After managing to stay off of prednisone long enough to get the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shot, and then managing to stay off of prednisone for fourteen days (long enough to produce satisfactory antibodies, or so we’re hoping), I had to go back on prednisone — my spirometry clearly demanded it, and in no uncertain terms. That begs the question of how robust my immune system really is after staying off of prednisone for as long as I did and then practically bouncing back onto it, but it’s not as though I had that much of a choice given that we are in the middle of a global pandemic that the United States is not responsibly handling. I mean, just look at the Delta variant sweeping across it, and look how many governors we have who say that masks should be “personal responsibility”, refusing to mandate them in probable large part because they want to get re-elected and think that imposing a(nother) mask mandate would hurt their chances at said re-election. It’s really absurd. And we are living through what may be the worst of it.

I hate the fact that I needed prednisone to begin with, but in this case it absolutely was what it was.

Yesterday, I was finally able to get the COVID-19 vaccine at my local pharmacy!

Well, the one that’s closest to my house. That happens to be where I stop in to get groceries.

I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it’s one and done, whereas the other two aren’t, and… if I do absolutely need prednisone again for any reason, it’s a lot more manageable to commit to staying off of it for fourteen days when I am otherwise doing well than to have to do that an additional time, or even two more times (I’ve heard that the Pfizer shot may be one that you need to take three times to achieve sufficient immunity, especially due to the Delta variant that has begun to predominate). The risks that it has are no higher than the risk of complications from the medical problems that I do have, so I wasn’t concerned about those — two of the last times that I was on prednisone, I got a localized Staph infection and what was likely to have been an H. pylori infection in my stomach from immunosuppression. Even though my intent is to stay off of prednisone for as long as I possibly can, ideally never needing it again because other things could have been substituted for it and were, I realize that there may be limited circumstances in which I may need it due to the severity of my asthma or frequency and severity of my migraines… so I’d like to plan for that. However, like I said, I would ideally like to stay off of prednisone for the rest of my life simply because my body can no longer tolerate the immunosuppression that it brings about. That is, well, my chief concern with prednisone.

I can tolerate the rest of the side effects of prednisone… the ones that I’ve had, anyway. Not the bad ones.