Yellow Underwear — The Key To A Great Year

(This is Suzy.)

If you read Steve’s New Year’s post, you know we went all-out for New Year’s Eve.  Or as all-out as possible when Steve was still not eating real food and it’s the midst of a pandemic.  Trying to give ourselves the best luck for 2021, we celebrated with some Colombian traditions that Heidy suggested.  We had wheat on the table and lentils in our pockets. We walked around the block with our suitcases.  We burned an effigy of bad things from 2020.

And we all wore yellow underwear.

Yesterday was Steve’s day to sign up for the Covid vaccine.  I’m not 65 yet, so who knows when my group will be.  There are 750,000 people in Steve’s group, plus lots of people left from the prior group, with a limited number of appointments.  You don’t have to be good at math to know the odds were bad.

When I got dressed yesterday morning, I deliberately decided to wear my yellow New Year’s underwear, to give us the best luck for getting Steve’s vaccine.

For what seemed like an eternity, the system hour-glassed.  We checked each day in February and March, over and over.  The system said there were no appointments.  We alternated between hope and complaining what a bad registration system it was. Then magically, something popped up on February 1.

The yellow underwear worked. 

But the yellow underwear’s job wasn’t done yet.  Steve walked to a neighbor’s house to tell him that the system was finding appointments now. Another neighbor saw Steve and said if you have any appointment, you can drive to the stadium and get your shot early.  They had done it the night before.  Thinking it was too good to be true, I checked online.  Sure enough, the head of the Arizona Department of Health Services said at the site’s discretion, they’ll give shots early so they don’t waste vaccine.   Not only that, but DHS said they offer the vaccine to tag-a-longs when possible, although they use the designation “+1”.  They said it depends on factors such as the number of no-shows that day or if the +1 is a caregiver.

Feeling even luckier than just yellow-underwear lucky (remember Harry Potter and the felix felicis potion?), we decided to drive down to the stadium after dinner and see if Steve could get the vaccine early.

The first person directing cars asked if we had an appointment.  I told her what I had seen in the news, and she sounded unsure and told us to exit.  I’m a rule follower – I don’t even jaywalk — so of course I was going to exit.  Steve convinced me to ask the 2^nd person directing cars.  I told him that Steve was recovering from chemo and radiation for cancer, and he looked at Steve’s paperwork for February 1.  As he wrote Steve’s number on our windshield, he said, “You just want to get this done as soon as you can.”

I started a sentence with “I’m his caregiver…“, hesitating and hating to even ask to skip ahead in the line for my group.  Before I had even finished my sentence, he was writing on the windshield again.

From inside the car, the “+1” was backwards.  It took me a second, but when I realized what he had written, I started crying.

Thank you, yellow underwear.