Vaccination
A thrilling tale involving the Pfizer Covid vaccine, brain damage, and Daylight Saving Time
Part of long-term survival of trauma is that you’re just going to accumulate stories. It’s inevitable, you’ll pick them up like dust gathering in unused corners — and most of them are about as useful. I mean, I could tell everyone what it feels like to spend a week with a Foley Catheter in you, but no one really wants to read that, and it’d be a little traumatic for me to tell it. On the other hand, I am chock-full of mostly-family-friendly anecdotes about surviving things that should have killed me. And that makes me a font of unrequested knowledge on how to survive stuff that’s going to take a few IQ points off the top.
Speaking of which, the two pieces of advice I give to every newly-diagnosed person is to get an EEG (like an EKG, but for your brain) and a neurocognitive assessment battery. That latter one is harder to find than the former, and is usually done by clinical psychology researchers, so you might have to go out of your way to find it.
Unlike an IQ test, which is largely a multiple choice test that predicts how well you do on other standardized tests, the neurocognitive assessment battery has a wide range of tasks involved, all of them different from test to test (trust me, I’ve taken four of them)(no, I did not “ace” any of them, even though I demanded a trophy), ranging from “Grooved Pegboard Test” (while timed) to “Can you study this image for two minutes and draw it” to “fairly basic math problems” to “alternate between listing vegetables and pieces of furniture” (I’m sure the researchers I worked with loved me questioning whether peppers and tomatoes are fruits or vegetables, or whether a divan is different than a couch). Yes, I’ve been asked to do all of those things on the tests.
The pay-off here, aside from giving everyone a rough idea of how to better-judge and define intelligence than a mere multiple choice test, is actually to introduce a concept I utilized before neurosurgery #2. I went in for the assessment about a month before surgery, and, after a fascinating but weird and exhausting day (one thing later researchers pointed out to me is that these tests are designed to grind you down so that they have a rough idea of your mental performance when you’re fresh, when you’re “in the groove,” and when you’re tired)(as one psychologist put it, “If you feel like you’re going crazy, don’t worry, that’s actually part of the test”), the researcher told me that it would take a while to crunch the numbers, grade the thing, and get back to me. Great. Fast-forward two months — one month post-surgery, and I get a call from the researcher. She said (and I’m paraphrasing), that I scored in the upper 85%-ish across the board, however, in visual-spatial tasks and memory, I was performing somewhere in the 60% range. As the researcher pointed out, when they see people with results that disparate in specific areas, it usually indicates some sort of organic brain lesion — like a tumor.
“So, basically, we’ve established that you have a tumor. Which is your baseline.” I believe that’s how she phrased it, although this is seven years ago, so I could be misremembering it. Talk about foreshadowing.
But, the point she was trying to get across was that I shouldn’t put too much stock in a single test that merely established I had some sort of neurological dysfunction.
I bring all of this up because I got the Covid vaccination the Friday before Daylight Saving Time started. So, any reported side effects and problems I experienced were comparable to a bad case of jet lag, which we all got a case of this week (another point worth noting is that, in talking to other neurology patients, jet lag really messes us up in a way ableds won’t comprehend). So, my baseline in today’s experiment is “chronic neurology patient who got to do one of the more-aggravating things associated with his disease. Oh, and he got a vaccination.” Take it for what you will.
I got my first vaccination for Covid (the Pfizer one, if you’re wondering) on Friday afternoon. For the rest of that day, my arm was sore. It wasn’t incapacitating, but it was noticeable for the rest of the day. Saturday, the pain was gone, but I was somewhat tired all day — it was comparable to mild dehydration; not fatal or even terribly inconveniencing, but not nothing. By Sunday, I was more or less back to normal.
Today, I’m not too bad, but that jet lag sensation has caught up with me. I’m not dying, but I will probably spend most of the day napping. It might be the Covid vaccination, it could be living with an organic brain disease on one of the most jet-lag-inducing times of the year; it might just be that my allergies are all going off at the same time. It could be any combination of all of those. I’ll find out in a few weeks when I get the second vaccination. And I will get that second vaccination, because whatever discomfort I’m experiencing is far, far better than the extreme discomfort I’ll experience if some preventable disease gets to me (again, forget the ventilator for a moment; it’s a month with a Foley Catheter, and that should terrify everyone).
