"After the second dose, the guilt really kind of hit me," the 26-year-old nurse from Ohio tells
Health. "I thought of all the people we watched die in the hospital, who could've lived another five or 10 years had this not happened, and the many people who needed the vaccine more than I did, who were more at risk, but who died a month before their time came."
This type of guilt isn't the usual kind you might feel when you feel remorse about something you did, like forgetting your best friend's birthday. It's survivor's guilt, a negative feeling that can come after living through something traumatic—like, say, a once-in-a-century pandemic that's killed more than 2.5 million people around the world, per the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.