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I had the first dose already, and had five days of chills and lightheadedness from it. I will receive the second dose in a couple weeks. My doctor said the second dose is worse...

My wife and I (both 80 something) got our first dose Sunday.

I had basically zero impact at the injection site. My wife was a little sore for 48 hours.

My main complaint was light headiness. That could be due to all of the allergens in the air in N. California after a week of rain. Yesterday the light headiness disappeared after lunch.

Last night was the best night sleep we both had since the injections. No hot flashes/cold flashes or laying there awake.

The second shot apparently packs a wallop for some of us as per the link below:

The Second COVID-19 Shot Is a Rude Reawakening for Immune Cells

Side effects are just a sign that protection is kicking in as it should.

KATHERINE J. WU, FEBRUARY 2, 2021

At about 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, I woke to find my husband shivering beside me. For hours, he had been tossing in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, nursing chills, a fever, and an agonizingly sore left arm. His teeth chattered. His forehead was freckled with sweat. And as I lay next to him, cinching blanket after blanket around his arms, I felt an immense sense of relief. All this misery was a sign that the immune cells in his body had been riled up by the second shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, and were well on their way to guarding him from future disease.

Side effects are a natural part of the vaccination process, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written. Not everyone will experience them. But the two COVID-19 vaccines cleared for emergency use in the United States, made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, already have reputations for raising the hackles of the immune system: In both companies’ clinical trials, at least a third of the volunteers ended up with symptoms such as headaches and fatigue; fevers like my husband’s were less common.

Dose No. 2 is more likely to pack a punch—in large part because the effects of the second shot build iteratively on the first. My husband, who’s a neurologist at Yale New Haven Hospital, is one of many who had a worse experience with his second shot than his first.

But much like any other learning process, in this one repetition is key. When hit with the second injection, the immune system recognizes the onslaught, and starts to take it even more seriously. The body’s encore act, uncomfortable though it might be, is evidence that the immune system is solidifying its defenses against the virus.

“By the second vaccine, it’s already amped up and ready to go,” Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told me. Fortunately, side effects resolve quickly, whereas COVID-19 can bring on debilitating, months-long symptoms and has killed more than 2 million people.

Excerpted:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/02/second-vaccine-side-effects/617892/