Month: May 2021

My four-day weekend has started. I hope everyone is doing well. I’ll be back on Sunday night with another exciting post.

I am approaching the fourteen day mark since I received my first vaccine dose. By most accounts, my body has now built up whatever immunity I should have received after just a single shot. Some fourteen months after the pandemic started, I now have some fairly good protection against the virus. While I do feel some relief, I haven’t changed a whole lot of my behaviour in terms of safety protocols. I understand I have received only one dose of the AZ vaccine. I need two doses to be considered fully vaccinated and protected. At this point, I am not even sure if my second dose of the vaccine will be AZ. In any case, since I am not fully vaccinated, there’s still a chance I can still get sick. There are documented cases where fully vaccinated people got sick and died. That’s just the reality of how viruses and vaccines work. Not everything is perfect. Until everyone is fully vaccinated (or at least as close to everyone as possible) and positive cases are down to more manageable numbers, it’s important to me to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

I guess the only thing that has changed is the slight sense of relief I’ve experienced that I mentioned before. Both my parents have had their first shot and so have I, so now I feel much more comfortable being around them. I also worry less when I’m indoors. I think I’ve been to a mall twice in the last fourteen months. I feel like I could go to a mall now while wearing a mask and I’d be in a safer situation than say a month ago, when I hadn’t had my first shot.

I’m looking forward to being fully vaccinated by the end of the summer!

I just had a three-day weekend but the people in charge of my team at work have informed us plebes that everyone is getting Thursday and Friday off this week! They are giving us some extra time off because we’ve been all working very hard lately and that hard work has paid off.

It’s a very kind gesture for management to allow us to have some time off and also to shift the schedule around so that the team having two days off doesn’t mean we’re just two days behind schedule for our existing work.

Wednesday is Friday this week!

The game I work on allows players to personalize their own accounts in many different ways, one of which is to select badges that other players can see. If you work on the game, developers get a special badge that only we have access to. After a delay of several months, due to reasons that I’m not entirely aware of, I finally got my dev badge on the weekend.

I hear that selecting that badge is a bit of a double-edged sword. You can get lots of attention, both good and bad. Some of my co-workers choose to not display the badge and go anonymous, while others don’t mind.

I’m terrible at the game I work on, so I haven’t played a game yet with my dev badge selected. I’m sorta nervous to take it out for a spin.

I am taking the day off tomorrow, so it’s a long weekend for me. I hope everyone has a wonderful Friday and weekend as well.

As some of you know, about a month before the pandemic started, I was in the planning phases of a small home renovation. The first step was going to hire an electrician to put in a new baseboard heater in my living room. That obviously did not happen.

Now that I’ve had my first vaccine shot, I am now looking into finally get this plan going again. Having my first shot protects me and protect any potential worker who has to come into my apartment. We will no doubt still have protocols in place, but knowing I have some biological protection makes feel safer about the whole thing.

Almost a year and a half late, I am eager to start this project.

Up until probably a month ago, I hadn’t used my dishwasher for well over a year. Like any good Asian household, I use the dishwasher rack to dry my hand-washed dishes.

Last month, I used the dishwasher just so that all the parts and motors could be run again. I didn’t want the appliance to get into a bad state just because I didn’t use it. I’ve run twice again since then. The most recent time was just tonight. I didn’t have a lot of dirty dishes but I had used up all my clean bowls and I was just so tired tonight, I didn’t feel like hand-washing.

I gotta admit, it’s way more convenient to let the machine do the dirty work.

Comedian and actor Jimmy O. Yang is back in Vancouver to film Space Force season two for Netflix. For some reason, he’s quarantining in Burnaby, right next to Metrotown. In this video, he tries Hon’s Wonton House, sampling an array of dishes. I like Hon’s myself. It’s simple and authentic. I just wish there was a location closer to where I live.

On Thursday evening, I wrote that I felt some very minor side effects from my first AstraZeneca vaccine. I was feeling some muscle aches in my arms and that was pretty much it. About ten minutes after I hit “Publish” button for that post, things went downhill very quickly.

