On Immunity – A Review

Looking down at my hands I see they are covered in tiny purple spots. These specs are insignificant, invisible in motion, and an annoying mystery.

I have what is called “peripheral neuropathy.” Peripheral neuropathy combines two twenty-dollar words to mean something quite simple: numbness in the hands and feet. It is a frequent symptom of nutritional deficiencies, injury related trauma, or infection. It is also linked to auto-immune disease, which is most likely why I’m graced with pins and needles that make it difficult to stand or write for too long.

Depending on its origin, peripheral neuropathy often progresses in stages. First you have numbness and intermittent pain. Second you have constant pain and intermittent numbness. Third, you have intense pain. And fourth, you have complete numbness and total loss of sensation.

Most people do not reach the final two stages of peripheral neuropathy, because it is a symptom that rides on the coattails of both lethal or treatable diseases. This is melodrama. What I mean to say is that it is often something to manage; it is a forewarning to flare ups or a reminder of missed doses in medication.

I, for the longest time, attributed my numbness to my sudden growth spurt. As if my circulatory and nervous system simply couldn’t keep up. My hands and feet often went numb when I laid down or exercised. I made guesses that my sheets bunched up and cut of circulation or it was because I slept funny or was restless.

In reality, it was just the first phase.

I now live in bearable-yet-constant pain, stage two. Sometimes I lose all feeling, other times I have pins and needles.

I cringe at thinking back on moments in my past, moments where I could not feel my hands or feet and simply shrugged it off or told bedfellows that it was normal. It was not normal.

I ignored the problem mostly, until one day while at work, I felt off. I had dropped several markers throughout my lesson, they were slipping from my grip. I left them on the floor because bending over made the room spin.

Later I had to I excuse myself from a classroom I was observing due to a migraine. I left and walked down the hallway to my own classroom. There I laid down on my desk with the lights off. I was in tremendous pain.

Eventually my fading in and out of consciousness was interrupted by my co-worker coming into the room in a panic. As a teacher, you’re taught a routine that doubles as basic first-aid. This amounts to asking basic probing questions as you take someone’s temperature and look for the icepacks you think you hid under the sink.

She ran through the questions. What hurts? Did you eat today? Did you drink enough water? Usual questions we should all ask ourselves more often. I gave the worst kind of responses to those questions, the ones that led you simply to a dead-end, where you just decide to take the kid to the nurse.

But by then we had my temperature, 92.4 degrees.

While 92 is a suitable temperature for a jacuzzi, it is not a suitable temperature for human life. Homeostasis demands a temperature of 98.6 degrees, but as long as you’re in the ballpark plus or minus 1.5 you’re generally pretty alright.

Seeing as we’re trained to go full panic mode if a child is 4 degrees above the average, my coworker went full panic mode as I was more than 4 below.

When another teacher came in, he remarked, “dude—go home, you’re a corpse.”

I certainly didn’t feel like a corpse. I was often so numb and so still. But here, while my constant chittering aggravated my migraine, I felt very alive.

It had been about 20 minutes when we checked my temperature again—93. Progress.

I talked with my boss, and she mandated I go to an urgent care.

The doctor there was not helpful, but asked questions that led me to a better line of reasoning. He connected all sorts of things through. My headache, my neuropathy, my shivering—all of it, he claimed, was linked.

Later he incorrectly told me I had a hole in my stomach due to cancer and that I likely had 6 months to live.

I was 24 at the time and while I already was not fond of this doctor due to the flippancy of some remarks about how much he planned to charge my insurance and that he was eating a granola bar while telling me all of this, I still assumed some grain of truth lay in what he said, but I wanted a second opinion.

Side note: If you ever have the chance to incorrectly diagnose a 24-year-old with life ending cancer and intend to wrap that all up with a 6-month prognosis, I recommend you do not do it while eating a nature valley crunchy oats 'n honey granola bar.

