they were saying, and I wondered if I was allowed to take photographs. I decided that I probably wasn’t, so I then began wondering how I could take pictures without anybody noticing.

The third masked woman asked me to go down the two shallow steps which faced the booths and stand in a separate section the size of a cardboard box which separated each of us from the others and helped them keep track of the sheep dipping order. 

“Stand on the red dot, please,” she said.

            This was my chance. The tiny little area I stood in was shielded sufficiently for me to snap a photograph. With hindsight I can’t say it was a complete success, but I’ll now never forget the shade of beige of those curtains. Just as I got the pic, masked woman three walked towards me again and I pocketed my phone. 

“You’re next,” she said. I was sure she’d caught me and I detected an almost imperceptible squint in her eyes. If I had to, I’d put money on her judgementally curling her top lip at me from behind the mask.

“Next please,” came a voice and masked woman three looked at me, nodded towards a curtain and said, “Please.”  

Inside the booth was a tall black man. He put his hands together as if praying and bowed a tiny bow to me.

“Hiya,” I said, too enthusiastically.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m great thanks, how are you?”

“Very good,” he replied smoothly. I couldn’t quite put my finger on his accent, African with a bit of French, which doesn’t narrow it down very much at all. 

“Which arm would you like it in?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” I replied then immediately thought I should just choose left because I’m right handed and I’d heard the stories about dead arms..

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?” He’d beaten me to it.

“Right,” I confirmed. “Shall we go with left then?”

“Very good,” he replied. I didn’t see his eyes roll, but I could sense it.

I don’t have a problem with needles, in principle, although the ones my dentist uses I’m sure are as thick as drinking straws and not only go into my gum but through my jaw bone before poking their way out of the back of my head. Dentist needles notwithstanding, I was fine, still, I don’t particularly like watching them go in so I pulled my tee shirt sleeve up above my shoulder, offered him my arm and turned away.

“Sharp scratch,” he said. “There, that’s it.” 

I didn’t even feel it, never mind a sharp scratch. Had he even injected me, or was I to be some kind of experiment? The one person they didn’t vaccinate as a test to see if Covid is merely psychosomatic. 

“Oh, is that it?” I said. “Thank you.” I put my jacket back on, the clinician put his sharps away, turned to me and once more bowed, his hands pressed together at the palms.

I drew the curtain back and flinched as I saw masked woman three standing in front of me again looking up at my face. “This way,” she instructed. “Follow the red dots,” before abandoning me to go back to her sheep dip duties.

I wandered through a waiting room towards the doors at the back of the club, where yet another masked woman accosted me.

“Did you drive here?” she asked. I guessed she wasn’t offering to bring my car round.

“No,” I replied, “I walked. Very quickly as it happens, I was fifteen minutes early.”

This woman definitely squinted at me before saying, “If you drove you need to wait fifteen minutes before you leave.”

“Right,” I said cautiously. “But I walked.”

“Five minutes then,” she said. “You can wait in here or go out there.”

It being a lovely morning, weather-wise, I thought I’d wait outside. I exited into a covered marquee with lots of chairs and a few tables. A handful of people were sitting there, all at a minimum of two metres apart, one of them, an enormous man, hunched over, staring at the ground and puffing away on a cigarette. I decided that I’d go to the actual outdoors instead of what had become a temporary smoking shelter, so I grabbed a seat on a park bench and reached in my pocket for my phone.

My surreptitiously snapped picture of the booths disappointed me, and I chastised myself for not asking the bowing clinician if I could take a photograph with him. I forgave myself when I realised he had better things to do than pose for a selfie with me. 

I switched on Duolingo — if I was being forced to wait for five minutes I might as well be productive and carry on my Spanish lessons. I got as far as typing in ‘Mi gato es muy bonito’ when masked woman four came over.

“First or second?” she asked. “Jab,” she clarified.

“First,” I replied. “Why do we have to wait here afterwards?”

“In case you have side effects.”

“Oh, like fainting?”

“Yeah, or a blood clot or anaphylactic shock.”

“Goodness.”

“We’ve not had any,” she reassured me.

“That’s lucky,” I said, and we fell into silence.

She drifted away and collared another exiter. “Did you drive here?” I heard her ask.

The giant smoker hauled himself up and lumbered past on his way out. And with that I thought it must’ve been five minutes for me by now, so I left too. I bid goodbye to masked woman one at the gates and began my walk home. I got to the main road and, while waiting to cross, my mind started whirring. What if I left too early and I have a blood clot incident? After all, I'd just had the Astrazeneca vaccine, and they were changing the advice for the under forties, which was only five years past for me. I’m young at heart and I tell people I’m twenty seven all the time. Maybe this is the universe’s way of fixing my poor attitude towards age. I’d be the oldest person in the UK to have a blood clot from a vaccine and what’s worse, I was going to die in the suburbs of Whalley Range! Why couldn’t I die in Chorlton instead? Or, if we’re going to choose places to die, why can’t it be in Tuscany?

