Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (108)
June 27, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 94: 12 am, 2 am, 430 am, 445 am 515 am wake ups. I’m at my wit’s end today. Yes, it was a terrible night of sleep (half was my body being what it is and half was Smol) but it’s now what, three months of trying to ride this out?
This weekend I couldn’t take it anymore and spent some time researching a dozen articles on how to deal with borked sleep and there are so many many reasons it could be and half of them contradict the other hald. Bedtime too early, bedtime too late, too much napping, too little napping, low sleep need, more sleep need.
Today specifically, I’m frazzled between needing to work and needing to fix Smol’s sleep schedule because we cannot keep going like this. Diagnosing what’s causing them their early waking has me pulling my hair out though. They might average 3-4 hours of naps at day and only sleep 10 hours at night. They’re consistently getting up way too early every morning, bright and early and happy about it, but clearly they are still tired to be napping as much as they do. My working theory is to push them to take shorter day naps and hope that means longer night sleep. We’re testing this theory today but that also means I have very very very limited time to work. At best, two hours of nap time to work.
Naturally that means my computer was a steaming pile of rotten turnips. After an hour of troubleshooting and restarting (SEVEN TIMES), the file explorer finally started working only for another thing to break. I was on the verge of screaming. Thankfully, I managed not to blow my top and moved on to other things for a short while.
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JB complained of a sore throat at 9 pm, and since I’ve had one myself for the past four days which I chalked up to CFS, we went and took a precautionary test. Negative, thankfully, so sent them to bed with a dose of ibuprofen for the pain.
Year 3, Day 95: 515 am. Experiment has not yet borne fruit. I know, it was unlikely to change overnight but I hoped. Silly, I know. If it seems like I snapped overnight, it feels like I did! It was over the weekend. Suddenly I just couldn’t take this seemingly endless early morning waking anymore. I had thought surely it’d go back to a more reasonable time by now!
Weather reports vary but it predicted we were in for our version of a scorcher today (80s degrees F) which is still quite mild compared to many others. It actually went up to the mid-90s which isn’t recordbreaking but certainly quite uncomfortable! Thankfully, our house holds in the cold so on days like this, walking back inside feels like walking into air conditioning (which we opted against during the heater replacement). A couple rooms that get direct sun for hours do get too warm but that’s not bad at all.
We were all slow as molasses today though and that made me grumpy in a lot of ways. Then JB came home with a terrible headache. We suspected heat as the culprit and plied them with liquids and ibuprofen but are equally suspicious that they caught a bug. COVID test: negative.
Experiment with Smol’s sleep day 2: failed to get them in bed by 745. 8 pm stretched out to a 9 pm falling asleep and carried on my bad mood about this sleep situation that stinks no matter how you cut it. If it works, we lose 2 hours of work time during the day. If it doesn’t, we lose 2 hours of work time AND 1-2 hours of morning sleep.
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My library book holds are flooding in and all I want to do is lay in bed snacking and reading them all. Without being sick!
Year 3, Day 96: 615 am! I can’t tell if this was a fluke, obviously, it’s just happened once. But I’m grateful for this small favor because JB has a full blown something. They developed a cough overnight so now they’re missing out on a weekly field trip, and very upset about it. I ran them over to the test site for a PCR test because once they’re coughing, camp won’t let them back without a negative test. Of course they didn’t bother to tell us what the protocols were before we started camp so that wasted a solid hour of our time trying to find out. I wish we’d asked before they started but I also wish the camp had been proactive about the decision tree info so we could just have referenced it and made the call without a lot of phone calls. Here’s hoping it’s a negative test and here’s hoping they process the test right away.
In the meantime, we are making this an opportunity to teach JB that it’s really important to put your need for rest first when you’re sick AND to avoid infecting other people. Learning to power through some things is important but, more and more, I don’t think it’s good for things like illness when we see that there appears to be a direct link between not resting in early COVID and having long COVID.
I sure as hell need to learn that same lesson considering how miserable I felt by mid morning and how I still instinctively planned to work during Smol’s one hour nap. Instead I choose to lay down and rest for most of my Smol-free hour and that helped a little. PiC came back from his on site day early enough to help mind the kids and that also helped. He’ll take tomorrow as a sick day so it’s not all on me. Also good because I feel like garbage. So much so that absolutely no foods sounded good. Not even sushi. That’s when you really know I’m broken.
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Something I was thinking about earlier this week: am I mixing up fitness and health? I have walked the same hill most days for a year and feel differently almost every day. Some days I’m huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf, needing to stop for a rest every 20 paces. Some days it’s a comfortable stroll with some twinges. Other days, somewhere between the two.
