Unfortunately I respond to anxiety in exactly the opposite way. The enforced idleness has been having a bad effect on me. My fasting blood sugar hit 200 this morning. I am trying to get it under control, but it’s hard when I can’t get out and be active as easily.
I took my bike out on the bike trail this morning, it was a little disturbing how crowded it was for a Tuesday morning. The county sent out a reminder of the shelter in place order while I was out. I heard about 20 cell phones go off at once with the alert. So much for social distancing.
Update: Still barely affected except for lack of joyriding and sitdown meals. MrsRico doesn’t want me shopping but our weekly market order pickups work. Apparently many in my rural redneck region are staying home - our county still has just ONE confirmed (and isolated) case from 11 days ago and that’s all. Relatives in Arizona, Oregon, and Washington all seem okay so I’ll try not to worry. Generally minimal impact here. Good; we need no excitement.
I’ve got an appointment set up with my primary care doc for later this month, and it will be a televisit. I have mixed feelings about it - because yeah, there are some things they can’t do remotely. For example I’ll need routine bloodwork and I don’t think jabbing my finger with a pin and smearing it on the laptop camera would quite do the job
On the other hand, if I were having a “routine” asthma flare, or just needed prescription refills, it would work fine.
Paul in Qatar: Yikes on the weird job situation. I assume your employer is not US-based; is “turn 60, get fired” a common thing in the middle east?
On the very same day that I got a call from Uncle Sam that I was approved for the job of taking census I went to the website I was told to go to set up a fingerprint appointment…and saw a message that all fingerprinting appointments were delayed until April 1st. At midnight tonight I went to that website to get an early appointment, and this is what I saw:
The farm market near me got a shipment of eggs, but their supplier (Turner Dairy) is all out of egg cartons. Talk about awkward, buying eggs sans cartons.
Because of rules handed down by the Oregon Food Bank, instead of having customers come on down and shop off the shelves we have to pack each box ourselves and carry them up the stairs to vehicles lined up outside. Also, because of the “six feet of separation” thing we had to send half of our volunteers home because we didn’t have a large enough space for them all. Twice as much work and half the volunteers.
My mother is doing better and -according to the nurse practitioner that’s been my contact- she had bacterial pneumonia, not viral. They didn’t do a COVID test but the bacterial culture was positive and - most importantly- she improved in response to the antibiotics.
I will always be a little skeptical since they didn’t do a COVID test ( what if the bacterial infection was secondary?) but she’s getting better and that’s what’s important to me.
Public schools in Texas are closed until at least May 4, and it’s likely (in my district at least) we’ll stay closed for the remainder of the semester. We are continuing with online learning, but our administrators have told us to keep it pretty simple and to basically accept ANY level of participation from our students as good enough to pass. Makes sense–we weren’t really prepared for this and the students shouldn’t be penalized for this crazy situation. We have a lot of low-income students and access to technology (devices, wifi, etc.) is limited for many of them. And some of them have bigger things to worry about, like working at the grocery store to help their laid-off parent pay the rent and other bills. So, my lesson planning and grading isn’t really filling up all that much of my time.
Fortunately no one I know has become ill, but I fear things are just starting to ‘heat up’ here in Texas. My elderly parents live in a small town and they are mostly staying home, but I think they and others in their community are feeling a little too safe because they are not near a big city. I keep telling them it is spreading here–even in rural areas there are cases popping up and probably many more than we know about.
My university is on-line classes only, so I am working from home. The family shop made a marvelous profit last week selling out all our herbal scented hand sanitizer. We are hoping to get more in five days. Everyone that comes to the shop for spiritual advisement because they want psychic protection from Corona Virus is told they must perform purity rituals of frequent washing, avoiding physical contact, and isolation.
I’m always a little surprised when people rejoice over a negative covid test. Covid is bad but it’s not a death sentence. I recently recovered from a nasty chest cold, and I would be delighted to learn that it WAS covid (although it probably wasn’t.)
What matters is what you said, “are they getting better?”
Who knows. Our supplier has promised a delivery on Monday, April 13 and since they they are a local smallish company that manufactures the sanitizer hopefully everything will go as planned.
Well it’s has been fourteen days for me and my mother and neither of us developed any severe symptoms so I don’t know whether we were exposed to COVID or not. We had an assortment of mild symptoms that could have caused by it or it could have been something else. I am going to assume we were not and that we should still still take extreme precautions to avoid being potentially exposed.
My mother had nursing aides coming in six days a week to help her with but I decided to stop having them come because it would just be a vector for us to get ill. It will be a bigger burden on me to help her but the costs outweigh the risks of us getting sick. Her visiting RN will still come once a week to check her and replace her catheter. (If she didn’t have the catheter I would probably not have the nurse come either.)
