Still pondering the novel idea that I now have traces of rare blue horseshoe crab blood in my body. And that somehow, this primitive creature is offering me immunity from the coronavirus. It has begun to affect my dreams. The other night I dreamed that the crabs all rose up and marched along the liminal boundary of the shore and I could almost translate their primitive whisperings.
After a week of symptoms, followed by another week of relative calm, today I’m running a low grade fever, my arm hurts, the headache is persistent. Nothing like before. My body is girding its loins, gearing up for battle. Soon I will return to receive even more indigo blood in my arm. I will dream of the color of the ocean. I am regressing back into the coral reefs of indigo colored time.
“Considered living fossils, horseshoe crabs trace back 445 million years, before the first animals crept onto land. Not a crab at all, but genetically closer to a spider, it’s a relic of the ocean insects that scuttled across prehistoric sea floors.
“They survived the catastrophe that killed off the dinosaurs; they survived the ice age, and the coming of man. These creatures changed so little that an Ohio church set out a 68-foot fiberglass horseshoe crab as testament to divine creation over evolution.” How the Coronavirus vaccine relies upon Maryland’s strangest fishery, horseshoe crabs, Baltimore Sun
According to Wiki, at 244 million years old, horseshoe crabs are literally living fossils—their ancestors date back to the Ordovician period, ca. 450 million years ago. They are a sister group of “Ricinulei within Arachnida. Subphylum: Chelicerata, suborder Xiphosurida, and order Xiphosura, family Limulidae.” Wiki I learn that there are four species: like the four directions of the earth. Limulus polyphemus, the Atlantic horseshoe crab is oor man, the one extending our lives. Giving us hope in these darkest of times.
My friend Eric Painter said, Did you know that blue crab blood, lysate costs $60,000 per gallon? I learn that it’s not so much about their blood, which contains hemocyanine, which is cool in and of itself, but their unique immune cells which are used to detect and destroy deadly bacterial contaminants.
Because the poor ugly buggers are a hot pharmaceutical commodity, with their copper-based blue blood, which contains a rare compound, Limulus amebocyte lysate, they are now an endangered species. Fishermen need to make sure their cold-blooded patients don’t die of exsanguination. Sheesh. What a time to have a shellfish allergy. Poor noble-blooded limulus crabs. Their brains may be the size of a pencil tip, and technically they have no hearts, but that blue blood coursing through their open circulatory system offers us hope, and maybe even love.
I got my first vaccine shot on Jan 6. Moderna. A stormy day all round. My preemptive preparation for the next round will be to take aspirin and Benadryl beforehand. Have a water flask for the hour-long wait after the shot—my mouth got positively cottony and I was woozy, so the trips where I lurched to the water fountain were surreal journeys. I was afraid of falling over. Like a drunk in a swaying choir.
I had an epipen at the ready, there was no swelling. But it hurt like hell, I couldn’t even sleep on my left side for a week. Felt like someone, maybe The Hulk, had sucker-punched me repeatedly with brass knuckles. Strangely, there was no fever on my arm. How could it hurt that much, and yet have no fever? I had to lift my sore arm with my other arm in order to use it. My bones ached. All my old injuries coming home to roost.
I awoke with violent headaches for the next three days. However, during week two, my arm began to itch, there was a faint swelling, a light rash, and some heat at the injection site, and I had a low-grade temperature for a couple of days. Nothing to worry about. The fatigue is real. I spent the next few days in bed, resting and sleeping.
As far as reactions go, this shot was nowhere near as bad as the yellow fever vaccination I got in the late 1980s. Back then, the delivery base use was albumen, or eggwhite, hence the reaction, as I’m allergic to eggs. I also did not fare well with a flu shot, circa 2000. I haven’t had one since. My reactions to shots have been so extreme, that my Kaiser travel nurse suggested that I forgo booster shots if I could help it. I traveled through Latin America with only a half-vaccine for yellow fever, and no tetanus shot.
I have an iodine allergy too. Since horseshoe crabs are shellfish that are loaded with iodine, there is some cause for concern. Except only their rare blue blood is used. I once had a dramatic reaction to a barium iodine stain drip for a kidney x-ray. I got hives inside my throat. Also, my cough syrup with tincture of iodine worked great, except it always gave me an itchy throat. I didn’t realize that was an allergy in the making.
Luckily horseshoe crabs are arachnids, or rather arthropoda, not even related to crabs, or most shellfish. But they do have a shell, ergo there very well could be a shellfish allergy reaction—which is usually the source of an iodine reaction. So, epipen at the ready too. Sea dreams to sea change. The future is nigh. This vaccine is a saline base. It is is of the ocean. My nightmares will dream in the language of blue horseshoe crabs. We are made of the ocean, and this archaic creature, a living fossil from the ocean will offer us immunity from this novel virus.
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