On the hard days, I think I’ve let myself become unfit and weak. But, if that’s true, then why am I so much less destroyed walking the exact same route the exact same way some days and not others? It occurs to me after a year of frustration with this thing: this is very probably related to my CFS and fibro. Maybe not entirely a thing I’ve been irresponsible about.
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Penny got me thinking about private swim lessons again. I previously thought they were an absurd price, but that’s because we were paying half that for group lessons and that was good enough. Prepandemic. Now, we can’t get into the Y’s group lessons and the only alternative we can get into easily is twice the cost. It’s only $7 more per lesson to go to private lessons at the Y if they actually have availability. PiC was furious at this last lesson when it was clear that his request for progress updates from a few lessons ago had been ignored and JB is still muddling around not picking up new skills because the instructors aren’t being clear about what they need to do to progress. They love swimming but they really want to make more progress too and I hate to see them frustrated in their seeking to learn when they do want to do better. Cross your fingers that we can get into private lessons?
Year 3, Day 97: 445 am and 515 am wake up.
PiC took a sick day today to mind JB but their PCR came back negative and they don’t have a fever so they’re allowed to go back. I’ve mixed feelings about this but this is like the decision we had to make about their missing school or not and I don’t think I’ll ever feel great about sending them when they have any symptoms. The thing that keeps me from keeping them home is that they will be masked the whole time, know to step out when they have to blow their nose, and generally have reasonably decent hygiene habits from the past year.
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I’ve got big project-level tasks I’ve been NOT working on and it turns out the answer to “how do I make myself do X that must be completed in the next 2 weeks” is to realize I have Y project that I also have to do in the same timeframe and that I also don’t want to do. I can pit these two unwanted tasks against each other! Procrastinating strategically.
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My checking account balance is off by two cents and that’s annoying but I am not going to spend the time now to go looking for the reason why. That’s progress! Normally I’d be obsessively searching. Also I have projects X and Y to do so I can’t be tackling something totally minor.
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Smol’s nose started running like a river today, they probably caught what JB had, and we figured they were ok since they didn’t have any other symptoms. Fools, us.
They popped a fever in the middle of the night. I knew that forehead thermometer didn’t seem accurate. It kept landing on 98.4 degrees when their body was so hot to the touch that scanning their body (not as intended) came up at 100.1. Our old digital thermometer hasn’t been acting right lately either so I’d been searching for a new one, not expecting to need it so soon. I’ve got a $5 off coupon at Walgreens from stopping in and picking up 4 bottles of conditioner for $16 pretax. That’ll come in handy once I figure out if we should go with another standard digital or maybe go big on a temporal scanner type.
I’m pulling out all my sick baby stops: feeding them water through a big syringe because that’s more fun for them when they’re too sad to drink from a regular cup or bottle, damp washclothes to wipe reluctant noses so that it’s soothing and not scratchy, letting them play with the not good thermometers when they’re reluctant to get their temperature taken.
Year 3, Day 98: A 645 am wake up doesn’t count as victory if it was preceded by 1045 pm, 12 am, 2 am, 3 am and 345 am wake ups. Poor Smol’s head cold came with an overnight fever and they were so miserable, and by the fourth or fifth wake up so was I. Finally calmed the hysterical Smol Acrobat and kept them sleeping atop me instead of putting them back in the crib like they normally prefer. They caught a couple hours of shuteye. I caught zero hours which set off all the inflammatory responses: major joints, minor joints, necessary for walking joints. All swollen. Yay.
Then we lost Roe v Wade. I’m all kinds of angry even if I’m not surprised. This loss of bodily autonomy is only the start of the loss of privacy and we have a long fight ahead of us.
I started with donating to abortion funds that will need help to help others. Planned Parenthood has plenty of money from regular donors, the grassroots organizations need our support now.
Will Smol be getting vaccinated soon? I kept thinking of you guys when both shots were authorized! But you haven’t mentioned it once since it happened. Or maybe I missed it…
I’m sorry the little ones have been sick. That is rough, especially when you already weren’t getting much sleep. I hope sleep is much less elusive this week.
Soon, we hope! I must have forgotten to mention it since our plans for it would have been in this post, except this week was all KINDS of topsy turvy between illness and rage. Crossing my fingers that the kids will be better this week and we can get it this week.
I also thought that you could take that lesson about not powering through – yay you for realizing that and taking a break!
Sad indeed when even sushi isn’t appealing. I hope things settle down a little for you – very soon!
I hope JB gets into private swim lessons!
Even while I was typing that note, I think it hit me that it was time to take my own medicine! So to speak. And it is now, too. I’d better get myself some rest time while I can. Mondays are always so hard.
Thanks for the wishes, fingers are CROSSED.