Covid-19 vaccination experiences

The day has arrived for my first dose Pfizer. Not feeling in as good a shape as I would have liked to be.

Appointment is at 1.30pm, it's nearly 9am. I'll go early and have some lunch in town - hopefully I don't bump into any unknown Covid outbreak anywhere, lots of MIQ's (managed isolation quarantine) hotels in town.

Will report back later today.

 

Home again after having the 1st dose of Pfizer vaccine. All went well and I had a great nurse. I told her I had ME and I think that might have been why I had to stay longer in the waiting room. I noticed the people who had been in line after me were allowed to leave earlier than me. I had to wait 25 minutes.

I did notice about 5-7 minutes after the injection while in the waiting room a sudden hot feeling where the vaccine liquid would have entered the tissues. But it dissipated quickly. Did anyone else feel something like that. I'm sure I felt it something like that.

I drank a small bottle of water on the bus trip to town and bought a bigger bottle for the trip home but could only get through half of it.

So far I feel okay. Injection didn't hurt.

Going to rest up now.

Thinking of you @Mij and hope all goes very well for you and your 2nd vaccine dose.

 

Done! The nurses just left. Feels good to be fully vaccinated.

@Rosie so glad your first dose went well! Rest and drink plenty of water

 

I think the water helped a lot yesterday @Mij

About 2 hours after the vaccine a headache developed and nausea. I also felt quite sleepy and wanted to keep closing my eyes.

I eventually took some Panadol and put a ice pack on my forehead for a while. Temperature taken and was normal. I still had the nausea before bed so I decided to take a little amount of bicarbonate soda in milk. This worked. I really thought I was going to wake with a bad headache today but feel fine except for a sore arm.

It does feel good @Mij to be finally getting the vaccine. I don't think I would have survived covid if I had caught it.

 

@Rosie

My arm feels less sore from the second jab b/c I'm moving it around a bit to circulate the blood, the first shot I laid down for hours w/o movement and it became very sore.

I feel sleepy too.

When is your next jab?

 

@Mij

My second dose is the 18th August. So not too far off.

 

@Rosie

So 21 days from the first. Right on schedule

 

Forbin
Perhaps I missed your posting. What was your second reaction like? My daughter sailed through Jab 1, however another circle of hell opened for her after jab 2.

thank you in advance

 

Hi, Perrier. I'm very sorry to here about your daughter's reaction to the second shot. I hope she is better soon.

I was referring back to my post here. The first shot of the Pfizer vaccine that I got was pretty much like any other flu shot. I had no reaction other than a somewhat sore shoulder. Three weeks later I got the second shot and again there didn't seem to be any problem except that my shoulder was more painful, with a different, "harsher" type of pain. Later that night, I woke up with an intense, harsh and "ragged" pain running the length of both arms and across a narrow band of my chest. It seemed like an amplification of a kind of "background" pain that I've had since the onset of ME/CFS.

My guess is that the vaccine may trigger the production of cytokines and that they, in turn, may make you more sensitive to pain. However, I'd never experienced that kind of pain amplification in my arm in nearly four decades of ME/CFS. It did make me somewhat nervous about what was going on. The next day I had a temperature of 101, but it and the pain were back to normal by the day following that.

My joke about a third shot not being worth a $50 gift card may turn out to have been "whistling past the graveyard," because now there is talk about the possibility of a "second booster shot," and I am a bit more concerned now about what kind of reaction it might produce.

 

In this fresh Q&A session between prof. Vincent Racaniello and dr. Daniel Griffin, an ME patient reports of improvement of her ME symptoms two weeks after having been vaccinated for Covid-19. She's in her 50's and has not felt great since she developed ME when she was 41. At the time she wrote in, the improvement had lasted for seven weeks.
Dr. Griffin responds that he's heard similar stories and that he would love to see a study on ME/CFS and Covid-19 vaccinations.
Begins at 42.18.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTcvQG-DqA

 

Day 3: after first vaccine. Sleeping really well at night. Haven't woken up with any headaches. Just noticing that I feel sleepy during the day but I guess that will soon pass. Still trying to up water intake. Sore arm on the second day but not sore now.

