AUSTIN, Texas — After months of separation, seniors and staff at Maravilla at the Domain are one step closer to getting out of the pandemic.
One-hundred-and-thirty residents and staff received the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday. Some of those residents already have big plans.
"Eventually I would like to start up again traveling," Aileen Kishi, a resident at Maravilla, said. "There's there's already some discussion about with my church choir and some other choirs here in the United States tentatively scheduled to go around July to Ireland to do some choral presentations, performances."
"The thing we look forward to first is being able to get together here," Dr. Ken Shine, another resident, said. "I mean, there are a number of us who play bridge there, lots of other activities. We want to be able to get back together, get some of us, take courses in the theater ... Going to a nice restaurant once in a while may be a neat thing to do, as well as visit friends and relatives."
"My family is looking forward to going out and eating at a restaurant," Marilyn Heath said, "do a little bit of road trips, whatever, things like that, what we can do as a family."
"Not to be able to jump in my car and run, do what I want to, that's not fun," Chloe Johnson said. "I really miss that. Once I get out of here, I'm going to go all over the state of Texas and visit people."
"Go to church, get to church, worship again," Georgia Strickland said. "Don't know when it's going to happen, but we can now look."
The people who have gotten vaccinated don't have a free pass to get back to normal immediately, as Shine likes to remind his neighbors.
"People shouldn't be doing very much of anything than they were doing differently," Shine said. "The problem, of course, is A) we've got to make sure everybody is immunized. Secondly, we know that some people who are immunized can still carry the virus and therefore, we have to be very careful with people going back and forth to family and so forth, whether they're immunized. And thirdly, we've got all of the pressure associated with other people who deserve immunization. We were extremely fortunate."
Maravilla will have a third and final vaccination event in February to give second doses to 50 more residents and staff.
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