Fear of the Post-Vax World
I got my first Pfizer vaccination three weeks ago. While I flicked through my email in a crowded post-vax reaction room, google informed me it was Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil’s shadow had predicted six more weeks of winter.
The irony was potent. I feel we have all had a full year of Groundhog Days. For those of us who have so far been lucky to make it through this pandemic alive, one day has churned into another, like an endless Andy Warhol movie. My wife and I have only seen our sons–masked and at a six feet. Like everyone else I miss my friends, I miss gatherings, I miss strangers faces in bars. My wife enjoys zoom. I do not. Strangely, I seem to have accepted this withdrawal too easily. This whole experience has been so unreal that I don’t fully understand its impact on my psyche. It isn’t the year of lockdowns that has puzzled me but my reaction to its approaching end. As Myers-Briggs long ago informed me, I am an introvert. Conversations have either been a performance during which I tell Irish stories, or where I am more than happy to be the audience. I don’t particularly enjoy verbal jousting. I am happy to sit, listen, and hopefully learn something. And yet, after my second vaccination last week, the closed Covid door creaked open again, and the world began to peek in.
As it did, I was left asking how do I adapt to this new reality?
It has been a year of no friends, masked neighbors, canceled family gatherings, postponed vacations, and hording food from biweekly curbside pickups. The horror of infection, sickness and death is the daily diet of television.
So how can this yearlong silent fog of death suddenly disappear with a simple jab in the arm?
I have always had a sneaking sympathy for the Syrian general Naaman referenced in 2 Kings 5. He came to Israel to ask that the prophet Elisha cure him of leprosy. Elisha did not meet him but sent a servant to deliver a message: Dip yourself in the River Jordan seven times and you’ll be cured. Naaman wasn’t a happy puppy. The Jordan was not the Tigris or the Euphrates. It was not an impressive river, and he was an impressive man. He stormed off, insulted that he had not received a dramatic blessing from the prophet accompanied by thunder and lightning. Naaman’s servant, however, offered wiser advice. “If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? How much rather then, when he saith to thee, wash, and be clean?
Naaman relented, dipped himself in the muddy Jordan and was cured. I feel a bit like Naaman. After this long year, I feel like Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?” I find it beyond strange that two jabs in the arm can restore my former life. I am, however, deliriously happy to merely ‘wash and be clean’. I feel humble and blessed to accept the vaccine, a marvel of modern genomic engineering. But now I have to ease my way back into the world again. My social skills are unused and creaky. My wife has practiced almost daily on zoom, but I feel … I can’t believe I am using the word … I feel shy.
Lily Meyer writes about this reentry into society in the Atlantic Magazine, Feb 10 2021. “As vaccination slowly returns inessential workers to outside life, many will have a new host of fears to deal with…”
In an article in Psychology Today(April 2020) Susan Albers coins the phrase “post-isolation syndrome”, which is anxiety about reintegrating back into the world. Also known as “Gate fever” it is apparently experienced by anyone whose work has necessitated geographical isolation. From environmental scientists trudging the wilderness to lighthouse keepers, and even astronauts. As Albers notes, it also “describes the anxiety of many prisoners as they face the end of their sentence.”
My “gate fever” is mild in the extreme. It may simply be a transient form of agoraphobia, a fear of re-entering the marketplace (Gk agora) again.
But whatever it is, I gratefully accept this miracle of modern science even as I mourn the over five hundred thousand for whom it arrived too late. I look forward to reentering my postponed life. I look forward to hugging my sons; visiting the cinema to see something that is not Netflix sized, and taking a trip down to my local bar where hopefully Justin will remember my name and once again ask, “the usual?”
I also wonder how many others have experienced this hesitation at the threshold of post-Covid life?
Raymond Hardie
