Side effects from the 2nd dose of the Covid vaccine.

I didn't get any side effects from the first dose of the Covid vaccine - the (younger) (gay) (Filipino) nurse at the resthome said that the people who had them seemed to be the people who had actually had Covid before in the past - but the 2nd dose was something else entirely, for me.

I was fine at work except for a bit of a sore arm at the injection site like I had had with the 1st dose, but that night at like 4am, I woke up with chills and shivering, even though I had on the same amount of blankets I'd had on all winter, and it wasn't a particularly cold night, either.

And, I seemed to be decently exhausted and my joints a bit sore.

So, I get up and check the temperature on my thermostat, and it's like 62 degrees, even though most nights I leave it at like 60 and it gets down to there pretty quick, and sometimes it even gets down to 58, depending on how the dial is positioned, since it's not super sensitive and the temperature that comes out of it is like 1-2 degrees ballpark from what you set it on, and I always keep the temperature lower at night since I sleep better that way, with a colder room and a warmer bed of blankets, which is how I had set it up that night for the night, even though the ambient heat in the room from when I had been up hadn't entirely disappeared yet.

Then, I get back into bed knowing that I shouldn't be cold and I start shivering again, and I decide I should get a sweatshirt on or something, but I'm too tired to get up for a while, and then I finally do get up and get it on, but even then I'm still cold when I get back into bed, and every once in a while even then on top of all that I kind of half get up in my sleep a few times and even then I'm always still cold.

And, sometimes my legs are cold, too, and I draw them up to my chest and put them under my sweatshirt, so I'm like this little ball of warmth.

Then, the next morning I get up, and I'm just so tired, although I feel too hot with my sweatshirt on.

I wasn't sure if I would feel good enough to go to work that day at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, but luckily after lying in bed for like an hour and then a leisurely breakfast of brownies and cookies with some coffee, I finally was able to feel normal enough again to go head out for work.

Like I told her later that day, though, better like forty five minutes of chills and a shitty night's sleep, than Covid.

Overall, though, I do wonder if I had Covid back in early February 2020, when I got super tired and I had that same chills/exhaustion thing and I called off work for a few days, and I chalked it up to some bug that was going around, which is what my Telehealth doctor told me when I called up and described what I had in order to get an excuse for missing a few days of work.

If that's the case, though, why didn't I get more of a reaction with the first dose of the vaccine?

I wish I had had a Covid antibody test a while ago, right now I don't think I'll ever know if I had Covid back then, before it was "a thing."