Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (195)
February 26, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 328: This day’s theme: It’s all a LOT.
Reading up on what Sera might have (probably has) and getting to this part has me wanting to yell cusses: “This is a life-threatening cascade of events and, in fact, a 20-80% mortality rate (depending on the study) has been reported with this disease.” I can’t. She’s sleeping right over there and yelling or cussing would wake her. But I want to.
That’s a huge range but more literature points to a worse prognosis generally than a good one. We have to increase her steroids again and add a second medication to try and stabilize her, and that’s terribly depressing.
My therapist asked if I’m feeling supported by PiC and friends through this and I didn’t understand the words. Support for what? I’m not the one who’s sick. (Well, I am but I have a cough, not something hemolysing my RBC.) All I could do for the past month was take care of her and hope like hell that she’s going to respond to the treatment. I’ve been holding my breath this whole time and probably repressing my feelings with caretaking. Because after that first cry when we discussed all the possible options for why she was jaundiced and anemic, all bad options, I felt the loss of Seamus crashing down on me again. I can’t DO that again. Not so soon.
*****
PiC took the day off to take JB for a playdate with New Friend (“Jay”) at the museum today. They had so much fun. I was mildly jealous. I’ve never had senioritis so badly: I wanted to ditch work and go play. Work that has been increasingly terrible for everyone. At least it’s customer-facing terrible (high maintenance misbehaving type people) and not internal-people terrible. We’re all in it together (sadly).
Year 4, Day 329: I’d hoped to get Sera’s meds filled at Costco today but they have to order it. Fingers crossed that it’ll be ready tomorrow. She’s back on the higher dose of steroids now, and it’s now making her both very hungry and very thirsty. She was only ravenous in the first round. I hope the thirst doesn’t persist. Hunger, I can appease with several small meals a day. Thirst means even more walks than the standard 5 a day she gets now. I might not make it. 😩
I want to stress-declutter but it’s nearly impossible to find a stretch of time where I can walk away for a cleaning binge. I’m already walking away seven or eight times to take Sera out or feed her or medicate her or do school dropoff and pickup. I’m stretching our walks out a little longer as my compromise.
Year 4, Day 330: It’s chilly enough to see your breath this morning. That’s normal. What’s not normal is seeing that same foggy “breath” coming off cars and trash bins when I was walking Sera. I think it’s where the sun was hitting them and warming them enough? It looked like we were playing dragons.
PiC has been heroically managing childcare this week for JB so that I can work because I’m so overloaded with ALL THE THINGS.
I cooked today! More on that later.
My coworkers, people in the industry, my relatives in healthcare all report similar trends to what I’m seeing that’s so frustrating in my day to day work: misconduct and lying has increased by something like 80%. I used to spend a couple days a month handling complex cases. Now I have 1-3 every single day. It’s so bad that the historically chipper folks who always assume the best in all situations have given up and defer entirely to my much stricter rulings on how to handle these cases. This matches what I observe in other areas too, like drivers are so much worse since COVID and we keep losing good people and the bad people keep thriving. I don’t like this landscape one bit.
Year 4, Day 331: Bloodwork for Sera again today. I’m trying not to hold my breath for the results because it’s been so up and down. One set of values is good, another set of values is bad. Then switch. This is the third set, will it switch back to Up/Down again or
In small doses, I see my childhood in this Captain Awkward and I can feel echoes of it affecting my parenting (which I am working on excising). Some of this is due to the immigrant experience, the world really is forking harsh when you’ve lived through war on your doorstep and then become immigrants (the first two). Some of this is pure selfishness to my eyes (the third one) though arguably it could also be seen as super shitty coping mechanism on the part of someone who has had trauma in their life and only knows to look out for themselves: #1421: “How do I be a parent if I never really had one? And how do I not be the kind people write to advice columns about?
A lot of these fights come down to questions of identity and a perception that a harsh world is justification for being as cruel as possible to their children in preparation (but not a good reason to make the world less harsh).
