Why The COVID Vaccine Booster Saved My Kids From Losing Their Mom

I have never been this sick in my life. Covid has stripped me of my one strategy for living: pushing through anything. But what it hasn’t done is killed me, and that’s everything because I’m a mom.

When the doctor gets Covid

I have never faced a weakness so severe that no amount of effort or pushing can get me through. I simply cannot fight the air hunger. I cannot sleep because I keep waking up needing the treatments that help me breathe. My lungs aren’t cooperating and my body is not in my control. I am a doctor and I have Covid.

Using excellent masks and getting the vaccine as soon as I could, I avoided getting Covid through all of the different variants until omicron. But omicron is so unbelievably contagious that it has infected healthcare workers everywhere.

Unfortunately, Covid has lived up to my expectations. I am writing this from my home, where I am out of work on medical leave. My doctors are treating me with what is called “maximal outpatient therapy.” I’ve had everything they can give me for Covid and for my asthma, and if I tip over the wrong direction the only option left is hospitalization.

Was I overreacting?

When Covid-19 rolled in and disrupted our lives, I imported a special N95 mask from Canada and prayed I was wrong about how much danger I was in. For a while, they were saying the people with asthma might not be in that much danger from Covid. But I knew my own asthma story: much like my relatives who also have this unusual asthma pattern, when I get even a cold virus from my work as a pediatrician it sets off an inflammatory cascade. My asthma gets so bad it can take me three months to get my breathing back to normal.

I hoped I was wrong when I feared that Covid could take my life and leave my children without a mother. I hoped that those who suggested I was having “anxiety” or “overreacting” were right. They weren’t.

I believe the Covid vaccine saved my life

When the Covid-19 vaccine became available for healthcare workers, I lined up at the hospital for my shot the first day I could. As we waited the required twenty minutes after our injections, I listened to nurses discussing the patients who had died from Covid that day. They were exhausted, but also relieved to be getting their first dose of the vaccine.

Later, I got my Covid booster shot as soon as I was allowed. And I believe that the booster shot is the reason I am home on medical leave instead of having been admitted to the ICU. Or dead. My doctors agree, and so do the statistics.

According to the CDC’s latest numbers, the weekly average death rate from Covid between October and November 2021 was 7.8 per 100,000 people for unvaccinated individuals. (That’s general population, not the number of people infected with Covid-19.) For those who are “fully vaccinated” for Covid but not boosted, that number drops to 0.6 per 100,000. But for those who have had their booster, the number is startling: only 0.1 per 100,000 people died from Covid during the reported period. Of note: these numbers will look a bit different once we collect more data on the omicron variant.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be people like me who get very sick, but it does mean our chances of dying are very low. Yet I know so many people with medical conditions that put them at risk who have not gotten their Covid booster yet, even though we know that if you are 5 months past your initial vaccine series your protection against omicron is low.

For me, the hardest part is being the patient and not the doctor. My doctors tell me to rest, take my breathing treatments, and repeat. But who am I if I can’t be the one helping?

The healthcare hero complex

Like most doctors, I’ve been a good soldier since I was a child. It’s a type. People like us tend to go into healthcare, the military, or become firefighters and paramedics.

In my case, I became a good little soldier when I was 11-years-old. In the space of nine months, first my mother and then my little brother each suffered severe traumatic brain injuries, both due to reckless drivers.

The day I saw my 9-year-old brother lying in the street in a pool of blood, and then spent hours alone with my youngest 4-year-old brother in the ER waiting room, I flipped a switch.

Those in the know will recognize a trauma response, but it was the ‘80s and no one noticed.

In that moment I stopped needing anything. I became the one who was going to hold the family together. The one who would not complain, the one who would help raise my younger brothers and help my mom with her emotional dysregulation and cognitive impairments.

Of course it didn’t work. I was a sixth grader and could not possibly stop needing things. I became tense and prickly, and my parents never had any idea why.

Fast forward a decade and I had started medical school to become a career helper without needs of my own. This is the culture of medicine: stories like mine are not exceptional in doctors, nurses, psychologists, or any healthcare worker.

Women have a hero complex

But the model of the “hero” is not exclusive to healthcare workers. Most women in our culture, particularly mothers, feel that their only real value come from when they are of service to others.

Consider the incredibly popular song “Surface Pressure” from the movie Encanto. “Who am I if I can’t carry it all? If I falter,” sings Jessica Darrow’s Luisa Madrigal, gifted with magical strength and the designated instant problem-solver for her entire village.

For mothers, and particularly for women in healthcare, “Surface Pressure” has become our theme song. And that’s a terrible way to live. It is the opposite of what the science of happiness tells us we need to live well.

As Covid, asthma, and medical leave forces me to face my own hypocrisy, I wonder if I can show my own kids a better way. As a pediatrician, I’ve counseled parents for years on how important it is to show themselves self-compassion. Meanwhile, just like every other doctor I know, I’ve worked with a fever of 103, or vomited in the bathroom between patients while working with a stomach virus, or saw patients while visibly short of breath with asthma and took breathing treatments between patients. My own doctors tell me I am absolutely not allowed to do this anymore, and I’ve made myself much sicker doing this in the past. I wonder if they follow their own advice, or if they act like foolish heroes too?

As Glennon Doyle has written in Untamed, “My children do not need me to save them. My children need to watch me save myself.”