Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (148)
April 3, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 3: What a MONDAY. My 8 hour night shift with Smol Acrobat was miserable – they were fussy, feverish, and incapable of finding a position to sleep in for more than 20 minutes. We ran late because we didn’t have to get JB out the door by 8 am, so I got 20 minutes of uninterrupted sleep but it pushed everything behind. I forgot my pain meds, my jacket, my daycare parent pass. PiC forgot his daycare parent pass and spilled coffee on himself and in the car. Smol Acrobat was tired and withdrawn by the time we dropped them off, and sobbed when we left which absolutely broke my heart. They haven’t cried at dropoff since the first weeks.
Phew. Rough start to the week.
Year 4, Day 4: Is this our third atmospheric river, and sixth storm, of the year? Eighth? I have completely lost count. We drove in the rain for a couple hours and it was oddly mesmerizing. The part of the drive when the clouds cleared was actually jarring.
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Talking to PiC about our paused quest for a hybrid or EV replacement car, I shared this tidbit I recently learned. We should expect car registration to skyrocket:
This is in California. I guess they’re trying to make up for the gas tax, but given we normally don’t drive much throughout the year, it seems like they’d be making way more from our annual registration than they ever made from our gas tax.
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I hate travel days. We did a good job of countering the usual travel departure stress and grumpiness by setting more reasonable expectations and (on my part) a lot of deep breathing, but I still hate travel days. They’re interminable, difficult, everyone is cranky at different times, there’s so much screaming and Sera gets all kinds of anxious until we’re actually on the road. Her whimpering escalates every ten minutes which is an extra stressor having to hear her distress escalate.
Year 4, Day 5: My day was big chunks of work around smaller chunks of family time. We had lunch with my aunt and uncle. My heart needed that. My uncle had serious health issues recently and it was a relief to see him looking reasonably recovered from surgery.
Auntie normally dotes on my kids from afar so I didn’t expect Smol to be engaged. Normally they are reticent when meeting adults they haven’t seen in ages. Happily, they were unexpectedly full of words and chuckles: sit! Chair! Dip! Bread! Mango!
Mango was a new word for us. We love eating it but they’ve never managed to say it before.
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Smol’s not eating or drinking anything like normal, travel seems to be a lot harder on them than it ever was for JB at this age. Everything is “no no no!” and they’re so picky about who gives them what. Water has to come from me, Dad has to provide diaper services, JB has to provide the hugs and fun. There is to be no switching of roles! Ugh. Pickypants!
JB is still a reasonably good sport about travel and helping out, and dotes on Smol enough that even though they get irritated by the very toddleriness of the toddler, they bounce back and engage with their younger sib in good spirits after a bit. I’m grateful.
Year 4, Day 6: Another 4 hour of sleep night thanks to general insomnia. I’m not a fan. My fingers are swollen little sausages and they’re going to be delighted with all the typing I have yet to do.
The kids got some cousin time while I worked. Smol was in a better mood than they had been all week (not a stretch, they’ve been sick and cranky, with a deep rattling cough) so I was able to slog through a lot more work with the kids hootin’ and hollerin’ up a storm from a slight distance.
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I’m dealing with Historically Difficult Person and taking it one minute / hour / day at a time. I’m focusing on how great it’ll feel when I’m done with this round and mostly ignoring my brain’s unbelievably strong desire to go fifteen mental rounds with them in preparation for the other shoe dropping. Up until the moment of this writing, they’ve been less monumentally irritating than usual but history suggests I would do well not to assume they’ll continue this way. History reminds my hypervigilant brain that they always find a way to be Extra Difficult and Irritating before the time allotted has expired. Not that my hypervigilant brain needed any reminders. Nonetheless. I shush my brain’s prodding me like a manic woodpecker with the line: “it’s better if we don’t think about it and when did we become “we” anyway”?
It’s helping me get through. It’s painful but manageable up to this moment. Caveat because I am trying to not jinx myself or hop on the Hypervigilance Train. *Knock wood*
Year 4, Day 7: I’m catching up on Nicole & Maggie posts and this comment from Alice prompted a reply that ballooned so I cut it short and brought it here.
