From “The Scratching Post”:Playing softball

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, August 26, published here by permission of the author.]

I’m immunocompromised. It’s a fancy way of saying that my immune system is weak. There are 1.2 million others in the U.S. like me. Many of them were born that way, or they contracted AIDS, cancer, or diabetes. Not me. I chose to take drugs that would cause the condition. It’s not because I’m a self-destructive madman. I had no choice. It was 2017, and I had just received heart and kidney transplants. I rejoiced that I would have more birthdays, but I was aware of a nasty downside: my immune system would never accept the new organs; it would work ceaselessly to reject them. If I wanted to keep the organs, the only known solution was to make my immune system less efficient. And so the drugs.
    Our current Covid vaccines all do basically the same thing. They cause the immune system to make Covid antibodies, which keep the virus from taking hold. But if you have a compromised immune system, it will make an insufficient number of Covid antibodies, and possibly none at all. Everyone with a transplanted organ is stuck with this Catch-22.

[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.