"My body's reaction to the second vaccination was rough. It gave me flu-like symptoms and I was down with sores and aches everywhere. 50 hours after administration, finally I am feeling better."
I got the 2nd dose of Moderna vaccine on Tuesday (2/2). When I woke up Wednesday (20 hours after administration), I felt terrible with sores and aches. I attended a 40 minutes zoom lab meeting on the day, but immediately after the meeting I just collapsed into the bed.
It took about 50 hours after administration until the flu-like symptoms (headache, body aches, fatigue, mild fever) faded. Judging from my own experience and stories of others, 2 days is about the time for the vaccine adverse reactions to run the course and disappear.
The reaction came quick. But in fact, recovery was rather quick and clean too.
Having experienced adverse reaction of the COVID vaccine, I'd still say, you don't have to be too afraid of the adverse reactions. It may be rough for 2 days, but it's just a drill for your immune system and runs its course. It would still be much better than actual COVID19 with virus circulating in your body, infecting your cells and destroying organs. Even with adverse reactions, my senses of smell and taste were intact. No diarrhea, no pneumonia or anything.
There is an anecdotal saying that after having high fever, some tumors can shrink, possibly due to pathogen-activated immune systems also attacking and clearing tumor.
"Immunity over inability: The spontaneous regression of cancer"
Perhaps, thanks to this immune system exercise, my body might have become even healthier than before by removing trashes. Then this adverse reaction was not bad at all.
I tried not to take ibuprofen (Advil) or acetaminophen (Tylenol) out of curiosity. I can afford to be curious when I know I am not going to die of adverse reaction and pain was not unbearable. But CDC says it is ok to take painkiller after vaccination. You may get away with less struggle if you choose to take a painkiller.
Anyhow, two days lost. I needed to catch up with some work.
Today 2/5 was a Stephenson Cancer Center Annual Cancer Research symposium. This year, it's the first full virtual meeting.
I was assigned to judge posters in the morning session (10:00-11:30AM). So I spent 1.5 hours last night to check abstracts and posters for all assigned presentations, and pre-filled a part of score sheet. To be honest I wanted to bail after being sick, but work is work. Just do it.
With virtual presentations over zoom, posters are small and I cannot even read them on my PC display during presentation. I had to read beforehand with PDF. In the future, presenters need to consider this size issue and adopt to the format better.
Also, talking fast is not necessarily a good strategy to communicate effectively. More info sometimes just dilute message.
After the virtual poster session, I sent the scores to administrator, and my assignment was done. The rest was checking out talks. I was particularly interested in Gero-oncology session, discussing aging and cancer issue, as the issue concerns my work.
Geroscience (science on aging) and cancer research have different methodologies and cultures. Geroscience people focus on age-associated events, then try to figure out how they affect cancer development. Cancer researchers think in histopathological cancer (pre-cancerous lesions and histopathological cancer) and signaling pathways that cause them (oncogenes, tumor suppressors). Microenvironment came to the picture in relatively recent years. While cancer researchers hardly test animal's functional aging (cognition-behavior), in geroscience it is a major metric to be measured and presented.
Interdisciplinary science is interesting. Yet, sometimes interdisciplinary project has a hard time to get funded, as neither NIA (National Institute on Aging) or NCI (National Institute of Cancer) see the project as the one in their turf. Can't be helped. We researchers need to find a good home (i.e. funding agency) for a project somehow.
