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Arizona Nursing Home Caregiver Talks About Getting The COVID-19 Vaccine

Some Arizona nursing home caregivers are still waiting to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but that’s only part of the story. 

Donna Fuentes is a certified nursing assistant at Wellsprings of Gilbert, a skilled nursing facility. Fuentes contracted COVID-19 last April. She recently talked about what it was like to get vaccinated. 

"And was pretty horrible. I had it for two to three weeks," she said. "I had almost all of the symptoms, except for the difficulty breathing. But other than that, I pretty much got hit with everything."

So when the vaccine became available, Fuentes didn’t hesitate.

"I was more excited to get it, the vaccine, just because I didn't want to experience getting COVID the second time around."

Especially because she didn’t know if it would be worse the second time around. As for her colleagues who are waiting to get the shot.

"They wanted to see how the first of us, you know, how we were going to react to it."

Fuentes did suffer a reaction, but she said she’d rather have a fever and chills for a day or two versus a couple of weeks. Fuentes is waiting to get her second dose.

→  Get The Latest News On COVID-19 In Arizona 

KJZZ senior field correspondent Kathy Ritchie has 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local media outlets — nearly a decade of it has been spent in public media.