I crossed the road and carried on walking, convincing myself that I was suddenly light-headed and this was an anaphylactic shock on its way. Was I short of breath? Am I going to fall over? Can I at least make it back to my own neighbourhood before I keel over?

Eventually I made it home and satisfied that I had neither an allergic reaction nor a blood clot, I began waiting for the side effects. When Chris had his first Covid injection, he felt like he’d come down with the virus all over again. He sweated, he shivered, his body burned up, and he even went to bed early. He had three days of it. I wondered how long my reaction would last and just how dramatic it was going to be. 

After two days, I stopped waiting. The only thing I felt post vaccine was a small and invisible bruise on my arm where the needle had gone in — it wasn’t a scam after all. The feeling was akin to someone poking me, with medium intensity, once or maybe twice, with their index finger on my arm. I was both relieved and disappointed. I wanted a story to tell.

Chris had his second vaccination on Sunday and again suffered some side effects — though less severe this time, he just felt drained and wanted to sleep a lot this time. He attended his appointment at the Etihad Campus’s Tennis Club in Bradford, East Manchester. That’s where his first had been before all the smaller venues popped up, so he returned there for his second. 

We went there, en route home after a lovely Sunday lunch at my cousin’s house in Marple. He’d planned on dropping me at home, then going out again, and I suggested he should just go directly there. There would always be something to do if he couldn’t get in straight away, I reasoned. We arrived an hour early but buoyed on by my experience of walking straight in when I was a quarter of an hour early to my appointment, he thought he’d chance his arm. He didn’t even tell them he was early when he checked in, and they processed him immediately. 

Apparently it’s a far bigger set up there than the one I went to but that’s to be expected as it was one of the earlier centres and I think they used it for mass vaccinations a few months ago. Our friend Charles had described it as being like a science fiction movie — of course the first thing that sprang to my mind when he said that was E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and I had images of stumpy green goblins scuttling about with pot plants and glowing fingers.  

I waited in the car for Chris and thought I’d get a good session in on Duolingo. Yo necesito una falda verde, I typed in wondering when I’d ever need to know how to say such a phrase. No matter; I continued. La universidad tiene dos bibliotecas. Not ten minutes after Chris had left the car did I see him again, striding through the car park towards me with a leaflet in his hand. He opened the door and got in the driving seat.

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “What about the fifteen minutes?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“For the blood clots and the anaphylactic shock.”

“What?”

“In Whalley Range they tell you to wait. Five minutes for walkers and fifteen minutes for drivers. What if you crash on the way home and we die?”

“They don’t do that here.”

“But, what if?”

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Turn this shit off.” He flicked the switch on the radio, silencing my beautifully crafted Spotify playlist in favour of a bunch of local radio adverts.

So it seems they do it differently in different places and I wasted five minutes of my life sitting in the sun at the back of the Whalley Range Tennis and Cricket Club. Neither of us has died yet, nor have we mutated. We have, however, started beaming 5G waves from our heads and I understand Bill Gates has full visibility of my movements now.

If you’d like to listen to my Spotify playlist called, I’m here live; I’m not a cat, you can do so here.

A glistening pint of cold, fizzy lager

    Quick update on my last post: as I mentioned, I’d received a letter from the dermatologist to tell me the biopsy had revealed moderately abnormal cells, I needed further surgery on my ear and that I would hear from Wythenshawe hospital. Six weeks later and I’ve still not heard from them. I gave them a week before I followed up. I started at the scene of the crime—Withington hospital’s dermatology department—but they didn’t answer their phone. 

    I called several times on the number they had given me before dialling another, which eventually got me through to the nurses’ station. The woman I spoke to checked my records and confirmed that I was on a waiting list and I should call Wythenshawe directly for more information. She gave me two numbers, which I dutifully tried every day for a few more days. There was no answer but there was an answering machine so I left a couple of messages. Still nothing.

 
    On Wythenshawe hospital’s website, I found their Patient Advice and Liaison Service—PALS for short—who promise to ‘help make your voice heard and liaise with the relevant staff to sort out any problems quickly.’ I called the number but there was no reply so I emailed them. I’ve still not heard from them. Not very pally, if you ask me.

    At a loss how I was supposed to talk to anyone at Wythenshawe Hospital, and not knowing who I should speak to anyway because the original letter hadn’t contained that information, I thought I’d try Withington again.

    I didn’t mess about this time; I went straight to the nurses’ station number as they were the only people I’d got through to in all this time, and I laid it on. The woman I spoke to was lovely and helpful and professional. When I said to her with a slight shrillness to my voice, ‘I just need to know if I have skin cancer or if I’m going to have my ear removed’ she told me she couldn’t comment on the content of the letter but she’d ask the doctor that wrote it—the first person I’d seen at the dermatology department way back when in the middle of February—to call me.

