Dr. Strangeblood

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vaccine

Fifteen minutes.

I'm sitting in the waiting room of a makeshift clinic in southwest Calgary watching this clock. It's the same cold, sterile clock you find in every doctor's office or middle school classroom. I've spent a lot of time counting minutes off my life on this clock. Now once again I wait as precious seconds evaporate into the vacuum of space, never to be seen again.

Fifteen minutes they said. Fifteen minutes to determine whether I'll be suddenly struck with a rare, life altering disorder as a result of a medical treatment that was forced upon me by my government.

“The sale of a human soul doesn't occur all at once- it happens through a series of compromises.”

I wrote those words over a decade ago and now they're ringing in my ears. Fury builds inside me while my eyes are fixated on the black minute hand. I can feel the heat of my breath through the paper surgical mask covering my face- a fiery blanket of anger envelops every exhale. I can feel pieces of myself being pulled into that infinite vacuum with every tick. My dignity fractures and swirls into nothingness on the backs of these lost seconds; Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

When I arrived at this second floor recreational room I was met by a table full of nurses, their minds aching with boredom in this empty space. Their eyes beamed with joy at the sight of me. I could sense the grins growing wide behind their face coverings. The last holdouts have succumbed to the pressure. Just a few more stubborn assholes to jab and we can all be free again. We can remove the masks and hug our grandchildren and walk in whichever direction we choose when we buy our groceries. What a day it will be!

This is the loneliest room I've ever experienced. I could throw a rock from one side to the other and hit nothing but air. I'm not even convinced it would make a sound when it lands.

This is Alberta after all: Canada's Texas. Truth be told, I think Albertans would give Texans a run for their money. We have real cold here during the winter. We have guns- lots of them- and not just for security or sport shooting. There are pockets of this province where the wildlife is far more dangerous than any pack of rabid gangbangers. Survival here can be the difference between a good jacket and a functioning rifle. This is not a place where people are climbing over each other to take a Covid-19 vaccine.

The nurse takes my information and gazes up at me with pride. She believes I've finally come to my senses and decided to do the right thing. This is my "come to Jesus" moment and she's the lucky priestess who gets to sprinkle me with holy water. I am here to flagellate myself at the altar of Justin Trudeau.

Not quite.

No, it wasn't a fear of the great twenty first century plague that brought me here. Covid caught up with me back in January, and aside from a headache and stuffy nose, life continued on mostly uninterrupted. I still ran my ten kilometers every other day, still did my usual backyard heavy bag, push-ups and core exercise routine on my off days, and I still maintained my disgust for the draconian policies enacted by our government under the guise of public safety. I did not cry out for liberal forgiveness from my deathbed as Joe Biden predicted.

That sweet old lady smile. Those weathered, beaming eyes. Maybe the inconsistencies in the official narrative weren't enough to shake her unswerving faith in these vaccines- or maybe life is just easier behind the shield of a convenient lie.

The waiting area is sectioned off into four lines: each one representing a sequence of letters in the alphabet that sequester people in accordance with the first letter of their last name.

I laugh out loud at my natural inclination to stand behind my letter despite being the only person here.

A faceless girl at the back of the room waves me down. The wait was unusually long considering the lack of human bodies present.

I walk along a corridor between booths on both sides. Glowing eyes watch me like salivating caged hyenas, their needles eager to break my skin. There's a frenzied energy emanating from these cluttered pods. They can smell my indignation. My ruptured will releases pheromones that waft into the air and arouses these confined beasts.

I take a seat at my assigned pod and the anonymous girl hands me a waiver. It states in plain english that my government is not legally responsible should I have an adverse reaction to the mandated injection. It turns out the phrase "safe and effective" ends where potential litigation begins.

I scribble my name and hand the waiver back. This entire scenario is so haphazardly duplicitous that I can't help but cackle. The fantasy of societal responsibility has met the reality of medical coercion and for a split second the truth is revealed to both of us.

