I was thinking this morning that I have very few actual responsibilities, at least when I narrow it down. And even then, I mean, I’m not actually responsible for breathing, eating, eliminating, and generally functioning. Those are just something that happens to living creatures, a hind-brain sort of thing.

I do assign myself a lot of responsibilities, though, and one of those responsibilities is (a) trying not to die for no good reason. Another one is (b) trying not to kill other people.

I just figure those are nice priorities.

So I get vaccinated.

I grew up at the tail end of polio, and knew people who had paralyzed limbs because of it. Getting the polio vaccine was considered civic responsibility, and my parents made sure I got the polio vaccine as a young child. I got a smallpox vaccination before traveling when I was twelve, because the disease wasn’t eradicated until 1980.

As an adult, I have continued to get vaccines as they became available. I’m obdurate about following good public health practices, because the rest of the world seems determined to do the opposite.

When my grandchild was born early and had to be in the NICU, I had to argue with my doctor to get the MMR vaccine; he wouldn’t prescribe it until he did bloodwork on me and realized I was not immune to one of the childhood diseases included. I think it was mumps.

It is truly strange that a doctor would refuse to vaccinate me when it wouldn’t do any harm even if I was immune. It was partly because a falsified vaccine study persuaded a lot of ignorant people that vaccines caused autism. And a pandemic persuaded a lot of ignorant people to deny that disease existed. And then, because humans think in herds, otherwise sensible people started to think maybe the ignorant ones were right.

(It turns out immunity to measles, mumps and rubella has often waned for people my age, by the way.)

When COVID happened, not long after my grandchild was born, I had friends who refused to mask and continued to gather in person, as if denying a disease made it less infectious. As if they were not responsible for not killing other people.

I and my small family, meanwhile, formed a pod and avoided face-to-face interaction. I was prepared to quit my job if necessary, but luckily the teacher education program in which I worked decided to go completely remote when things got bad. People died in droves, especially people my age.

After I got my first COVID vaccine, at the Convention Center in Philadelphia, I went into a quiet place and cried a little bit. I was so grateful.

I didn’t stop masking in enclosed spaces, though. I kept myself informed and I read the research, and so I knew early on that COVID was spread by aerosol, not by surface contact or droplets, and that masking with N95s reduced transmission.

I still got COVID, though, because there’s a limit to what I can do as an individual, when my husband got pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. Even though I masked diligently, I got exposed between the hospital staff who weren’t masking consistently, and the sick patients, and possibly the people on the buses I had to take to get back and forth to the hospital. Other people’s refusal to mask made me sick.

But I was vaccinated and got Paxlovid, so my infection was mild. I slept downstairs in my house on a futon, though, because my husband had cancer and I didn’t want to infect him.

I got it again a year or so later, even though I was vaccinated and even though I avoided exposure. Again, it was mild, because I followed directions. It was Christmas. That meant I couldn’t see my family if I didn’t want to infect them, so I didn’t. I spent Christmas alone. Not actually a big deal when you think about it.

Other people continued to get COVID. My father, in his nineties, moved into a nursing home when my sister couldn’t care for him any more, a couple of years ago. He promptly got COVID, because nursing homes are centers of disease, and he died not long after, ostensibly from pneumonia. When I tell people that, people say, “Well, he was old,” and I think well, I’m old too, and that doesn’t mean either of us deserves to die.

I continued to get the vaccine whenever it was available, and I continued to mask, but the world continued to get dumber and dumber, abetted by a toxic government that employs vindictive denialists.

I’m 74 and I have asthma, so the recent FDA decision didn’t deny me the vaccine. It just denied it to my adult kid, to my grandchild, and to my son-in-law. It denied it to my friends, and to my family members. It meant that we were going to have to get our doctors to lie for us.

And then the governor of our state persuaded pharmacies to use guidance from other organizations, and this morning we got a notification from our pharmacy that COVID vaccines are available to anyone who wants it.

The governor of my state is not trying to kill me. That’s so nice.

My family had a little celebration of phone messaging this morning when we got the notification. My adult kid and I are now already vaccinated.

Another day when the world did not succeed in killing me.