I’m being a dutiful and safe adult and getting my shots. I’ve had my pneumonia one, Prevnar 13, and the two Shingrix ones, for shingles. Next up is my tetanus booster, and I’m seriously wondering: do I hafta‽ I will get it, but I need a few weeks of my health back first.
Brain injury and drugs don’t mix well. Medications don’t work like they’re supposed to when the neurons are damaged. Makes sense, actually. How can broken neurons respond normally to medication changing brain chemistry? Well, the same seems to hold true for vaccines in my single-subject study of one — me.
I’d anticipated I’d be tired and would take a month to get back my energy. And I am getting better more and more each day after the Shingrix booster (which was in the last week of March). But I didn’t anticipate all the effing side effects. Thinking back on it, those, too, make sense because we know brain injury causes an inflammatory immune response, which I touched on in my book Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me. The Shingrix vaccine is very effective because it causes a strong immune response. As a result, I suffered a regression in my strength, my emotional regulation, my stamina, my thermoregulation, my cognitive functioning (reading, memory, problem solving all went downhill and are returning now), and my writing disappeared for a month. Made it kind of hard to blog or even get on Twitter when the latter made me so dizzy, I wanted to barf.
I very much needed homecare, just like I did after eye surgery. But physicians remain so uninformed about brain injury that they assume that something that doesn’t necessitate homecare in the usual patient shouldn’t in one with brain injury. Not true.
I’m coming out the other side. And this awful month has made me fear getting another vaccine. But the threat of shingles in the eyes is worse. Tetanus with what it does to you is more terrifying. And I’ve had pneumonia enough times to choose month-long Prevnar 13 effects of fatigue and emotional dysregulation over pneumonia’s life-threatening gift of days and days of it being hard to breathe to point of scary and then a month to recover and function again.
