Well, less than a day after my last post about burning up in the heat wave, and… yeah. I’m not going to say I wasn’t thinking about it being a real risk. I was worried about fires at the time; and still am. I’ve had enough fires nearby that me joking about them is pretty much me ‘whistling past the graveyard'(side note- don’t do that either. The moans of the undead keep throwing me off-key).

I didn’t think the town of Lytton would be entirely destroyed by fire, and not so quickly. When the fire started, there wasn’t any warning. Most of the town escaped, but with no time to pack, and two people didn’t make it out. I like Lytton; it’s a place to stop on the way to Vancouver. I don’t have many photos of it; it was just a nice place to take a brak from driving, grab a coffee and watch the Thompson and Fraser Rivers meet.

I hope they can rebuild quickly, and the residents can recover their former lives. If anyone wants to help, they can support the red cross here, and gofundme has a number of fundraisers too.

In better news, I had my second dose of vaccine last Thursday;the 12 week delay between doses was shortened to 8 weeks, so I got it soone than expected(I’m still the last person in my family or regular acquaintances to get it, am not in the first half of the province to get vaccinated, so the government has probably written me off as ‘fairly useless’ ) I promised to write again if there was anything worth mentioning. I’d already written off that promise mentally, and had planned to skip writing about it, actually. After all, I didn’t have any issues with my first dose, so probably nothing will happen with the second, either. Right? RIGHT?

….

… actually, right. Well, right, more-or-less. I did have some side effects, but only enough to make an interesting science project out of it.

To sum up my last post about my vaccinations: I had Pfizer, I had a sore arm for a day and no inflamation or swelling, I felt fine otherwise, and most importantly, I invented the word pokening in an poor attempt at humour.

This time, I had Moderna(because I already had Pfizer and it was boring), I’m skipping the ‘avoid all pandemic-related words’ because the joke was barely worth it the first time and definitely not the second, and… oh yeah. Side effects.

The second dose actually hurt a lot less than the first going in. I assume that the first injection touches off a nerve or something, but the second…I looked away, of course, and wasn’t even completely sure if it went in. The nurse might have just slightly pinched my arm before reselling the vaccine on the black market. Fair by me, they do enough hard work that I can’t begrudge stealing a few essential medicines to pawn off for money. My arm got a little more sore over the course of the evening, which was the case back in May too; it wasn’t bad, but aching enough that I couldn’t sleep on it.

The day after my pokening, my arm was still a little sore. No more than from my first dose, actually, and in fact maybe a little better. I looked at it with my thermal camera, and didn’t notice anything worth taking a photo of. No inflammation or warm spot. In retrospect, maybe I should have.

Two days after my first vaccine, my arm was pretty much back to normal. After waking up the second morning after the second vaccine, not so much. It was perhaps slightly less sore, but still there was a noticeable ache. Around the middle of the day, I noticed that it was also slightly pink, and a little hard to the touch. Nothing major, but perhaps a slight inflammation.

Spoiler: that’s as bad as it got. No nightmare stories about severe reactions, such as being dizzy, vomiting, my arm falling off, or sudden occurrences of death at inconvenient times. I had a sore arm, that’s it, and I am writing this solely to whine about it.

With the inflammation, it seemed worth looking at the arm through my thermal camera again. Feeling my left arm, it did seem like there was some warmth there.

Like last time, the brighter the shade, the warmer it is, and there’s definitely a faint bright area across my upper arm. The injection site still had the bandage over it; that’s the dark square visible. I pretty much just left it there to remind me where the injection was in case I needed to take photos, and otherwise, I probably wouldn’t know exactly where the needle went in. It wasn’t any more sore at the injection site

The warm area is faint, but it’s there. Interestingly, the injection site doesn’t seem to be the centre of the inflammation; it seems like the bulk of the heat is below the bandage. Perhaps that’s the direction my blood carried the majority of the vaccine? Just to double check that it wasn’t my body being randomly weird, here was my right arm at the same time, which wasn’t injected. At least, it wasn’t injected to my knowledge, and I think that’s something I’d remember.

The skin is an even temperature, and maybe slightly cooler than the left arm. I definitely had an immune reaction! Truthfully, I was kind of happy about it. In addition to having my own story about getting the vaccine, I also had wanted to examine a vaccination through thermal imaging, because I love science, even if I have no clue how to do it.

