Far from the jabs.

 


It was such an awaited moment! And it got over within a couple of seconds. How quick the morning was! A prick is all I felt. If it weren’t the jab, my mind would have passed it off as a very gentle ant bite.

It was all a breeze as I went back home after getting my first vaccination. One step closer to fighting corona, yay! For almost six to seven hours from that point in time, I felt nothing unusual. “No side-effects, eh?” I said, “Eh!” With the most relaxed smile on my face. After all, it was a Saturday morning. I wasn’t going to waste my weekend on something boring like resting. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Come evening, as the sun made way for darker skies the doors of my body opened to immense pain and its temperature went skyrocketing as if it were aiming to touch the moon itself. 102-degree celcius, out of nowhere! And I was shivering in a room with no fan and no air conditioning. I asked for a blanket in the middle of summer – where I would have usually turned down the AC to 18-degree celcius. Google was helpful to tell me that the chills, the fever and the pain were all side effects of the vaccination and that I had nothing to worry about. Of course, I followed it up with a doctor too. And with the right medicine and ample amount of rest I got back on my two feet – no blanket on. But this took me 3 days, and you can add some random bouts of headaches to that count. And the spot on my forearm that got the jab still swollen, still hurting.

It got me wondering… How can a simple, seemingly harmless prick on my arm, that should have been nothing more than an ant bite, end up hurting me for days? Isn’t this how trauma works? When we go through it, it happens so fast, our mind has no time to register it. Then, we never forget its sting for the rest of our lives.

The sibling who thought it was rather classy to show you your “reality” when others thought it was time to pat your back. The scepticism of the parent who never trusted anything you did. The self-boasting elder who thought your choices weren’t good enough because they know it all. The friend who pretended to love you but was actually jealous of everything you had. All of those who thought you had it way too easy and never saw the struggle. For those who thought they could tell you anything just because you were too polite to retort. Anyone and everyone who gave you those seemingly harmless jabs that seemed like nothing at the start but pained for days to come. And how they called you sensitive, dramatic, overemotional, foolish, senseless for feeling and reacting to those jabs.

But, guess what? The ship filled with jabs has sailed far, far, away. It is so far on the horizon that you can now see it at a distance and it looks pretty. Its uglier side facing the sun, not you. Your body has healed from it. So has your mind. It is readier than before to fight any virus. Or rather, just be. Be happy. For the first time ever. Far from the jabs.

 

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