My name is Preston Romanienko. I am 22 years old and on the Autism Spectrum. Covid didn’t directly affect me but the residual effects of isolation and melancholy did a number on my mental health from which I am still recovering to this day. For all I know, I may have never contracted covid. However, when the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines came out, there was this sense of relief I felt upon hearing the news. My parents were the first in our household to receive their vaccines and I took it a little later than they did.

When I got my first shot of Moderna, my reactions consisted of the usual tiredness, soreness in the shoulder and mild shortness of breath. Those reactions weren’t extreme and came off as expected but they could not hold a candle to my reactions to the second dose.

At first, I received my second shot of Moderna and felt hardly anything aside from the same reactions from before. Next few days, I felt heart palpitations, intense tightness in breath and it felt as if I was having a midl heart attack at times throughout the whole week. After telling my parents what I have been experiencing, we decided for me to be taken to JFK hospital in the evening. After I got checked in, an EKG showed nothing was wrong but blood test results came back with 700 troponin, the heart enzymes. Given a couple of days, doctors confirmed that it was indeed a mild heart attack I got from the second dose of Moderna and had 18 blood tests done on me and even a CT scan. I was discharged four days later and got in touch with a cardiologist who prescribed me with blood thinners and high blood pressure medication to control my blood pressure and deal with my myocarditis.

Since the end of August 2022, I have been off of the blood pressure and blood thinner medication and currently attend follow up appointments with my cardiologist.

My time being hospitalized for something that caused a one-in-a-million reaction to occur was miserable and utterly crushing. I never felt more out of touch and stared so deep into the void with no regard for anything. I was outside of my mind and body and felt angry. Nothing but raw anger and disappointment of this massive inconvenience and compromise of my health. I’m not saying this to encourage protests to vaccination or support any anti-vaxxers, I’m saying this to just make my experience known. Nothing more.

Moving onto my painting, it represents how I felt and what mental state I was in at the time of my hospitalization. It was a dark place and for the first time I felt vulnerable and weak. I wasn’t me.