On the other hand, it was a very muted reaction, meaning I’d have to do something I was hoping to avoid. I thought I’d escaped it after posting my first vaccination, but here we are. I’d have to compare both arms in the same photo. Look. I’m not happy about this either; this is against any fair standards of public decency. TRIGGER WARNING: I’m posting photos of me shirtless.

For the record, I’m not saying a photo of a man (or woman) topless is necessarily indecent or immoral. I’m saying a photo of ME topless is indecent and immoral. And maybe a little gross. I have a physique someone would charitably describe as ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’. If I were to ask the same someone at gunpoint, and order them to be honest, I’d get the description ‘vaguely troll-like, but not in a good way’.

But enough about my last job interview. This is your last chance to close this window and leave with your appetite intact.

… okay, if you’re sure…

… here goes nothing….

Okay. I’ll wait while you let your stomach settle. Please don’t lower your opinion of me; I work hard to make sure it is already as low as can be.

So, my left arm, which I’m holding slightly higher, is warmer. Especially around my shoulder, right here:

My thermal camera photos come at a staggering 320×240 pixels, even more than a game-boy. As good as that high resolution is, I blew up the photo significantly to make it easier to see. Despite this, the inflammation doesn’t really stand out. It’s there, and is the warmest spot on my body, but if you didn’t know what you were looking for, nothing would look out of place.

…except my body. Ugh. Sorry again.

Below me is my awful dog, who wouldn’t move for my photo.

Anyways, if you’re desensitized now, lets skip forwards a day.

Day 3:

Now, the main question is probably ‘Did the vaccine turn you into Rudolf the Red nosed Reindeer?’

The answer can be broken into three parts.

First: Shut UP!

Second: Rudolf’s nose was red, not the total unyielding blackness of the void. If it were the colour of absolute emptiness, I would understand why the other reindeer avoided him.

Third: I took this photo after going for a bike ride, stopping for a dip in the river, then riding back home in my wet clothes. It was a warm day, and I wanted to cool off. The wind from cycling quickly probably cooled my extremities off, such as my nose and ears. You might notice that my fingers are cold too, almost invisible against my shorts/bathing suit. My chest is also cooler; in that case, it’s probably the dampness of my wet T-shirt, because most of my body core is warm from the exertion. I had to take the damp T-shirt off before this photo, but it was probably a similar temperature to the bathing suit/shorts. And, obviously, the bathing suit/shorts are the coldest, as they were wet, and the water was in the process of evaporating from the wind. Look. They’re actually just a bathing suit, but there’s a thin line between a bathing suit and regular shorts, and I cross that line all the time. The drier part of them, where the bulk of the wind hits, has dried off, and is slightly warmer than the rest.

But all I really care about is the left shoulder. Lets focus on that, and not the fact that I’m posting topless photos of myself and talking about wet T-shirts. The shoulder is the warmest object in the photo, and the inflammation looks similar as the day before. To the naked eye, it looked the same too- slightly red, a little swollen to the touch, slightly tender.

The awful dog is still there. I don’t think she moved in the last 24 hours. I guess she’s not dead, as her body is still warm, but maybe she’s in a coma or hibernating or something. Not important.

Day 4.

The awful dog didn’t move, so I had to instead. Four days after getting the vaccine, and my arm felt much better. It was still sore, but didn’t feel as inflamed, and not as warm. As expected, it also doesn’t look like it’s inflamed in the thermal infrared range. Both shoulders look pretty much the same. Day 5, the pain was almost gone and I didn’t see any difference between the arms, so I didn’t bother with a photo. Day 6(when I’m writing this), I was completely back to normal.

So in all, the shoulder pain and inflammation wasn’t worse the second time around, but did last longer. It still wasn’t bad. A bad bruise would be worse. In fact, I have a nice bruise and scrape on my palm that feels worse. I also have a scratch on my leg from the awful dog that feels worse.

A lot of people I talked to mentioned they were more tired in the days after the vaccine. I didn’t have any problem after my first dose, and after my second? That bike ride I mentioned was over 60 km, so… no, not really tired.

I’m now a week into the second vaccination, and feel fine. No regrets in getting vaccinated. I mean, I’d love to try Astrozenica to get a complete picture of all the vaccines, but they chased me away from the clinic when I tried. I guess I’ll settle with two; everyone else got a double Pfizer dose, so I feel special. The funny thing is that the vaccination wasn’t even the most noteworthy thing to happen to me that day. The other is probably going to be a post on its own, so look forward to that next time.

Oh. And don’t worry. I’ll have all my clothes on next post. Well, probably. Most of them. Maybe.

The above photos were taken with a Seek Compact Pro camera.