IdeaJones

Tag: COVID19

  • Back In The Saddle Again (Well, in, then out, then in…)

    So I haven’t been keeping up on our website until just recently. My new hashtag is #IBlameCovid. It’s been 5 months since I was first diagnosed. Here we are in July (almost August) and I’m definitely improved (I know March happened, but don’t ask me about it), but not completely over it yet.

    The main lingering symptom is exhaustion. In March, I found myself having to sit on the floor of my shower because I couldn’t stand up long enough to rinse the shampoo from my hair. Now? I can shower, then I have to lie down for an hour. So improvement, yes, but not back to normal.

    That’s a common misunderstanding about #Covid19. People think you have it and you die, or you get better, end of report. Not really. For many people, even a mild to moderate case (like mine), where you didn’t have to be hospitalized, produces lingering and often debilitating symptoms that can come and go unpredictably.

    Thinking is physical work and it tires me out. Laugh if you want to, it’s true. Sometimes I hunt for common words or to labor to finish a thought. It gets better, then returns. I’m just glad my brain came back at all. For quite a while, I struggled to follow a thought from one end to the other, and conversation left me with crushing fatigue.

    I’m writing and editing again, and my brain seems to function, until I get tired, so my working hours are brief and interrupted by rest breaks while I lie down, but at least I can work a bit. I just have to accept that an hour of writing will be followed by an hour (or more) of lying down. It’s frustrating, and I was wrestling with guilt and frustration, but I remembered the lesson a dear friend taught me.

    Merlin was my service dog. He had been a starving stray puppy, but he still approached every morning cheerfully, making the most of whatever life offered him that day. We call it The Lesson Of Merlin. He taught me that it doesn’t matter what you planned, or what you feel your situation “should” be. What matters is meeting life where it is and doing what you can with what you have to work with.

    Merlin, who tried to teach me all he could.

    Which isn’t to say I’ve magically become a yogi and avatar of enlightenment. I have to remind myself every day, sometimes multiple times a day, to look at what I have available that day and make the most of it. If it’s a bad post-Covid day, that may mean lying on the couch all day, watching Shakespearean comedies, history programs and writing classes on tv. If it’s a good day, it’s a bit of housecleaning, writing, playing with my pups, talking with Mark. My challenge is to find joy in whatever I have.

    The lesson of Merlin.

  • Health Tracker Form

    I belong to an online support group for #Covid19 “long haulers,” people who’ve had the disease and are experiencing symptoms weeks or even months along. Most of the people I’ve interacted with have been great — but it’s still not a club you want to join, for obvious reasons.

    Early on after I got Covid, I stumbled across a form created by a doctor (I’m sorry I can’t recall his name) for patients to track their symptoms, to make it easier to talk to your doctor. It occurred to me that it would be useful, not just then, but going forward. You need to collect enough information to know what your normal “baseline” is, after all.

    If you regularly keep this information, when something goes amiss, you can let your doctor know what’s going on. No trying to recall which day you felt which symptom, how bad was it, what was going on that day. You have it available. I created mine in Open Office as a spreadsheet and included the readings I take and the symptoms I was experiencing.

    I’ve never been good at keeping a journal, but this has turned into my journal. I note how I’m feeling, what’s going on, in addition to vital statistics and any symptoms.

    If you’re already experiencing health issues, first off, I’m sorry to hear that! If you try out this form, just remember you can adapt and personalize it to fit you. You might have something that isn’t on here, for example. Adjust to fit. Below is a link to the original form that I adapted (scroll down and you’ll see it. This form was developed early on in the #Covid19 pandemic and doesn’t include all of the possible symptoms we now know can be part of this illness. Add whatever you’re experiencing. Even it it’s not Covid, this info can be very useful for you, and your doctor:

    https://campbellteaching.co.uk/covid19/

  • Peeing In Humanity’s Pool

    Peeing In Humanity’s Pool

    It’s not politics. It’s good manners (and being a good person).

    Etiquette has always interested me. I noticed as a little kid that there were different rules for different people and situations. Mom pointed out early on that we don’t speak the same way to the minister as we do to friends on the playground. Twirling so your dress flies up and your underwear shows is okay at a dance, but a bad idea at the office.

    The etiquette evolving for this time of pandemic interests me. On a purely emotional level, it’s an unpleasant surprise to see how many people think not wearing a mask or distancing is some sort of statement promoting some “cause,” as opposed to simply being a practical thing recommended by experts in medicine, science and public health to slow down the spread of a very contagious new disease.

    I suspect many of them are simply terrified. Human beings don’t make our best decisions when we’re scared. The brain stops accepting any new input that’s complicated and we don’t have processing power or time to untangle anything confusing. It’s easier for some people to respond to fear by refusing to believe anything is wrong, because admitting what’s going on means accepting a certain amount of powerlessness.

    Why not do the things we know help, like staying home as much as we can until a safe, effective vaccine is available? Why refuse to distance, or wear masks? Those give us what power we have in this situation, so why give them up?

    In part, because it’s quickly become part of a person’s identity. Meaning has been attached to taking those steps. They’ve gone from being sensible precautions to personal statements. But in that process, I think some people are mistaking the statements they’re making.

    Yes, liberty is important. Freedom is crucial. But they don’t come without cost. We live in a society with other people. The basic deal is that it’s understood we will cooperate for the good of us all. I’m free to drive a car, but not into your living room. I have to take a test, get a license, and obey traffic laws — and I have the right to expect that you will, too. My stopping at a red light protects other drivers (and me). Them stopping protects me (and them). We protect each other.

