Mercer Island MD: COVID vaccine side effects can be uncomfortable, but temporary

What does it feel like to get the COVID-19 vaccine? Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen got the Pfizer vaccine over the holidays and joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss his experience and side effects.

“The vaccine actually took literally three seconds. And I’m not joking when I say three seconds — the guy did it so fast, I didn’t even know it happened. So it was not painful to get the actual injection. And I felt fine for about the first six to eight hours. But then after that, I slowly started to feel sort of achy all over, sort of like I was getting the flu,” he said.

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“Seventeen days earlier, I had actually had surgery on my neck. I had had a cervical disc replacement for cervical stenosis. And following my surgery, I had relief of all the pain that I had before the surgery, and I just had a few days of postoperative pain, and then I felt fine,” Dr. Cohen said. “But what was interesting is over the course of the day, that pain came back — both the preoperative pain and the postoperative pain. And by the evening I could barely lift my left arm, and I felt actually horrible.”

That said, most of it eventually subsided and Dr. Cohen noted that part of the response was due to the vaccine working.

“What it told me was that my entire body, the immune system, was completely activated and completely revved up and inflamed. And that’s why I was experiencing that pain that I’d had prior to surgery, and even after surgery, and everywhere else in my body,” he said. “It was just this massive immune response to the shot itself, which actually is interesting because it tells you that, in fact, the shot is working.”

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“I ended up taking just some Ibuprofen,” he added. “I was very tired and felt very hot and sweaty, but I didn’t have any fever or anything like that. I just generally didn’t feel good. I ended up going to sleep early that night. I slept about two hours longer than I usually do. But the next day I woke up, I felt fine. Actually, I would say it was 90% better by the following morning, which would have been roughly 24 hours after I had gotten the shot.”

When talking to his colleagues, many seemed hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine themselves because of experiences like this.

“It’s funny because I’ve talked to some of my other colleagues and asked, ‘Did you get the shot yet?’ And the response is, ‘I’m not really hurrying to get it because most people I’ve talked to feel like they want to die after they’ve gotten it.’ So I don’t know what the experience is for everybody,” Dr. Cohen said. “You read what the CDC tells you, and the side effects I experienced are pretty much what is described for people getting the shot, other than the thing about having, you know, sort of reactivation of my pre-op and post-op pain, but that only lasted about 24 hours.”

“Although you’re going to hear stories where people are uncomfortable and whatnot, getting the vaccine is well worth it,” he said. “For the 12, 18 hours that I was awake and feeling not well, it was way better than being sick for weeks or months, or even dying from COVID.”

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