    Ten minutes later, and the doctor was on the phone. She explained that I do not have skin cancer; the further surgery was to be undertaken by the plastic surgery team at Wythenshawe; and that it was an advised precaution given the moderately abnormal cells and the possibility of them becoming more abnormal in time. She went on to say that I do not need to worry and that I should wait for a call from Wythenshawe.

    After weeks of moderately abnormal worrying, I finally felt reassured. That being said, I’ve still not heard from Wythenshawe, I still don’t know how much of my ear they want and I can only assume the PALS team have fallen out and disbanded.

    In wider national news, the covid rates in the UK are dwindling as the vaccine does its job. Almost half of the UK’s population has had at least one vaccine shot—my first is due next Wednesday—and the country is gradually opening up again. Of course we’ve been here before, and things can change, but last time the country started to get back to normal we had no vaccine and the only thing to assist us was the Government’s ‘eat out to help out’ promotion.

    So as it stands we may go to a pub, or restaurant, but we must sit outside. That ruling is in place till 17th May and has led to a flurry of bookings across April and May—I’ve currently got a birthday dinner next Friday, drinks the following Thursday, lunch then drinks on the Saturday, dinner on 21st May with friends, again on 26th for our anniversary and one last reservation on 1st June because in the olden days we used to enjoy going out for a pizza on a Tuesday night. This might appear to the untrained eye as overkill, but believe me, some of these reservations are rarer than hen’s teeth.

    When the pubs first opened again, I was keen to get out there and sip a glistening pint of cold, fizzy lager, poured by someone else, and served to me in a glass—simply because I’d not done that since October. I went into work on the Thursday of that first week knowing that a couple of colleagues would be there and after we’d finished for the day we hit the Northern Quarter on the hunt for a table. Twenty minutes later, I was utterly dejected as we realised it was going to take an eon to find a seat. I had a right face on me. When somebody suggested we buy some cans and drink them on the roof terrace at work I had to apologise for my miserable attitude and mumbled the words, ‘Well, yeah, obviously it’s about the company.’ I don’t think I convinced them, especially when I said, ‘You know if I were on my own I could’ve got in that last pub.’ I eventually got my glistening pint a few days later, and I have made up for it since by necking the stuff like it’s going out of fashion.

    As part of the process of returning to normal, there is a new arm to the track and trace scheme whereby people who have no symptoms test themselves at home and report back to the NHS. As a good citizen I ordered my kit of seven tests which should last about a month. They arrived on Monday but I had an important appointment on Wednesday so I pushed it to one side—I couldn’t risk missing it if it turned out that I was positive. Apparently that’s not the right way to look at it, but it was a very important appointment.

    I didn’t find time to do it on Thursday (glistening pints of cold, fizzy lager) then, on Friday, I got myself all revved up for it before realising I wasn’t supposed to eat before the test and I’d just wolfed down a massive piece of quiche with some new potatoes and salad. I pushed it aside again and settled down with a slab of carrot cake.

 

    Eventually, this morning, I got round to taking the test. It’s the standard thing you see on the TV of folk having swabs jammed up their noses and into the back of the throat. You then take said swab and mix it in a formula and drop it into a little plastic strip before giving it half an hour to reveal the answer. I imagine that’s what a pregnancy test is like, just with fewer tonsils and more piss. Thankfully, the test was negative because I’m due at a garden party this evening and I didn’t want to cancel.

    Finally, I feel I should mention the biggest news of the last month: the death of Prince Philip, the Duke Of Edinburgh, at 99 years old. It’s one of those strange situations where something affects people despite them having no direct link to the event or in this case, the person. There was the usual mix of sentiment on social media with some horrors being completely merciless, as if the money and privilege afforded to members of the royal family negates any need for sympathy or their need to mourn. I mean, why should someone be upset about losing a family member when they have a driver and a nice house?

    Thankfully, though most people saw past the ceremony and the bluster of the misanthropes, and recognised the event for what it was: a woman who had lost her companion of over seventy years, human, diminished in stature, and hurting, and having to do it in the spotlight of public scrutiny.

    His funeral was at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and as current Covid rules dictate, the congregation was made up of just thirty people. The service was solemn and pared back and the Queen cut a lonely figure, standing unaccompanied to the right of her husband’s coffin.

 
    News reports say that she will continue to live at Windsor now and only return to London for work. Others have suggested she might pass the crown on to Charles, though I don’t see that happening. There will always be mixed opinions about the royal family, and whilst the death of Prince Philip was a big deal, you can guarantee the international reaction will pale into insignificance when the Queen dies.