And thus began my quest to figure out what is wrong with me. Which, I suppose is the quest I've been on for most of my life. I went on many wonderful journeys, such as: getting an ultrasound to measure my organs. Giving 11 blood samples at once. Getting my entire circulatory system mapped in a full body version of those arm cuff blood pressure testers. Getting a second ultrasound to measure my organs. Having a nurse karate chop the enflamed lymph nodes on my neck. Giving another 7 blood samples. And, who can forget, the allergy tests. The tests that told me I could no longer eat what I used to--right when I got really into cooking.

I don’t tell this story to say woe is me, I tell it to get to the next point, which happened in March, 2020. When I sat down to go over test results with my hematologist (yes, I had a blood doctor), he told me that I shouldn’t come back for at least 6-months.

He told me about how they most likely will be cordoning off visits with people like me until it’s safe for me to be there or my condition gets worse. He told me he was not sure if I was at-risk, but that I probably would be. He told me that sometimes these diseases hit people like me harder.

"People like me, like sick like me?"

"People young like you."

He gives me his phone number and tells me to text him specifics and that he will help over the phone, but that until then all I could do is take my vitamins, watch my diet, and stay grounded.

This was, in all respects, not great—after all what does it mean to “stay grounded.” My feet, numb from walking the 12 blocks to the doctor in Brooklyn, in March. Grounded. I thought.

Those of you who know me know I don’t do well with things that are unsettled. Having to take an entire year of regular testing, doctor’s visits, and stress and put all that on pause is the opposite of ideal (which I suppose is “ordeal?”).

That coupled with the other massive changes in my life and you know, the massive changes happening all across the world did not bode well for my mental state. It was a rough time and I felt very alone.

I felt much more alone when I made the rare journeys out of my house to do laundry or to get groceries and I saw people not following simple guidelines. Outraged, I did what any sane millennial does, I turned to social media.

I did not expect to see public shaming for people who did not make safe choices, but I also did not expect to see people spitting on others, coughing violently in their face, or on meat and produce.

It took me too long to realize doom-scrolling was not the answer, so I did as I usually do and drowned it out with faux-productivity. I found myself much happier by diving into art and writing, dedicating months of the pandemic to creating and learning.

This creativity was often interrupted by moments of the dread resurfacing. Finding itself exhumed in my dirty laundry, my empty fridge, and the full light-up-the-whole-dang-sky fireworks that kept me up at night.

Moments that forced me to remember that there was a world that I’d have to deal with, a world that was not safe for me. It was a low moment for me one that shattered into many pieces when I tried to dissuade the boys playing with fireworks outside of my apartment and they ended up setting one off less than a foot away from me.

I remember standing there shocked. Waiting for one of them to explain themselves. But they didn’t, they thought that I was stupid for standing there, not running from the small bomb they so carefully threw at my feet.

They did not know I could not run.

Eventually, finding no resolution. I went into my apartment building. And I cried.

It was an ugly cry, one that was soaked in guilt. I had turned off the outside world, and my first attempt to interact with it blew up in my face—quite literally.

I had failed to reach these people, people who I didn’t know were children until I was face to face with them.

For all my hiding—my hermitage—I was no wiser, no better, no stronger. I was frail and emotional. Bottling that for months led to an implosion. To too many feelings. I was overwhelmed.

And the worst part was that I knew I was not alone. Dozens of windows stayed lit up until 4am when things got quiet, just like mine.

And now, so much time has passed and there is still no true light at the end of the tunnel. There is however, something ahead. A crossroads.

Vaccines are not a solution, but having them puts us on solid ground. They are the crossroads, from which we can see there is light at the end of one tunnel.

But, without careful action, this light will dim the choice will fade, and we will be stuck in this damn labyrinth.

If you listen closely, you can already hear the dredging. The faulty arguments, the disavowed case studies, and long forgotten pundits are being pulled from murky rivers in nets. Placed on the shore and hit with a pressure hose. They have been dormant since 2006, but still their presence lingers.

