This past Monday early in the morning Caroline logged into Arizona’s COVID vaccination website on the hunt for an appointment to at least get me vaccinated, as she’d been doing every day for the past couple of weeks. At 57 years old, obese, with diabetes and high blood pressure, I’m not the person who wants this ugly virus. Much to our surprise, she not only found an empty slot, but she was also able to snag a second appointment for herself 10 minutes after mine. We’d heard that the sites weren’t being strict on scheduled time so we showed up 45 minutes early and were waved right in.

Along a serpentine path around a series of buildings, the barcodes of our appointment verification emails were scanned in and the confirmation number written on our windshield. At the next checkpoint, we were asked about allergies, those with allergies had yellow caution tape tied to their driverside mirror. Not having allergies, we were told to continue driving through the gauntlet of volunteers. The next question was if this was our first or second shot, we continued to the left with other first-timers. The person at the final checkpoint asked all of the questions all over again while also inquiring about our current health condition and if we’d had COVID already.

A few feet forward and a cadre of volunteers verified our data, handed us vaccination cards, requested we open our doors, and asked us to raise our sleeves. The time of the injection was noted on our windshield, we were congratulated on taking the initiative to get this done and asked if we’d like to schedule our second shot, we said yes. The morning of April 7 will see us back here at the same site getting another gentle little jab in the arm. We were told to pull up further once more.

We pulled up behind some other cars and someone wrote on the windshield when we could leave: 11:30. Caroline and I have now been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine and so far we are seriously happy to be halfway there to having the recommended dose that will hopefully offer an ounce of protection against the worst effects of COVID-19, should either of us contract it at some point in the future.

At 11:30 we were asked how we were feeling and with a confirmation of “all good”, the attendant cleaned off the notes from our windshield that followed us through the entire process and we were off to find us some lunch. While this all took a minute to finally get the appointments, today went surprisingly smoothly. Now we just need a few billion others to get the shots and get our planet back to normal which is kind of new and still unfolding. I’m curious what exactly it might look like.