I Just Got Vaxxed! Does Anyone Know How to Activate the Microchip?

That was a joke, by the way....

The Italian village of Civita Castellana during the months long lockdown of 2020. Photo by John Arnold.

John and I rent cars when we can. Infrastructure in Amelia is less than ideal, and hauling cat litter up a hill and five flights of stairs can put you in a foul mood, especially when you return home and see the worthless little creatures lolling on your freshly vacuumed couch.

It’s rumored that back in the late 1800s, Amelia was given the option of having train service. Italian engineers were going to build tracks and a depot in a modern day Appian Way, but the city elders put the kibosh on it. Why? During hunting season, the train whistle might scare away grouse.

So now, we scour the Internet for car rental deals. And being empathetic souls, we give rides, when asked, to the train station down the hill in Orte. We did exactly that a week ago. Because I’m legitimately paranoid about the virus, we wore masks, and kept the windows all the way open.

A few days later, one of the friends we gave a ride to came down with the virus. I was stunned, scared—and furious. It turned out he’d gotten it from a woman he hooked up with in Rome, which made me even angrier. I was going to get sick and possibly die because some guy wanted to smash? If the virus didn’t kill me, surely the irony would.

John had already received his first dose of Moderna, but I hadn’t. Unlike John, I didn’t have a national health card. We’d tried everything to get me vaccinated—entire days were lost making phone calls, listening to insufferably cheerful music while on hold, surfing the Web, pursuing one wild goose chase after another. Friends sent me phone numbers to try that never worked, but they were just as perplexed as I was. Why would Italy make it impossible for me and others like me to get vaccinated? Wasn’t the whole idea to protect all Italians by getting as many folks vaccinated as possible?

In the U.S., anyone can walk into a pharmacy, roll up their sleeve, and get the jab. You don’t even have to show ID. Here in Italy, just to get John vaccinated, we had to call for an appointment, drive 100 kilometers to a mall in Rome, wait in a seriously long line, fill out tons of paperwork, and then get Moderna’d in a Red Cross tent. Americans have no idea how good they’ve got it. Why every single person in the U.S. isn’t running to their nearest pharmacy baffles me.

John and I went into instant quarantine, of course. It’s a strange feeling, waiting to see if you’re going to get sick and/or die. We’d survived a year and a half of the pandemic, much of it in lockdown, and yet here we were. It was depressing, demoralizing, infuriating.

And then a friend of John’s called to tell us about a new campaign called Vax and Go at Fiumicino Airport in Rome. Theoretically, they would give the jab to anyone showing them a boarding pass. Desperate people do desperate things, so I scrambled to find the cheapest one-way Ryanair flight I could find, which happened to be to Barcelona. Not that I had any intention of getting on it. John and I were still testing negative for Covid, so in the small hours of the morning, we marched down the hill toward the parking lot and made the ninety-eight kilometer drive to Fiumicino.

(While schlepping down the hill in Amelia, we saw fresh mozzarella being made!)

We knew the trip might be thankless. In Italy, there’s always a reason you can’t do something or get something. Yet here we were, bleary-eyed, racing toward the airport. I found myself wondering what we would do if this gamble failed to pay off. Maybe I could steal a vaccine? Run inside a Red Cross tent, snatch a needle out of an Igloo cooler, and jab myself before they hauled me off to jail?

Once we got to Fiumicino, no one at Vax and Go asked to see my boarding pass. One of the guards gave it a cursory glance before admitting me to the Mezzanine level of the airport, but that was it. I waited with six other people in a cordoned-off area for the crabby receptionist to acknowledge us. It wasn’t encouraging to see her sending people away. “Sorry, we can’t vaccinate you,” she told the woman in front of me who was wearing a sari. “You aren’t an EU citizen.”

Neither was I.

(What the tollbooth in Orte looks like at the crack of dawn.)

I tried looking less sweaty and desperate than I felt, smiling when she gave me a truculent nod to come forward. “I’m here for the vaccine,” I told her, meekly offering my passport.

“That’s completely useless,” she snapped. “You can’t get the vaccine unless you have a national health card or a tax ID card.”

No surprise. In Italy, there’s always a catch. Fortunately, I had a tax ID card. When I took it out of my purse, her disappointment was palpable.

“Oh,” she muttered. “Fine. Here.” Pushing a paper at me, she shouted, “Next!”

Vax and Go at Fiumicino Airport. Photo by Stacey Eskelin.

And that was it. After months of waiting and worrying, months of reading everything I could on expat vaccinations, months of hoping against all logic and reason that John and I wouldn’t contract the virus and die, I walked inside that room and got my first dose of Moderna, second dose scheduled for the middle of September.

Ordinarily, I might have wept with gratitude at the privilege. Thank you, medical science! Instead, I was appalled that I’d had to work this hard to protect myself and others, and that the woman in the sari had been turned away. It seemed as though Italy cared more about a woman irregularly receiving a vaccine than it did about saving her life.

I’ve written this article in the hope that my story will encourage you to get your vaccine, if you haven’t already. We’re in this together or not at all. What you do or don’t do potentially affects thousands of people. In a world with unequal levels of access to vaccines, please take advantage of the opportunity to protect yourself and others.

Do you have any crazy vaccine stories? If so, I want to hear them. Please leave your comments below.