I'm taking a few weeks break from the forum now and will rest up for the next vaccine. x

 

@Perrier how is your daughter doing ?

 

I am just the same as always

There have been things I have tried over the past fifty odd years which have made me think I was cured but the effect never lasted longer than a few weeks.

Maybe I would have had more of a holiday if I had known about ME and not done too much though the last thing was metformin when I was diagnosed with diabetes. I knew I was not cured but it was fun for a few weeks trying out recipes, little things I had wanted to do which only took a little bit more energy. After a month I was back like before.

 

Well, it is now 16 days post jab. I cannot say she is near baseline. The flu feeling is more acute. But she seems to have developed cognitive issues, which she did not suffer from severely. Eg. When someone texted her on the phone she could fire right back. She seems unable to do that. Some kind of brain slowing down, which I note. But there is now a new problem, which is severe severe stomach ache, non stop: hard stomach, burning, non stop. I rang up an ME doctor not in our town to get advice but it's not helping. I think I need to speak to the local GP, because this can't go on. Perhaps we need to check it out. Dear Sarah, thank you for asking.

 

I hope you, and she, find something that improves things for her.

 

I believe there was a recent video in which Dr. Komaroff mentioned the phenomena of some people with ME and/or Long Covid feeling "better" after getting the vaccine. He thought this should be looked into and mentioned that, when you get an infection, the immune system ramps up, but it also then actively puts on the brakes and comes back down once it senses that the threat is over. He speculated that this temporary active suppression of the immune system my be why some ME/LC patients feel better in the wake of the vaccine. I'm not sure how temporary or long-lasting this improvement is supposed to be.

 

First shot of Pfizer yesterday afternoon. My arm was a bit stiff last night and still is, but not sore enough to take painkillers. Otherwise I feel fine!

 

3rd vaccine: Pfizer, after two shots of AstraZeneca (the AZs only produced a low number of antibodies in me and I had no T-cell immunity). As for the first two AZs, I had pretty strong, but otherwise typical vaccine reactions on the day of the vaccination and the following day. My ME/CFS symptoms weren't really affected that much.

I would say the side effects of the third shot were much less unpleasant than the first two. However, I was still feeling quite horrible due to other factors affecting my illness coincidentally (the beginning of my period etc), so it is a bit hard to tell what role exactly the vaccine played in this. If I had to quantify, I'd say the first AZ was a 10 (10 simply meaning it was the worst of the three) and the second was an 8 and the Pfizer afterwards was probably a 4, but due to the other factors affecting me on these days, it's safer to say 4±2.

Just like in the first two cases, I felt the side effects of the vaccine on the day of the jab and the next day. I had an equally sore arm on all three occasions but that didn't bother me too much.

Additional info: I'm a woman in my 30s, mostly at the lower end of mild. I have a tendency to get stronger than average vaccine reactions since the start of ME/CFS and these sometimes also affected my ME/CFS symptoms in the past (when I was much worse than now) but not really anymore. In my first few years of the disease I was the type who caught literally every cold and suffered greatly from them (and they also affected my ME/CFS symptoms) but not so much anymore.

 

Thank you for posting this @Wyva,, particularly with such detail about side effects.

I have had 2 AZ vaccines, have seroconverted but with very low antibody levels. My GP has told me that I will need the proposed booster and that it will be Pfizer. He has also now said he considers me immunocompromised which was not his earlier view.

I am grateful to hear how the side effects affected you. I had vv severe side effects after v1 for 10 weeks and only decided to go ahead with v2 reluctantly: side effects were much less severe but the mast cell reactions triggered by both vaccines are still ongoing, over 6 months after v1.

Side effects will be a major factor in deciding whether to have the booster, although I cannot imagine turning down something that will protect against this virus. I am 74 so maybe I cannot make antibodies but Mr B, same age, made a satisfactory number.

There seem to be a number of people with ME who have severe side effects. I would like to know if anyone is monitoring this so that more informed choices can be made. In the meantime I am very grateful for individual info.

Are the results of the mix and match study in Oxford out yet? - but that is for efficacy not side effects.