Once Upon a Midnight Dreary, I Vaccinated the Weak and Weary
By: Jared Roach
Tags: Covidvaccination, Volunteering, Seattle University, Vaccines, Covid 19

At 10:30pm Thursday night, a colleague texted me:

EMERGENCY: I just got word that a freezer at Kaiser broke and we need to dispense 1,600 doses before 5:30am. We need vaccinators stat!!!

I have a Virginia medical license but have been living in Seattle. Washington’s COVID state of emergency enables me to practice here. So, I could volunteer, but I had not given a vaccination in two decades. I was scared. What if I volunteered and then biffed it?

Just the week before other doctor volunteers had told me giving the shots was really easy. The hard part, they said, was drawing the vaccine from the vials. These doctors reassured me that I wouldn’t have to do that because pharmacy volunteers would ready the syringes and all I would have to do was administer the shot. I really had no excuse not to volunteer. If I volunteered, I would have an easy job. I could not fail. How hard is it to stab someone in the deltoid with a syringe?

But I was tired. It was already my bedtime, and volunteering might mean staying up all night. There would be many younger doctors eager to volunteer. If I went, the clinic would be overwhelmed with other healthcare volunteers. I would be redundant, and surely turned away at the door. Wouldn’t it be an environmental crime to waste gas driving to the clinic?

I kept thinking about all the people who had volunteered for our country. From Concord to D-Day; from Clara Barton to Alice Paul. Surely being tired or unsure is not an excuse for an American conscience. What if there weren’t enough volunteers? If they didn’t have enough volunteers, and as a result couldn’t administer vaccine, lives could be lost. I felt compelled to at least show up at the door so the clinic could at least have the option of turning me away. I jumped in my car, and minutes later I was at the door of Campion Hall. It was now 11 p.m.

A line was already forming of folks to be vaccinated. It soon became apparent that the Swedish / Seattle University folks knew how to organize a mass event at a minute’s notice. In fact, they had just finished up another mass vaccination clinic a few hours before, and so all the key staff just turned around on their way home and came back to run this clinic. By the time the night was over, many of them ended up awake for 22 hours. They had a system that was able to absorb and organize hundreds of volunteers in minutes. I walked through the door, identified myself as a healthcare worker, and minutes later I was in a college dining-hall kitchen dispensing vaccines. Nobody ever asked me my name. I told them I would do whatever was asked of me, but that I hadn’t drawn up syringes in decades. I figured they would take that as a hint that I should be assigned to give shots, not make them. They didn’t bat an eye. They sat me down. My self-doubt had been successfully baited and switched.

I would not have come if I knew I was going to be preparing syringes, because I wasn’t sure I could do it and agonized that I would make a mistake and lose a dose (or vial!) of vaccine. But now I was on the spot, I didn’t hesitate to step forward. The need seemed too great to allow me to capitulate to my insecurity. And I needn’t have worried. The pharmacists — managing, teaching, supervising — could not have been more wonderful. In minutes they had me and the other volunteers professionally drawing up doses. I told them they could “fire” me any time they wanted but they did not and seemed grateful for my (and all the other volunteers’) presence. They had excellent quality control. Every syringe drawn up was carefully inspected and sent back if it was not perfect. By the end of the night, I felt transformed from an idiot to an expert, and our team of seven volunteers had drawn up 902 doses from 88 vials. That’s twenty-two more than spec.

We got a little tripped up by the nature of a “witching hour” clinic. The date changed an hour after we started the clinic. Swedish/SU had never had a clinic that spanned two dates, and so we didn’t have preprinted cards with the right date on them. We had to pause while someone ran to print up more cards but that only took a few minutes — a testament to the efficiency of the professional team. Each syringe is good for an hour after it is drawn. To mark this, we put the time in 24-hour notation on a sticky label. Somehow one of us got confused around midnight — we wrote a few times like “2438” on some syringes. Most of these errors were caught, but by the end of the night two syringes had to be discarded because of uncertainty on the time. We did a perfect job drawing the syringes but were slightly imperfect in labeling the syringes. It was the things we should have learned in third grade that may have cost a life that night, not the things we should have learned in medical school.

In part because we could never be certain exactly how many doses we would get from each vial, it was hard for the clinic to perfectly manage the line. Staff would periodically estimate how many people were in line and try to match it to how many doses we anticipated. Someone had heroically gotten a website for appointments working in an hour, and so everyone in line had an appointment. Nobody spoke to it, but there had been a lot of press in the national and local media in the last few days about the ethics of vaccine distribution, and there must have been incredible pressure not to let this event turn into another instance of inequity. But at the same time, it felt like a battlefield situation — letting even one dose of vaccine go unused could mean somebody’s life. I was impressed by the quick and careful decision making of those running the show (I never learned their names). Their use of the appointment website they had conjured up so quickly allowed them to target high priority demographics. But by 3 a.m., it was clear that we would have a few dozen extra doses. And there was nobody in line. What about the volunteers? None of us needed vaccines. “Call the police,” the supervisor barked over the radio. I imagined the resulting 911 call: “Hello, what is your emergency? — “Send the police — we need to vaccinate them!” Indeed, within minutes, we were vaccinating police officers. And then, as we reached the last few prepared syringes, everyone there — including those waiting for their 15-minute safety checks after just getting vaccinated — was implored to: “Can anyone text a friend and get them here in 20 minutes? Raise your hand if you have somebody — we need an exact count.” Scattered hands went up. I reached for my phone and realized that I missed deep friendships — there was nobody to whom I felt close enough to call at 3 a.m. in the morning — even to potentially save their life. I put my phone back in my pocket, returned my volunteer’s vest, and slipped home to sleep.

Shortly after I left, every dose of vaccine found a recipient. I had written the expiration time on the last syringe I dispensed: “0348”. The last recipient got vaccinated at 3:45 a.m.