Avery K. Tingle, The Gamer Author

When Mandy, a young woman just past thirty, came home from Mexico and got sick, we didn’t think anything of it.
She’d just come home from vacation and she’d enjoyed herself. Crashing isn’t unheard of. The problem was, Mandy wasn’t getting any better.
In fact, she got consistently worse as time progressed. A woman who literally never took a sick day was beginning to miss time at work. Her family grew worried. It was getting hard for her to get out of bed. She couldn’t make it more than a few feet before scrambling to the toilet. Her chief complaint was that she was having trouble breathing.

It was one of the more severe cases of the flu we’d ever seen, but we weren’t that concerned. Everyone gets knocked on their ass once in awhile. Mandy was tough. She’d push through.

Sure enough, just when everyone was considering hospitalization, she recovered.
It appeared to happen overnight. She got up one day and felt better. Normal life resumed.
She was preparing for work one morning, sharing a bathroom with her fiance when she suddenly collapsed.
Mandy never regained consciousness.
The doctors were baffled. After an autopsy, the most educated guess the doctors could come up with was pulmonary embolism. She had been dead before she hit the ground. But that had been a hypothesis. The truth was, they didn’t know what killed her.

This was approximately one month before COVID overtook the planet. Once the plague hit, and people began dying, Mandy’s sudden passing made more sense.

Like you, I don’t trust the federal government no matter who’s running it. I don’t care what the news says. I trust science, and the medical professionals behind it. While I know that one day I’ll have to shed this life, COVID is not the way I want to go. Asphyxiation while being hooked up to a ventilator as the life is slowly drained out of me is not the way I want to leave this planet.

But do you know what’s worse? Knowing I may have infected someone else.
The idea that I may pass the Delta variant onto someone who was simply in my vicinity, and that it might kill them, that’s not something I can live with. Yes, I am concerned with a stranger’s fate, because like it or not, I don’t live on this planet alone. Whether or not I like someone doesn’t give me the right to put their life in danger.

I got vaccinated because I trust the science. I got vaccinated because I am immunocompromised. I got vaccinated because I know for a fact COVID is real, and all the denial in the world isn’t going to change that. But most importantly, I got vaccinated to ensure that no one else will catch COVID from me.

It’s not all about you and me. The only way we get through this is together.

Please get vaccinated, if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading. Be safe.

Avery K. Tingle is a scifi/fantasy author currently residing in the Las Vegas area. Owned by two cats, he is passionate about social justice, Star Wars, and mental health. Connect to his award-winning writing and social media here.