Choking on the Covid contradictions

INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 148

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 01: A mask-required sign is seen on a door of a store in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn borough in New York City. A spike in late summer coronavirus (COVID-19) positive cases in the U.S. has some schools, hospitals, and businesses encouraging and at times requiring people to start masking up again. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that hospitalizations have increased by nearly 19% in a single week and deaths by more than 21% nationwide. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

ASK THE SOPHIST

Can I Cheat Death by Skipping My Next Booster?

Dear The Sophist:

HERE’S THE SHORT version: I’m a runner—the casual but regular kind, not really racing or anything, but usually hitting the double digits in weekly mileage at my age-appropriate pace. I had Covid for the first time in July of 2022; I was in Lisbon for a conference and ended up spending almost the entire time in bed in an un-air-conditioned Airbnb instead of enjoying myself. 

The memory of it was bad enough that in early October, I kind of fudged my age and profession so I could get my third booster (fourth shot overall) ASAP. I had the same kind of reaction I’d had to all the other shots: a couple of days of low-grade fever, sore throat, and migraines. I also ended up with a bit of lingering chest congestion that lasted a while, and got bad enough that I started attributing it to something else. 

On my runs I began having to stop after the first couple of minutes to basically hyperventilate for a minute or two, and then adjust my pace downward significantly (I went from maybe a 9-minute mile range to maybe a 12-minute mile range). I’d had bronchitis a lot in my 30s, and a couple of times it had progressed to pneumonia, so as this chest congestion got worse, I figured that must be what was causing it—weirdly, though, I didn’t really have a cough.

By early November, I couldn't run at all. When I started to have steady chest pains and trouble breathing, my primary-care doctor gave me referrals to see a pulmonologist and to get a CT scan. Of course, the first available appointments for both of these were at least a month out, so I finally accepted the inevitable and went to my local emergency room. 

Turns out they don’t keep you waiting very long when you arrive with chest pain as one of your symptoms. After a few hours of mystery and inconclusive chest x-rays, and a lot of me lamely apologizing for wasting their time, they set me up with a CT scan… and once the results came back they rushed to get me admitted. Turns out I had clusters of pulmonary embolisms—blood clots in both lungs. These presented in a way that was (luckily for me) unusual for pulmonary embolisms, which usually involve one or a small number of large clots on major pulmonary arteries and require immediate surgery; mine were dozens of tiny clots on small peripheral arteries in my lungs, and ultimately could be cleared up with a course of blood thinners.

I saw maybe seven doctors of various specialties during the two days I was in the hospital, and all the blood tests to detect possible genetic or other common causes for clotting issues came back negative. All of the doctors told me, with varying degrees of hesitancy, that they had been seeing an unusual number of men in the 30-to-50 age range presenting with pulmonary embolisms during the Covid era. Each of them said that they believed it was due to either the virus or the vaccine.

My lung strength is now back (or at least close) to what it was before this happened, and other than having to take blood thinners twice a day (out of the usual medical abundance of caution), and consequently having to be careful about habits or activities that might lead to bleeding, I’ve suffered no ill effects other than a few unpleasant medical bills. I caught Covid again later that November, over Thanksgiving, and while I had to take my Thanksgiving dinner alone in my childhood bedroom, I had absolutely no symptoms. 

But now I'm dreading the decision I have to make when the next Covid booster comes out. I don't know that the last booster caused my blood clots, but given the timing and sequence of events, and the information from my doctors, I do think that is the most logical conclusion. There's not enough peer-reviewed research to draw meaningful conclusions, so I'm stuck having to make decisions based on the limited and anecdotal evidence currently available to me. 

Maybe I'm overthinking this. I am a believer in the efficacy of vaccines, and their importance to individual and public health; I will get my flu shot very soon and without hesitation. I know that the set of circumstances I’ve outlined above (prophylactic use of blood thinners, no lasting effects from the previous incident) means that I’m very unlikely to suffer further consequences in the same vein (no pun intended, I guess), and I absolutely want to be protected from the current Covid variant. The vaccines have a proven track record of doing what they’re supposed to do in this regard. 

The folks in my social circles are almost universally pro-vaccine, so when I tell my story and get to the “It kind of seems like it was caused by my last booster shot” part, it tends to shut down the conversation completely. This is not something that anyone wants to consider, and I don’t particularly blame them. 

OK, that wasn’t the short version at all. What do I do with all of that? I keep thinking that maybe I should just forget about it. On the other hand, I genuinely could have died if I’d kept up my masculinist “I’m fine” routine for another week or two last November. Is my anxiety around getting the next booster nothing more than a mild trauma response that I should ignore? Are there larger questions that can be considered without undermining my otherwise consistent position on vaccines, or feeding into antivax narratives? What should I do here?

Sincerely,
Needled by My Conscience