This collage is based on my experiences of volunteering at a Covid-19 vaccine clinic whilst I was at home during the recent lockdown. The clinic was based at a local GP practice, and my role was in managing queues and welcoming patients as well as watching over the waiting area to make sure that nobody had an adverse reaction to the vaccine, on the days when they were using the Pfizer vaccine. It was a really uplifting experience for me, to be amongst so many different and new people, and I was grateful to be able to speak to so many different patients about their life stories, their feelings towards having a vaccine, and to hear about some of their own personal experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic.

I wanted to use this assignment to reflect on my own emotions at the vaccine clinic, but also the feelings of the patients who I spoke with. I have used bright colours to portray some of the joy that volunteering and speaking to patients gave me personally. I have also used some layering of colours in representing the patients who are queueing for a vaccine in the collage, to show some of the variety and depth of emotion that people carried with them to the vaccine clinic. I wanted to portray the people in my collage in a surreal style, to show how for myself, and for many people attending the clinic, it was in many ways an other-wordly experience – receiving a vaccine for a virus during a global pandemic that has shaken the world and disrupted everybody’s lives in some way or another – it is still for me and many of the patients I spoke with, hard to believe and comprehend, and our experiences at the moment are so different to the life we are used to.

I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to hear from so many patients personally. In the early vaccine clinics in December, many of the patients were overwhelmed with emotion, often so grateful and happy to be receiving a vaccine, and at times tearful because of the intensity of the relief that they were feeling. For many of them, they had been shielding throughout the majority of the pandemic, and for some this was the first time they had really left their homes and interacted with people outside of their household for a good number of months. This was by far not the only emotion that people spoke about and showed; people often expressed anxiety and stress around the process of having a vaccine, particularly in the more recent weeks with concerns around blood clot risk regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine. There was sadness, for relatives and friends who could not yet receive their vaccines, and grief for the loss of loved ones to Covid-19. This is only a small glimpse into the vast range of emotions that people expressed, and I have attempted to capture a little bit of this in my collage.

My experience at the vaccine clinic highlighted the uniqueness of everybody’s emotions around having medical treatment and interventions. It showed me that you can learn a lot about how someone is really feeling about something, despite what they may be reflecting on the outside, by listening to them and trying to understand as much as you can about their own personal situation.