Today my husband and I went out together. I wish I could say that we went out to dinner, but unfortunately, I had to get a blood draw and he needed to have an abscess on his back looked at.
But before that, I had my first experience with teletherapy.
I have a twice a month counseling session with a psychologist. She, along with so many others, has moved to teleworking. Today we had our first session with a screen separating us. It went pretty well. I had a little trouble getting into the session at first but was able to, eventually. I was surprised, as I talked to her, at 1) how well I may actually be coping and 2) how normal so many of my feelings are. My frustrations with the men in my household aren’t because they’re being nasty, it’s because life as we know it has been upended and we don’t know how long it’s going to go on. There’s this undercurrent of uncertainty that’s underneath everything. I don’t like it. No one does. But I realize that there’s an undercurrent. There are reasons for my feelings. In fact, there are very sound reasons for my feelings.
I did tell my counselor that if I had shown up dressed in a HAZMAT outfit with a mask, then she’d have reason to worry. :-).
My husband and I went down to Dekalb Medical (now Emory Dekalb) to get our stuff done. I have an endocrinologist appointment next week, God and COVID-19 willing, and I have a feeling that he’s not going to accept my rationalization of ‘stress eating’ as a reason as to why I have gained back weight I’ve lost. (He is not a bad doctor. It’s just that his bedside manner can be rather lacking at times.). The woman who took my blood was dressed almost as if she were caring for an Ebola patient. Well, maybe not quite THAT extreme, but she did wear a surgical mask and was wearing a disposable paper gown over her clothes.
The women in the office were also wearing surgical masks, almost all of them.
But here’s what was weird: The parking lot was practically empty. I’m used to having a lot of trouble finding a parking place outside of the building I go to and this time, I didn’t have a problem. Elective procedures have been canceled.
The waiting room in the doc’s office was practically empty as well.
And the one thing I thought would happen with my husband ... didn’t happen.
You see, what I wanted to do was drop him at urgent care. He thought it would be more efficient to go to the ER. I thought, okay, if that’s the way you want to do it, but don’t be shocked if I have to pick you up the next morning.
The total time for both of us together to have our stuff taken care of?
Around two hours. If that long.
My husband ended up having a cyst on his back. What had worried me was that the area around the cyst was red. I thought it might be infected and I didn’t want that infection to get into his bloodstream and turn septic. So the docs in the ER drained it and fixed him up, and sent him home with antibiotics. (He told me that the docs had called it a “classic drain”. I sort of felt like he was a participant in an episode of Dr. Pimple Popper.)
While waiting on my husband, I went down to Joann’s Fabrics and got a mini muffin tin, on the reasoning that “if I’m going to be stuck at home, I’m going to do something productive!”
Then I drove down to a small park and took a few minutes just to walk around.
It’s spring in Atlanta, spring that brings the foul-smelling Bradford pears but the forsythia and the daffodils, the cherry blossoms and the redbuds . . . And the pollen. Spring will always follow winter, and in Atlanta, the arrival of spring is not only heralded by the trumpeting of daffodils and the flowering of forsythia, it is also heralded by the sprinkling of pollen over every car, every driveway, every front porch, and every deck in the area.
But this is a weird spring, this spring of illness, this spring that will come marked with the acronym of COVID-19, that will be marked by canceled proms and canceled graduations.
I couldn’t put my finger on it while I was walking around the park, but things just felt odd. Maybe it’s because I was carrying around in my mind the undercurrent of what was going on in our world. There was a sign up at the park saying, playground closed until further notice, and I wondered if this was what the people who survived the 1919 flu pandemic experienced.
What I think it is, why I think it feels odd, is that we’re in the “falling into” phase of this event. Every day is bringing more bad news; the market dropping more points, yet another prominent person testing positive for COVID-19, more governments, more municipalities enacting emergency orders, more places closing or severely restricting their hours. We’re still falling down the hole and we have not hit bottom yet. The fall, in this case, is a little bit like that awful autumn of 2008, where every day brought another drop in the market and another firm closing its doors.
When JFK was shot, or 9/11 happened, or the Challenger exploded, you had the “falling into” phase; where things were happening, one after the other after the other, rapidly and there was no way to stop them or make sense of them. I guess someone’s terminal illness is a bit like that as well. Outside you see the normal rhythms of life, of people going to work, running errands, shopping at the grocery store . . . And your rhythm has been totally upended.
I listened to a Paul Harvey news broadcast the day after JFK’s funeral. The impression I got was that of a nation trying desperately to get its feet back under it after two men and four shots had knocked the feet out from under it and knocked the wind totally out of it. People were jumpy, edgy, trying to navigate a new normal, trying to use the initials LBJ, not JFK; trying to say “President Johnson” and not “President Kennedy.”
We’re not there yet. We’re still seeing the exponential growth of this illness, still hearing of people testing positive, still hearing of protective measures being taken. My own husband is a federal employee and he has yet to learn whether or not he will be going back to work on Monday. (He called in sick Monday, felt better Wednesday, and then went in that Wednesday only to be sent home with orders not to go back until Monday.).
We’re still in this odd, weird, “falling into” phrase where we have not adapted to what is “normal”.
Someday we’ll hit bottom. Someday our feet will get back underneath us and we’ll learn to navigate again.
In the meantime, I will reload my weapon of humor daily with the ammunition of snark.
So, all together now:
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine!
Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.
No comments:
Post a Comment