I'm immunocompromised and got a COVID-19 booster shot: How I felt afterward

In late November, I walked into an emergency room, tears rolling down my face.

This was a Saturday afternoon and that morning resembled a lot of my Saturdays in the pandemic: I’d met a friend for socially distant coffee at our favorite outdoor coffee truck, where we ate banana bread baked in the shape of dinosaurs and lamented about the last year of our 20s spent in lockdown.

A few hours after returning home, a pressure in my chest, straining my ability to breathe, had grown to an alarming degree. I got in my car and drove thirty minutes to the hospital, growing more panicked as the pressure — and pain — grew. I started crying.

The pandemic, at this point, had gone on for nine months. Frantically driving to the ER feeling unable to breathe felt like all my fears coming to fruition. I was certain on that drive that COVID-19 had taken up residence in my lungs, that I’d made a fatal mistake by touching my face at the grocery store or by hugging my mom.

I’ve taken immunosuppressants for more than a decade, for a genetic autoimmune illness, Crohn’s Disease. For nine months, COVID felt like an inevitability, for me and for many other chronically ill people I know.

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After years of feeling like I managed to keep my illness at bay, COVID put my status as a chronically ill person back on the front-burner. While we all stayed inside and wore masks and, for a short time, wiped our groceries with Clorox wipes, I did so with the added fear of my unpredictable and suppressed immune system. I hailed the vaccine as my admission ticket back into the world. I see the booster shot the same way.

Back in November, it turns out that I had made a mistake, but not the one I'd thought. 

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In the ER, I tested negative for COVID-19 twice. A chest X-ray showed cloudy spots over my lungs, so doctors sent me home with antibiotics and an inhaler, figuring I had a bacterial strain of pneumonia. A few weeks later, a test for Valley Fever, a fungal infection common in Arizona and parts of California, turned up positive. I’d hiked a lot in the same dusty park in October and November, and that’s where I assume I contracted it.

Valley Fever is well-known in Arizona, where I lived on and off for 15 years before moving back to Michigan in April to write about education for the Detroit Free Press. A lot of people get it and don’t even realize they have it, because their immune systems successfully fight it off. Some people aren’t lucky, and live with the infection burrowing into their lungs — and sometimes in their brain and bones – for months, years and decades, just because they took the wrong breath of air.

Often, those people are immunocompromised like me.

I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease at age 15, after three weeks of what I thought was a severe stomach flu. Over the past 15 years, I’ve made trips to the ER in searing pain, I’ve been to the ICU and I’ve had a blood transfusion. And — because things aren’t all bad forever — I had a game-changing surgery in 2016 that improved my life significantly, and mostly put my disease into remission.

I am very skilled at the Crohn’s Disease ballet: The diagnostics, the blood tests, and the twice-yearly check-ups. By 2020, Crohn’s felt like an app running in the background of my life, managed by an immunosuppressant that only started to feel like a double-edged sword when the pandemic came along.

For most of 2020, my life was frozen in fear. The fear only got worse after the Valley Fever, because I knew COVID-19 could put my lungs in even more peril. Valley Fever felt like incontrovertible proof that my immune system doesn’t work like a healthy immune system.

I got the first COVID-19 shot (Pfizer) at midnight in the parking lot of the Arizona Cardinals stadium.

A few weeks after the shot, I felt lighter.

The same horror I first felt in March 2020 came rushing back to me late last month, as the Delta variant made its way into our lives. I try to comfort myself with the data: That breakthrough cases are rare, and many are mild. That the vaccine has still been proven effective in people with Crohn’s disease, even in individuals taking the same medications as me.   

I know all of this has taken a strain on my immune system. Coupled with the fact that I got the shot early on, I’m certain about my decision to get a booster shot.

I learned that the FDA authorized a booster shot for the immunocompromised a few weeks ago as I prepared to board a plane for the first time since February 2020, with some trepidation, to attend a close friend’s wedding in New York. The outdoor wedding was gorgeous, and the first time I’d seen a group of friends, including my oldest and best friend, in two years. I felt a combination of feelings I’ve come to know well over the past few months: Fear and optimism.

I made my appointment for the booster shot at a CVS on Livernois for 5 p.m. on Aug. 20, a Friday, so I could weather any vaccine-related fatigue over the weekend.

The moment of injection came and went quickly. The shot went in and I didn’t feel it. A pharmacist stuck a band-aid on my arm and I waited after in the pharmacy for 15 minutes.

On the way home, I listened to a few songs by John Prine, who died after contracting COVID-19 in April 2020.

My left arm felt sore for about 48 hours. I felt fine until Saturday night, just before bed, when I felt some vague flu symptoms: nausea, exhaustion, an ache in my muscles.

I slept for nine hours and woke up to a normal Sunday morning, ready to drink coffee and read the newspaper. I cleaned the gutters, which is absolutely not the kind of chore I could have completed if I’d still been feeling side effects.

The pharmacist who injected me told me I was the seventh person he’d seen for a third shot, causing flutters of anxiety in my chest. Chronically ill people are some of the first to receive the booster, and with that comes some very reasonable anxiety.

Here’s what soothes that anxiety:

• Data from Israel shows that a third Pfizer shot better protected those 60 and older from serious infection than those who had received two shots. 
• A study, also out of Israel, found that the side effects of the booster were largely the same as those from the second shot. 
• I consulted my doctors before getting the booster, and she supported my decision.

My fight with Valley Fever has lasted eight months. I’m still not sure if it’s completely gone, but I can breathe better and that’s thanks to a group of very diligent infectious disease doctors, and a pill that’s caused the worst fatigue I’ve felt in my life.

Being chronically ill can be an isolating experience. In a pandemic, it’s even more isolating.

But thanks to the booster shot, in a few weeks, I’ll see another group of close friends I haven’t seen for years.

And again, I’ll feel lighter.

Contact Lily Altavena: laltavena@freepress.com or follow her on Twitter @LilyAlta.