When these parents look at their kids, they’re looking for stuff to fix or improve, not stuff to enjoy, like they’re so caught up in what their kid should be like that they forget to like the kid they have.
You owe me obedience, you owe me compliance, you owe me all your money, you owe me a consistent level of achievement, you owe me following the career path I choose for you, you owe me on-demand access to your living space and time and attention, you owe me every holiday forever, you owe me a say in every choice you make from education to career to romantic relationships to how you dress and what you call yourself, you owe me the chance to control how you raise any future kids you might have, and you owe me these things totally independently of how I treat you. Come on, it’s not like I ever hit you or anything.”
Year 4, Day 332: Friday food review: It’s been a lot of just-getting-by meals here: take out, ready made meal entrees from Costco supplemented with frozen broccoli and rice, leftovers smorgasbord. But ONE DAY THIS WEEKEND I COOKED. I made a seafood pasta that was completely unappreciated by Smol Acrobat and enjoyed by everyone else: shrimp, scallops, and clams in whole wheat spaghetti.
Then I tried to make thit kho for the first time. This is a comfort food from my childhood and, oops. I ruined another spatula.
Random ponderings: It’s always cold here, usually I’m zipped up to my nose in a hoodie. I’ve started wearing a tank top under my tshirt layer and wow! That keeps me a lot warmer than I remember. My feet are still cold all the time though, even in wool socks.
Sera is just a wee small dog on my dog size spectrum. I have to bend over to pet her! But at 50-55 lbs, she’s at the top of my solo lifting limit. I do best with large dogs but probably shouldn’t adopt another dog I can’t lift into the car. It was really hard getting Seamus in and out of the car when he had his dental and was so zonked he couldn’t walk on his own.
I’ve been working through the ways my dad was really not a great parent, but at least I did have one loving and present parent. As an adult, I’m glad her debilitating anxiety didn’t affect me (wipe off can lids or you’ll get botulism! No washing your hands during thunderstorms! and so on) except that every so often I realize “wow, that was bonkers.”
I often wonder if I’m a good enough parent to my kids. I feel like there’s so much to DO.
Given how low the bar is, I can pretty confidently say that we are all great parents.
nicoleandmaggie recently posted…RBOMoney/career/etc
I feel the same way about so much to do! And then sometimes I read stuff like this and think, oh wow the bar for good parenting is way lower than I thought it was: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article285803366.html
I’m glad you dodged the debilitating anxiety. I have a relative who very much leaned on their kids to practice their anxiety coping techniques and the one prone to anxiety does and the one not prone to anxiety doesn’t. It’s interesting.
… that IS a distressingly low bar…
Jenny F Scientist recently posted…Adulting, Latest Round
oooh yay for cooking! i know all too well about falling into a takeaway rut to get through… and that pasta sounds delightful.
In therapy mine’s been going on about how i deserve support through some upcoming things which is just so fundamentally at odds with my warped view (let me get through it then report back for my gold star/tick/A+ from you thank you!) But let me back yours up – caretaking is f-ing draining and yes, all the support you can get is absolutely warranted.
Off to read Captain A. Yikes, mine was very much always looking for the flaws and that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do. I also went to school assembly today as kiddo’s class was ‘hosting’ and I was kinda dismayed at the expectations and beration – maybe I’m out of touch but the zero tolerance for any fidgeting and mumbling and the swift telling off seemed harsh. I also couldn’t help but wonder where the healthy line for expecting compliance is (we all gotta learn to play by the rules) but something about all the awards for ‘following instructions’ hit a bit off centre for me.
The pasta does need more flavor, I’m still working on that, but the dish is steadily improving! And I managed to cook the scallops perfectly twice but I’m always terrified of overcooking them into rubbery hockey pucks.
I hate to say it but I also look for flaws. I see them and then I have to firmly latch my lip shut and not offer most of those observations.
Yeah the awards for following instructions very much feels off, it feels much more about training for compliance and not about teaching people to think and be civilized.