We finally got vaccinated today. It wasn’t easy; I didn’t think it would be. It was frustrating; I should have expected that.
We got an email from Kaiser (our healthcare provider) telling us it was our turn and we should call for an appointment. We waited on hold for over four hours only to be told that there were no appointments available.
Then Santa Clara County announced a “no wrong door” policy meaning we could get vaccinated by any healthcare provider in the county. The county itself started offering vaccines under this policy through the Santa Clara County Medical Center. We got our first dose in February with our second dose schedule for today.
Then yesterday we received an email saying we had to go through Kaiser for our second dose. They cancelled our appointment for our second dose.
By luck, today, my wife ran into a neighbor who happens to have Kaiser also. (Kaiser is the largest healthcare provider in Santa Clara County, covering 40% of the residents.) He said he had just gotten his second dose at Levi Stadium, which is where we were supposed to have gone. He told me to call a phone number which I did. I said our appointment had been canceled and they said to come on in anyway. So we did.
I have been very cautious during this pandemic. Now (after the 14-day waiting period for the vaccine to become fully effective) I will start being less cautious. This doesn’t mean I’m going to throw caution to the wind. But I hope to visit my children whom I haven’t seen for over a year. I also plan to start visiting again with my friends (at least the ones who have been vaccinated).
I wish the pandemic were behind us but it’s not. Still, today I really felt I a corner had been turned, both for me personally but for the world. I hope I’m right.
My second dose didn’t go as smoothly as the first. I got an email the day before my appointment saying that it had been cancelled and I had to reschedule through Kaiser. Both the Kaiser website and telephone support was completely overwhelmed and unhelpful, but I was able to make an appointment at Stanford (which actually seemed to be organized).
Then the next day (the day of my original appointment) my wife happened to run into our neighbor who told her that he had just gotten his second dose–from the county–at Levi Stadium, the same place we had been scheduled to use. He told her to call the county health services. I did and they told us to “come on down.” So we got our vaccination after all, but could have done without the bureaucratic jerking around.
Kaiser (the largest health-care provider in Santa Clara County) has been unprepared throughout the pandemic in terms of their infrastructure being unable to keep up. I expected a certain amount of craziness, but Kaiser has done much worse than any of the other major health-care providers in the county. I believe that Kaiser uses in-house servers and home-made software, whereas the other providers use commercial software, no doubt hosted in the cloud. Open enrollment is coming…
In terms of the in terms of the vaccine itself, I had none of the oft-reported side effects.