Among the extremists I have already seen conversations popping up of people considering inevitable mandated vaccinations as “taking our rights away,” or as “violations of MY body.”

The same false statements over masks they echoed in April.

I do not imagine I need to levy facts at you—but their logic can be enticing. Autonomy is a valuable thing. But in maintaining this small portion of theirs, they take away all of mine.

I worry because, I feel too often niche groups find megaphones and corrupt facts with fallacy. I worry that that creates rifts among families and friendships. I worry because that creates vicious hate. I worry most of all because that creates distance and that is something we already have in abundance.

I ask that instead of demeaning and provoking—if given the chance, have a meaningful conversation with someone who is falling down the bad-faith rabbit-hole. I have asked that before here, because I do worry that there is a fundamental lack of communication that leads to education. I worry we will forget what discourse is.

I also ask that to give myself the breathing space. To use my platform, regardless of its size, for something positive. Something that creates and fosters growth, rather than something that stifles and destroys.

I also write this because—well, it’d be nice to go to the doctors and finally figure all of this out.

I’ll step off my high horse now, and transition gracefully into a thank you for reading. I appreciate the heck out of you. You’re golden, not just for sitting through my story, but for just being so dang cool.

Take care.

-Connor

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If you have actual tangible concerns about the vaccine or any vaccine, let’s talk about them I’m happy to discuss anything in good faith with open-minds on both sides.

These are some ideas that are commonly cited as reasons against vaccination:

Herd immunity is a theory – “Theory” as a scientific term is applied to all sorts of things, such as gravity. In science a theory is an in-depth explanation of an observed phenomenon. Hence the “theory of gravity” and the “law of gravity.” Herd immunity explains why infection rate decreases when a significant portion of a population is made immune to a disease.

These Vaccines were rushed – This is partly true. It normally takes ten years to reach the confidence levels of the vaccines that are currently on the market—but believe it or not that was done without skipping or compromising any steps. Normally vaccine trials function in separate distinct phases, but for these vaccines researchers were allowed to overlap phases to speed up the trials. Essentially, the researchers tested and developed at the same time, meaning they were able to progress assuming the tests were successful cutting out all of the lag time.

RNA based Vaccines mess with your DNA – This is not true and is based in a misunderstanding. The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines use mRNA vaccines, the M stands for messenger. These messengers basically have a blueprint to create the antigens that fight against Covid-19, so you’re not getting new DNA, just new instructions—the same kind of instructions your body sends around all the time.

I’m not going to be a guinea pig and get the vaccine first – Well, yeah I mean. That’s fine, you’re not really on the list to jump the line! But, when it comes time to get the vaccine, you need to. We need a 70 to 90% vaccination rate to truly create herd immunity. That’s not a global or countrywide statistic either. That 90% goal is for your community. Meaning 90% of the people you interact with should be vaccinated.

The vaccine contains a scary chemical – This is a common issue people take up with vaccines. People will bring up mercury, formaldehyde, and aluminum. Sure, if you inject enough of a heavy metal into your bloodstream, you’re going to have a bad time. But the thing is, your body already has these chemicals in them. The vaccine doesn’t contain a dose that will affect your internal levels of any of the previously stated chemicals, you’ll be OK I promise.

As always, I really hope you arm yourself with media literacy. If you read it—fact check it. Fact check it with reliable credited sources, you know what those look like. Read carefully. And if you find a source you can’t tell is real or have found something that you think challenges something, let’s talk about it!

Don’t share anything blindly. Nip misinformation in the bud, help inform people who are misinformed by having real conversations with them.

As the world has seen recently, a lot of people have been pushed into niche groups who believe things that seem completely unbelievable. Often times these people find that there’s no where else to turn to, but that doesn’t have to be true.

Have the conversation. De-escalate. Talk in good faith.

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And hey, if that doesn’t work out, write a five-page blog about it and post it where your family and friends will see it.