Brenden Hills: This is how I felt after getting the COVID-19 vaccination

Saturday Telegraph reporter Brenden Hills got the AstraZeneca vaccine last week. These are the side effects he suffered afterwards.

If the side effects from the COVID-19 vaccination are not as bad as a full-blown dose of the virus, then you don’t want COVID-19.

Wanting to inject a bit of normality into my life, I signed up to get the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 31.

Brenden Hills received the AstraZeneca vaccination last week. Picture: Brendan Radke

The advice from the nurse administering the injection was that the side effects range from nothing to feeling like a full blown dose of the flu.

But the only way to know where you fall on the spectrum is to take the injection.

I rolled the dice. She’ll be right. How bad could it be?

Reporter Brenden Hills.

By 5pm that afternoon I had a bit of mild fuzziness in the head. No dramas so far.

Nothing had changed by the time I went to bed.

At 3am, I woke up feeling like I was asleep on an iceberg and had a blazing fever.

As the morning wore on, that symptom was joined by throbbing behind my eyes and severe aching in my lower back.

By 4pm, I had developed concerning chest pains, which luckily did not turn out to be a blood clot.

This lasted through to the following morning, at which point those symptoms disappeared.

But they were replaced by a severe fatigue that was still with me as of writing this on Friday.

I qualified to receive the vaccine because of a medical condition that puts me at a higher risk of getting a severe dose of COVID-19.

As a comparison, a friend’s elderly grandmother got the vaccination around the same time and experienced no side effects.

So while my side effects were bad, my guess is that they were not as bad as a full-blown dose of the virus.

Would I get the vaccine if I had my time again? Absolutely.