"I have a heart arrhythmia" I tell the girl. "It has to be Novavax. I'm serious. Myocarditis, no matter how mild it may be, could kill me."

The girl assures me I'm getting the Novavax vaccine. I make her show me the bottle and I Google the long form name on the label to be sure. With any luck this bottle has been sitting at room temperature for days and the clear liquid inside has been rendered useless. I pray to whatever deity may be listening that I'm one of the fortunate few to get a spoiled dose.

The needle enters my shoulder and I focus my mind on why I'm here: I'm doing this for love and for family. Two months prior my mother in law contracted sepsis from a blood transfusion given to her during a cancer treatment. She fell into a coma for a week and my wife rushed back to Vancouver to be at her side- but since we were unvaccinated, she was forced to take a thirteen hour bus ride due to Trudeau's barring of the unclean from air travel. We had more than enough money to fly her to and from several times over, but because we dared to defy the dictates of Mein Fuhrer, she was reduced to the status of serf; forced to wallow for hours on end in the pits of obsolete and potentially unsafe transportation. My mother in law was not just on death's door, she was ringing the bell, and we knew if she regained a fraction of her health we would require regular access to airplanes. There was no other way around it.

The girl removes the needle and instructs me to wait in an isolated section of this ghostly gymnasium for fifteen minutes in case, well, you know, the bad thing that totally hasn't happened to anyone actually happens. I laugh at the stupidity of it all and once again the truth beneath this bureaucratic nonsense flickers before our eyes.

The sterile clock. Three minutes left. It just occurred to me that I obeyed this ridiculous formality despite knowing better. Perhaps this is the same state of mind that led to the continuous uptake of these vaccines regardless of the publicly available data.

A burly blue collar man drops into a chair four seats down from me. Another late bloomer. Rage radiates from his skin. I imagine him being one of the heroic truckers who descended on Ottawa and demanded our government return the rights bestowed upon us by our constitution. I gaze in his direction but he doesn't look back. He probably thinks I'm one of them; here for my fifth booster, gleefully pumping this junk into my body. I want to correct his misconception of me, but maybe it's better this way. Maybe he's better off thinking he's a rare case and that everyone else has stuck to their principles. Sometimes hope is better preserved in believing you're the only one who's been corrupted.

We've sped toward George Orwell's vision of the future at an alarming pace. Where he was most accurate in his analysis of society under authoritarian control was in their ability to manipulate the relationships implicit to our lives. In the Soviet Union- the civilization that provided the bedrock for his books 1984 and Animal Farm- children were employed as spies by the communists and encouraged by school teachers to report their parents should they say anything critical of Stalin. In modern terms this equated to secret hotlines where citizens were asked to report friends and family members who broke pandemic rules (also present during the Soviet Union), demands that we vaccinate children in order to protect the old and ill, and a deep dividing line drawn between those who do as they're told and those who don't.

I can't help but feel like Winston Smith staring at the portrait of Big Brother in the final pages of 1984.

I rise from my seat and make my way for the door. In two weeks the Trudeau government will end the vaccine mandates under pressure from multiple lawsuits challenging the validity of these policies. This will serve as a reminder to never compromise my morals under any condition- ever. I'll never get a second dose of the vaccine, nor will I again allow myself to be an unwilling participant in a global profiteering scheme for big pharma. This will be my only journey through the rat's maze.

My spirit was bruised but my faith in God has strengthened. I'm not a religious person in any sense, but I have to believe there is something waiting for these bureaucrats on the other side of this realm; that eventually a cosmic balancing act will occur and what tiny fragments of humanity exist within them will be shattered a million times over by some great reckoning. To not believe in God would mean to not believe in the ultimate prevalence of good over evil, and to know that justice does not apply to some in this, or any dimension, would lead to a nihilism so overwhelming it makes me shudder to even brush against its edges.

Karma will come for them all, God willing.