One of my dearest friends has shared with me and her other “like a daughter” person what she wants for end of life and it’s very similar to what Alice’s mom wanted. In the event of encroaching dementia, she wants me / Sis to make the end of life decision for her and I’ve already told her that she’s asking us for something that feels impossible. We want to respect her wishes, completely, but if dementia or Alzheimer’s comes into play, there won’t be anything like a black and white easy decision to make. It’s going to be hazy and fuzzy and when faced with reality and in the moment, the choices you make for each medical decision aren’t going to match what you ideally wanted. Maybe the benefits of still being here to be loved are worth it, I hope they are for Alice’s mom.
I remember going through this with my beloved grandma at a much younger age. As a child, I was very selfish. I begged Gran to take every possible treatment to extend her life, all I could focus on was not being able to say goodbye. I don’t say that to be judgy myself, but I understand now that because of us, her life was prolonged long past what she truly wanted. When her caretakers called us and put us on the line with her, they were emotionally manipulating her. Her grandkids in America were the only people she couldn’t and wouldn’t say no to, and they knew we’d never be ready to say goodbye. It wasn’t fair of them to put that on her or us.
I don’t know how I’m going to handle it when my dearest friend goes into her decline. I do know is that it’s going to be incredibly hard and I hope we have at least another good decade with her before we have to start facing mortality. I can’t imagine having to live in a world without my friend and mentor.
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Today was expected to be the worst day of all the difficult people and an unexpected turn of events made it the least painful. SCORE. I am quite happy with how it turned out. My defenses didn’t have to be up all day and therefore I am not totally worn out from defending against the boundary-disrespecters. Let’s call this my karmic gift for working so hard at maintaining neutrality in place of my usual irritation and rage.
I hope poor Smol is still on the mend. How lucky that everyone else in your little family is so good to them. Fingers crossed the rest of the family visit goes without big bumps.
Smol is nearly there! They’re still pretty snotty but it’s not as bad, nor is their cough so terrible now. 🤞🤞
Thank goodness we’re back we’re back I’m so happy we’re back 😁
What is the “daycare parent pass”? We didn’t have those when my kid was going to daycare and this is the first time I hear about them.
It’s just a security pass so you can go drop off or pick up without having to have your ID checked. I think all daycares have different ways to do this.
I can tell you that with my mom, when she was healthier and telling us what she wanted, I told her to put me at the bottom of the list in terms of responsibility to say yes/no. I didn’t think I would be able to do it emotionally. When things started happening, though… for me, it changed. Seeing her in the ICU right after the stroke, I remember asking questions about if she’d consented to the treatment she was receiving and being told that she had. I knew then that I did have it in me to say yes/no, because I didn’t want her to be in a state she’d told me directly she didn’t want to be in.
What I’ve seen in the years since then has also shown me that it takes a lot for a person to be considered unable to make decisions themselves. My mom is still considered able, even with her cognitive damage and early-stage dementia. I think also that it’s really hard for doctors to slow down and ask the hard questions about if a patient truly understands and wants the kind of survival they’re likely to have, when the doctor knows that something is survivable with treatment. I think a lot of doctors aren’t really trained to have those conversations, and I suspect that it’s a complicated thing for them both legally and emotionally. I still wish they did have those conversations, but I can see why they often don’t.
I can understand that shift. As a child, I struggled with it because it was beyond my ability to really grasp.
As an adult, I didn’t have a choice when my mom got sick. I was both in charge and not in charge at the same time so that was a fraught situation.
In the future, I imagine caring for Dear Friend will be equally complicated as we navigate this situation where she’ll likely be considered more competent long after it’s uncertain she understands everything. I do wonder if there’s a point at which they can choose to hand over decision making, that’s something she and I need to discuss to ensure we’re all on the same page about how to process the grey area stages.
Thank you for sharing your experiences.