How I got my shots; some good advice on working your way through the vaccination maze

When COVID-19 vaccines first became available I tried signing up, but was thwarted (and I’ve never used that word before and hope to never use it again) by confusing sign-up websites, websites that would show available vaccination appointments which would be gone by the time I took 15 seconds to check my calendar to see what else I was doing that day and a drug store chain that would give me a vaccination appointment if I would in turn give them permission to roam through my medical records.

I could only imagine the flurry of unsolicited emails I’d get for the rest of my life while the drug store chain tried to sell me products for ailments I suffered 27 years ago.

Age-related complaint alert

So what’s the deal on this old-age stuff where you wake up with some pain you didn’t go to sleep with (and I’m talking physical pain, not sleeping companions because that’s a young person’s complaint) like a sore knee or heel pain or a stiff neck and just about the time you think maybe you should go see a doctor because it’s probably leprosy or beriberi or the first stage of scurvy, the pain mysteriously goes away?

When I was younger I was on high-health alert all the time and if I woke up with a pain at 6 AM would try to have a doctor’s appointment by noon, but these days I give it a while because otherwise I’d be in the doctor’s office three times a week and the vast majority of the time the pain goes away on its own.

I think my body is infested by Gremlins, which if it isn’t an actual medical diagnosis, certainly ought to be and I think many of you would agree.

If something hurts for a solid week maybe I’ll consider seeing a doctor and even though I’ve become way more relaxed about this mysterious pain stuff, I still worry that the doctor will diagnose some life-ending disease and say: “If only we caught this two hours ago.”

Now that I think about it, my wait-and-see attitude toward health was also mirrored by my wait-and-see attitude toward learning my co-workers’ names because I worked at the Kansas City Star back when they had hundreds of employees who worked in several buildings and I decided I wasn’t going to learn anybody’s name until they’d been there at least five years.

“Really? I go to all the trouble to learn your name so I can say, ‘Hi, Bill’ in the morning and three years later you leave?”

Women are always complaining about men’s fear of commitment, but in my mind I was requiring commitment before learning the names of my coworkers and, in certain instances, children.

“Look, if you’re just going to go to leave for college in 18 years, then move to Los Angeles, California or Helsinki, Finland or Timbuktu, Mali to pursue your career in the (fill-in-the-blank) industry, let’s try not to get overly personal and keep this relationship on a professional level. ”

I actually got a tattoo with my kid’s birthdays in Roman Numerals which one of my sons accused me of getting so I wouldn’t have to remember their birthdays and use up the part of my brain reserved for important stuff like George Brett’s Lifetime Batting Average (.305 and I didn’t have to look that up) and I really would have resented the accusation if it hadn’t been 100 percent accurate.

Joke’s on me, now I can’t remember what the Roman Numerals stand for.

I get a vaccination appointment

So out of the blue some website I registered with and totally forgot about sends me an email that I’m now scheduled for a vaccination appointment at 8:15 AM at the Lee’s Summit Health Center, which despite having a really cool name (and I like to refer to it as My Summit) was unfortunately located on the far side of the Grandview Triangle.

At this point, everybody from Kansas City who knows anything about traffic patterns in the Metro Area just gasped and said “Oh, that poor man” because trying to get through the Grandview Triangle during rush hour is only somewhat less difficult than trying to cross Death Valley at high noon in August. Considering all the confusing highway signs which makes it appear you’re going the right way when in fact you just took an exit to Blue Springs and a Twilight Zone episode, I feel confident in saying more people have been lost in the Grandview Triangle than the Bermuda Triangle and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.

For those of you who don’t live here:

Kansas City is one of those towns that appeared to be designed a team of people with Attention Deficit Disorder after consuming 24-ounce Mountain Dews and a bag full of Easter candy because you can be going down Main Street and without making a turn, suddenly find yourself on Brookside Boulevard because Main Street just stopped existing for a couple blocks and came back to life a couple streets over (I’m pretty sure that Star Trek transporter is involved) and went from a four-lane thoroughfare through the business district to a one-and-a-half lane street through a residential neighborhood which is pretty weird behavior for something called “Main” Street.   

Here in KC you can go East on 47th Street and without making a single turn find yourself on Emanuel Cleaver Boulevard and I think it becomes something else again before turning back into 47th Street, which if you live here long enough you figure out, but confuses the hell out of visitors.

To avoid the Grandview Triangle during the Rush Hour From Hell, I took Bannister Road which goes from being a four-lane boulevard through what used to be a Big Deal Shopping Center, but now looks like the aftermath of some nuclear bomb mishap, to a two-lane, winding, twisting road through the countryside where you pass houses with overall-wearing men on the porch playing a banjo and yelling “You shure got a purdy mouth” as you go by…which is a completely untrue, but somewhat humorous reference to Deliverance which put me off canoe trips forever.

I mean if I ever have to have sex with a dude, please don’t let it be Ned Beatty.

So where were we?

The My Summit Medical Center

Turns out the Missouri Department of Highways and Practical Jokes had one last surprise for me because I was supposed to turn off on Ranson Road, but that’s not what the sign before the exit said and the Ranson Road sign only appeared after you missed the exit and had to drive a couple more miles and make a U-Turn to get back to the Medical Center.

Once I finally got there, the people could not have been nicer and gave me my vaccination and a timer set for 15 minutes so they could wait and see if I turned into a werewolf or brain-eating zombie which would qualify me for a job designing roads in the Kansas City Metroplex assuming we have one of those and I’m not sure we do.

After not growing excess hair or howling at the moon or trying to eat the brain of the person next to me, they gave me a card and another appointment in three weeks to get my second shot.

But two weeks after I got my first shot the same website that told me to go to My Summit Medical Center sent me an email saying it had been three weeks (it hadn’t) and I needed to make my next appointment (which had already been made.)

Anyway…

I jumped through all the hoops and made it through the Grandview Triangle Funhouse and am now fully vaccinated and looking forward to what I hope is a more normal summer. And if you haven’t gotten your vaccination yet, I’m here to tell you to persevere and you’ll eventually get there.

But you might want to bring along a good road map.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/