    It’s the liberty bargain. I’m free to exercise by throwing punches — but not at your face. Your face has the right to be unpunched by me. My rights aren’t the only ones that matter. Yours matter, too. You have a right for me not to casually risk exposing you to a potentially deadly disease.

    If the only thing masks and distancing accomplished was making some people feel safer during this chaotic time, they’d still be worth wearing. It’s good manners. It’s kind. It’s caring. And if people feel safe, if they see you doing your part to help, they’re more likely to feel safe enough to come out and spend money.

    When someone wears a mask or distances during a global pandemic, it’s not a political statement. The statement being made is that this person thinks other people matter enough to protect or comfort them — their own family, friends, neighbors and coworkers, that exhausted nurse or doctor who’s been tending coronavirus patients (and watching people die when they couldn’t be saved), that researcher getting close to finding a vaccine to protect people, that truck driver or grocery clerk risking health and life to keep the groceries coming.

    It’s not a flag. It’s not a magic amulet (you have to wear them correctly for them to work — just having one on your person doesn’t protect anyone).

    It’s your way of saying whether you’re mature enough to understand that freedom comes with responsibility, kind enough to help other people feel a bit safer in trying times, smart enough to understand that not doing it makes us lock down longer and likely will get us locked down again. You’re willing to do your own bit to help get your community, your country, and your world through the biggest challenge we’re all likely to face in our lifetimes.

    So make your statement — but make sure you know what statement you’re really making.

  • Making It In The Covid Era

    We’re making what we can out of what we have to work with. How about you?

    April 14, 2020

    Hi! How y’all doin’?

    My fifth week of being in medical isolation (isolation from everyone as ordered by a doctor) is winding down, with week 6 on the way. I’m going to need to create a new coloring page for my window! This one is almost filled in.

    When I walked in here and closed the door, shutting Mark, our dogs and everyone else on the other side, they thought I might be in here for two weeks. Then two weeks became four, and now it’s open-ended. It’s required some adjustment. I’m sure your life has, too.

    I was just talking to someone about how everything has changed. Grocery shopping. No more “Oh, we’re out of X, I’ll just dash down to the store…” No, Mark and I order our groceries two weeks in advance (“What do you think you’ll want for lunch in two weeks?”) and play the food lottery (“Did we get popcorn this time?”). For my friend, going to the store requires that she suit up in a home-grown hazmat suit and line up outside the store to be let in by the bouncers as if she’s trying to get into an exclusive night club. The whole trip she has to worry about people who won’t maintain proper distancing. By the time she gets home, she’s done. It’s exhausting.

    Of course, it’s worse for grocery store employees. People who just don’t seem capable of understanding what’s going on are angry and confused, and take it out on the grocery store employees, most of whom are doing their best in a difficult time and hoping not to get sick. Our local grocery store is really doing a good job of contact-free pick up, although the manager of a local Target went off on Mark, somehow thinking Mark would put the staff at risk sitting in his car, masked and gloved, with the windows rolled up, while someone put our order in the trunk of our car.

    It’s a surreal time to be alive, ain’t it?

    Meantime, although kids who went on Spring Break to party, then got sick, seem not to have talked to their friends, who think the “right to party” the Beastie Boys sang about is actually in the Constitution. They just had to shut down a club open in defiance of shelter-in-place orders. Did those kids have direct word from God that they and everyone they knew was immune? Are they just as dumb as a bag of hair? No idea.

    We are for sure seeing who is a team player and who, definitely, is not. Everyone on Team Survival is hanging in there, doing what they can, staying home if they possibly can, physical distancing… and it’s working. Where people are doing that, they’re flattening the curve.

    It’s clearly up to us to save each other. God knows the feds aren’t going to, not with Dear Donny at the helm. The thing he’s working hardest at right now is attempting to shift blame. He’s never worked so hard in his life. He wants the states to be responsible for themselves without looking to the federal government for help. Wait — isn’t that why we have a federal government? Our President-at-the-moment is, sadly, about as useful in a crisis as tits on a bicycle.

    So we stand together by standing apart. We wash our hands like it’s our holy calling, figure out what meals we can make out of what’s in the cupboard and whatever we were lucky enough to get from the grocery store, don’t go out or gather unless we must, wear our home-made masks when we do, and send this thing back to whatever suburb of hell it came from. When there’s a vaccine, we line up (is anyone still an anti-vaxxer now?), and stick out our arms, our butts, whatever’s required.

    And years from now, we sit down kids who weren’t yet born when this happened, and we bore them silly with our survival tales of how we got through the Great Pandemic of 2020. We will have earned that right. Most of us, anyway.

    If your story is how you ignored it all and went on partying, please keep quiet. These are impressionable children, and you shouldn’t help make them stupid.

    Hang in there, y’all!

  • #QuarantineLife: Your Next Adventure

    A lesson (so to speak) in hope.

    A therapist told me once that one of the most important things in life was to have something, even a small thing, to look forward to. In times of crisis, when it seems all of life is about the now & the immediate future, it can seem endless unless you can find something to look forward to in the future.

    Right now, I can’t leave this room, and my husband can’t leave our house (except to pick up groceries through a contact-free option at our grocer’s). Every day we wonder “what next?,” with a feeling of dread. That’s no way to live.

    One day, this will be over and it will be okay to go places and see friends again. Why not look forward and think about where we’d like to go when we can? Even a short road trip will feel like an adventure. I’m looking around our state and identifying places I’d like to visit, things I’ve either always meant to do or that sound good.

    I’m not sure when we’ll be able to go, but even planning the trip makes me look forward in a way that says “There will be a future and we’ll be in it.” Planning is a hopeful exercise. This can also be a project for homeschooling — more on that on our #AskATutor page.