I had planned on going to sleep anyways after I wrote my post but as I crawled into bed, the muscle aches had expanded to all parts of my body. I also started to feel the chills come on. I began to shiver ever so slightly, even as I was under the covers. I was feeling very uncomfortable and it came on lightning quick. Thirty minutes ago, I was feeling normal. It caught me by surprise at how quickly I felt ill.

Oddly, I was feeling like my intestinal muscles were cramping. It’s hard to explain, but I knew it wasn’t because I had ate something bad. It’s like if your leg muscle cramping, except this was some of my intestinal muscle. Those cramps came in waves and it was quite painful. So I had that to deal with, along with the chills, and the whole body aching.

With all that going on, I found it very difficult to sleep. I just didn’t see how my body and mind was going to relax enough in that state to let myself fall asleep. I had several people warn me during the day to stay hydrated after the shot. I took their advice and was drinking water all day and throughout the evening. I brought some water with me to bed. Even while I was taking a turn for the worse, I forced myself to continue to drink water.

The area where the shot was administered, which had been pain-free all day, all of a sudden became very sore and painful to the touch (much like the rest of my body). It was like my body had gone to battlestations. I guess that’s exactly what it should have been doing.

I was in this first stage of discomfort for who knows how long. It must have been two or three hours. Sleep did not come at all. I’m not sure what came next. I think it was the headache. A painful headache developed. It made tossing and turning painful.

My chills gave way to a fever, probably around 5am. I got hot, my body ached, my head was pounding, and I was just feeling miserable. I had to pee and it was an ordeal to even muster the strength and endure the pain of getting up to go to the bathroom. I didn’t really have any choice other than pee in my bed.

After urinating and getting back into bed, I thought that I couldn’t even remember that last time I felt ill, even just a quarter as bad as this. Since the pandemic began, with physical distancing, mask wearing, avoiding crowds and public transit, I had been successful at avoiding a single cold or flu. Now, lying in bed, I felt just awful. Yet, this was a good sign that my body was creating antibodies in response to the vaccine.

Friday morning was a bit of a blur, I may have fell asleep for about ten minutes here or there. I do remember feeling very hot and sweating. I also somehow gathered enough strength to send out an e-mail to work saying I was going to take a sick day. My headache had not subsided all this time.

I believe around 11am, I decided to take an Advil. I would have taken one earlier but I was hoping I wouldn’t need to and wanted to just let my body do its thing with the vaccine. I had, however, been without sleep all night and was feeling the worse I’ve felt in probably three or four years.

After I took the Advil, about an hour later, I got really hot again, felt like I was sweating through my PJs and my sheets. The only thing I could do was just lie there and let it happen. The suddenly, I realized my headache was almost gone and my fever had gone down significantly. I wasn’t feeling hot anymore and I stopped sweating. I’m not sure if it was the Advil but if it was, it had done an amazing job.

By this time it was about 12 or 1pm and I felt good enough that getting up from bed didn’t feel like agony. This allowed me to make some food and a coffee. I was starting to feel much better. I didn’t do too much for the rest of the afternoon. I went back to bed, drank water, and I was able to fall asleep for about an hour in the late afternoon.

My condition remained the same throughout the evening, though just before bed, I felt the tiniest of all over muscle aches and a bit of a chill. I was able to sleep normally on Friday night. I woke up feeling ok on Saturday morning. It was almost like nothing had happened the day before. The only thing that seemed out of place was that I felt hot and sweaty doing less strenuous things than normal. Not sure if it was because it was sorta sunny on Saturday or if I still had a bit of fever. I also got tired quickly. I had to nap in the afternoon.

On Sunday, I felt completely normal again, with the exception of the injection site, which remains sore, like someone had punched my arm real hard.

As an adult, I’ve had several flu shots and I’ve had the hepatitis vaccine but nothing has come close to what I’ve experienced with this one. It really did a number on me but that’s ok. It means it worked and that’s the important thing.