Third Time is a Charm!
The third Pfizer vaccination seems to be the one that actually makes me feel bad. Injections 1 and 2 were pretty mild, but #3 is not pleasant. Getting booster shots for two of us today at Centre Hospitalier d'Angoulême took more than an hour and a half.
That’s not a complaint. The medical people handling our shots took the time needed to make our BC COVID vaccinations fit into the French system so that they could give us our third dose of Pfizer. That meant a lot of looking at various forms of BC Government health paperwork, and at our French Passes Sanitaire (which bizarrely had the wrong month listed for the second shot), and a lot of printing off multi-page documents, which were subsequently signed AND stamped.
What we learned about French bureaucracy, and what we actually applied later that day at HSBC, is that once you’re in the queue people will work very hard, and very patiently, to find a way to get you through to the other side. All that you need to do is sit there and wait.
In our case the one serious stumbling block is that the Lot number for our second Pfizer vaccine apparently doesn’t actually exist. I am reasonably certain that if this has happened in Canada we would have been tossed out the door because obviously if you can’t prove you’ve had a second vaccination they can’t give you the third. “Come back when this has been corrected.”
But this is France, and we had already moved up the row of chairs in the hallway, and were in his office, and had provided a big handful of various documents, so obviously we couldn’t be turned away. So after discussing the matter with his colleagues and superiors it was decided that they would enter a similar but not quite the exact same batch number.
This, I think, represents excellent problem-solving skills.
I feel as if France would grant you permanent citizenship simply based upon your raving reviews of their country.
I would love to see a similar blog written by someone attempting to immigrate to Canada, to see how we appear from the outside in.
Really look forward to these pieces, Barry. Thank you.