(Originally published by The San Francisco Chronicle on May 22, 2023)

My husband can’t watch soccer games anymore, and for a year I wondered if the COVID-19 vaccine was to blame.

His first stroke happened a few days after a COVID vaccination. It flummoxed everyone: He had no previous health problems, and the vaccine he got wasn’t associated with stroke. As a health researcher and vaccine proponent, I had a hard time making sense of it.

Now, at just 47, he has survived two strokes and lives with a constellation of small, weird brain impairments. For some reason, watching soccer players zip around the field blows some mysterious circuitry that rerouted to fix his post-stroke double vision.

(Continue reading the opinion essay on The San Francisco Chronicle’s page here.)