Shot in the arm

SNL had a very funny cold opening on Saturday: "Dr. Anthony Fauci" as host of a new game show, So You Think You Can Get The Vaccine. The panel tasked with choosing the lucky winner among the supplicants looking for a shot was composed of "Governor Gavin Newsom", "Governor Andrew Cuomo," and "Governor Gretchen Whitmer." I was hoping that they'd include Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, but there probably aren't enough outsiders familiar with our lax-bro gov who has recently told us that he's "pissed," and that his "hair's on fire" over the clumsy rollout of the vaccine here. So, sorry Charlie, you don't get to be made fun of on SNL.

Anyway, after reviewing the contestants - one with herpes, one claiming to be a grannie (before she was unwigged), one claiming to be a smoker (some states, including Massachusetts, have put smokers ahead of other groups) - the governors choose an 85 year old retired military doctor granddad.

When they announced that he'd won, the happy granddad doc asked whether he'd be getting his shot now.

Of course not, he was told. All his win did was entitle him to now sign up for the vaccine.

Goodbye and good luck!

I am one of the fortunate folks in the 65-75 cohort who has managed to secure my first shot.

According to the statistics, 50% of my group have gotten a jab, but you'd never know if if you're on Twitter or reading comments on The Boston Globe. The 50% have-nots have been quite vocal about their difficulties, and I can definitely sympathize with them.

When they opened up vaccination registration to my cohort on February 18th, it seemed like all one million of us tried to hop on the reg site at once. It got ugly quick. Within an hour, approximately 900,000 of the one million were already muttering about The Hunger Games as they flailed around an incredibly poorly designed interface that kept crashing on them, and required putting in the same info - I think it was eight or nine pages worth - again and again each time you got thrown out. Even more frustrating, there were times when you thought you'd snagged an appointment, only to find that the 1,000 appointments available for the following Tuesday at Gillette Stadium there for the asking when you started entering those pages upon pages of personal, health, and insurance info, were no longer open. Sorry. Back to square one and having to re-enter your info yet again.

I only worked the registration site for a few hours before deciding to give it a rest for a week or two, in hopes that they'd have worked the kinks out of the system.* (And in case you're wondering, it's easier than you think to memorize your Medicare ID number.)

But, of course, I was tempted to hop on, off and on, to see if anything had opened up. As if!

Then on Saturday my brother came to lunch. He'd been reading about vaccinations at Boston Medical Center. 

I had looked at BMC in the morning, but it seemed worth another try. 

Et, voila!

The Massachusetts vaccine sites all require separate registration, but I'd been looking at the mass vax sites (Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium, etc.), which had the incredibly aggravating front end. (Back end, too. A good deal of my career was spent in software companies. Did the company implementing the Mass. mass vax site system never hear of stress testing? Or user interface/experience testing? Apparently not.)

In comparison, the BMC site was a paragon of simplicity and ease of use. It required very little info, and if you missed out on the appointment you wanted, no problem, you didn't have to enter your data in over and over. You just went back and tried for another time.

And BMC had another wonderful feature: it was only open to patients at BMC and to Boston residents. 

BMC is a private medical center. It's the teaching hospital for BU Medical School. But it used to be the public hospital for Boston, and still has a mission to serve our lower-income communities. (Boston City was founded in the mid-nineteenth century. The first municipal hospital in the US, Boston City was built to serve the poor, which in Boston at that time was largely the Irish immigrant community.) I don't know a soul who gets their regular medical care at BMC, but decades ago when I had to have a TB test before I could start business school, there I went. It was the only game in town. And if I ever got shot or stabbed, I would definitely want to be rushed to the BMC trauma center.

Anyway, in just a few minutes on the BMC sign-up site, I was able to secure vax appointments for both my brother and me. Yes, it was going to be a bit of a PITA to get to the satellite vax site in the Roslindale neighborhood. And, no I couldn't find us appointments for the same day, which meant my brother - who is also my driver in this case - would have to schlepp out to Roslindale twice in two days. But no big deal, given that we had appointments for THE SHOT.

After signing up, I immediately called my friend K and told her about BMC. She got a Roslindale appointment, too.

K then heard from a friend that, if you called, you might be able to switch to a much closer shot site: BMC's main campus in Boston's South End.

I waited a day, and then I called. 

Could I come in right away?

Yes, indeed. But could they hang on whether to see if I could get a hold of my brother.

Sure, they told me. Give him a buzz.

Unfortunately, he was in the shower, so he'll need to keep his appointment this week in Roslindale. But I wasn't in the shower...

I was on the phone at 10:40 a.m. If I could get to BMC by 11:30 a.m., I would be good to go.

It's only 1.5 miles. Time to spare! 

So I legged it out and got my first shot last Thursday.

And a shoutout to BMC for their excellent registration system, the courtesy and efficiency of their call-in center, and the calm, warm, and efficient workers at the vaccine center. The experience could not have gone better. 

And oh, what a relief it is to have gotten that first jab. In equal parts a relief to be on my way to immunization, and a relief that I won't have to contend with the signup (MassVaxPalooza) system again. (I guess until there's a booster shot they decide everyone needs.)

But I won't be fully relieved until all of my family and friends are also able to get vaccinated.

I will not be wearing the button they gave me.  

With so many people still struggling to find an appointment, I don't want to advertise my good fortune.

Still, it feels plenty good. Light, tunnel and all that.

So I'm starting to make a few modest little plans for when I get my second shot, which will be towards the end of this month.

I'm going to take the train out to Worcester to visit my cousin. I don't think we'll be going out to lunch, but we'll have a nice non-bubble visit. (She and her husband get shot two the end of this week.)

K and I are going to take one of our regular masked walks. (We're signed up for shot two on the same time and day, so we'll be walking back and forth to BMC.) But afterwards we're going to end up at her place or mine for a nice glass of wine, and toast the weird year that's behind us.

I might venture into Nordstrom Rack and get myself something springy.

I'm going to get back to volunteering at St. Francis House, which I'm greatly looking forward to. (I was spending about 15 hours a week there, so getting furloughed took a big chunk out of my retirement life's work.)

The sky is not yet the limit, but I've gotta say that the shot in the arm was a real shot in the arm.

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*They apparently made some "improvements" to the sign up system, trying to make it more user friendly for the second Thursday sign up the Massachusetts Vaccine Jamboree. (Thursday is the day when the majority of new appointments open up.) One of the big improvements was setting up a virtual "waiting room" that would let you know how much of a wait you had to sit through. Within short order, people were being informed that they had 10,000 minutes left. That's about 7 days. Yahoo! 

Other were told they had a 25,000 minute wait. Or 40,000. The highest number I heard was 65,000 minute wait, which translates into a month and a half. I know that a lot of us retired Boomers have time on our hands, but does anyone really want to hang online for 45 days?