I got my second dose of the vaccine this week. My arm was sore the day after, of course, so to say I screamed like a crazy person when my son punched me at the injection location that morning would be an understatement.
“Why did he punch you?” you may ask.
He saw a punch buggy, of course. Now, no one punches hard in this game, but my injection spot is SO SORE that I screamed like a crazy person and then laugh-cried because we started playing punch-buggy during the pandemic, so it seemed fitting that my 2nd vaccine would be celebrated by a punch from that game.
What a strange 14 months we’ve had, isn’t it?
Around the first of March 2020 - before anything in our city had shutdown - I was hearing stories about shutdowns around the globe so I anxiously woke up at 3am panicking that we may be trapped in our house for awhile without wanting to go to the grocery store. So, I hit 3 different stores trying to stock up on enough food to keep us homebound for a few weeks. I also stocked up on water because - well - it just seemed like that was what I was supposed to do in a crisis? We’ve never been prepared for anything, honestly. We have batteries but no generator. Until that week we had no “provisions” for anything. We didn’t even have a bottle of hand sanitizer in the house. Hence the 3am panicked shopping trip as I set out to prepare for the unknown.
As I’ve documented before, all of this coincided perfectly to moving my Mom here March 15th. And I was pretty confident, having lived with her and doing all of her shopping for six months in 2018, that stocking up “provisions” for her would not be as easy. My Mom was very, very, VERY picky about her food/drink situation. If I came home with the wrong brand in something? It would never get eaten. Don’t even think about generic products! I did ask her what her favorite soups were because that was “easy” provision to stock up with. But - full disclosure: When she died? Every single one of those soups were still in her cabinet 10 months later.
I still made it to my Indigo Girls concert with my childhood friends in Knoxville in early March. Donnie ran his 100 mile race in Chattanooga a few days later. But after that we started hearing of school systems around the country getting shut down. Wes had his final tendon relocation surgery March 10th and we braced ourselves for that being canceled since it was elective. Lucky for us, we made it about one week ahead of elective surgery cancellations. Because of that surgery we ended up keeping him out of school the rest of the week, which means he started quarantine a week before everyone else did. At first this seemed like a noteworthy thing…until quarantine stretched on and on and suddenly that one-week extra buffer for Wesley no longer seemed interesting.
Nikki had a big soccer tournament the weekend of March 13-15 and we were all bracing for an announcement to shut it down. We kept our phones on every second of every day anticipating the ruling from the school system, but the tournament went off without a hitch and we didn’t get the notice that schools were closing for the next 2 weeks until the final day of play.
My Mom’s sister got her to town that Sunday after the tournament, meaning Mom rolled into town as my city was shutting down. It was all happening so fast, once the schools announced they closed Donnie heard his office was closing. They gave every employee a scheduled 30 minutes in the building to get what they needed. About a month later he really regretting not grabbing his desk chair, but none of us really knew the scope of the shutdown in those early days. He did eventually arrange a time to go get it, but not for that first month or two of remote working.
Because the city shut down, we did not start looking for salons or manicurists for Mom. We didn’t start looking for doctors. We didn’t show her cool things around the city. We just settled into this weird stasis where I went over several times a day to visit and walk her dog and every few days I would get groceries for her. I found myself carrying around a lot of fear and anxiety: Am I going to contact Covid being the errand-runner in the house? Am I going to give it to my Mom?
The kids didn’t have school at all for a few weeks, so while everything was still novel we spent a time hiking and trying to be deliberate about choosing fun activities outside to pass the time. We put together a lot of puzzles. We did sidewalk chalk art.
All of that novelty faded fast. Then they went virtual on schooling for the last few weeks of the year. Our school system was more prepared for that quick change because we have a technology initiative in place already meaning kids all had computers or iPads issued by the school. They parked busses in some of the underserved communities that had Wi-Fi routers blasting signals so kids could come nearby to download assignments etc. I really struggled being the facilitator/educator during those weeks because I was also still getting used to taking care of Mom and I have about zero patience with school stuff.
Both my kids were on the last years at their schools so there should have been “graduation” type ceremonies to send them off. They were bummed at first at all of the cancellations, but in the end it doesn’t seem like it bothered them as much as I worried it would.
Sometime in April Mom got sick. She was sick for a few days and we finally braved going to a doc-in-a-box. It was our first “outing” in the post-shutdown world. We sat in the car until there was a room available. We walked straight back to the waiting room. Then, when they told me to take her to the Hospital ER I had to drop her off, leave her there and she was terrified and upset and it was all monumental levels of terrible.
Note on masks: We didn’t have our mask mandate in place in the state yet, and I can’t remember when exactly I started masking. I do remember I started a few weeks before the mandate and it was so strange at first. I almost felt self conscious in the beginning because no one else seemed to be doing it. Eventually, I found a grocery store where most people were wearing masks and quickly stores started putting up signs requiring them and finally our Governor issued a mandate.
While Mom was in the hospital I was staying at her place with her dog because Rosco was still not settled into the new living situation and he screamed when we were gone for so long getting her checked out so I knew I couldn’t leave him alone without bracing for a call from the landlord again. No visitors were allowed in the hospital anyway, but I did eventually find out I could drop off bags or food from restaurants for her at the security desk. When she was finally discharged 5 days or so later we were prescribed dialysis 3 times a week. My would have two more hospitalizations over the course of the summer and I was not allowed to visit any of the times.
Because of the pandemic the orientation to dialysis was strange. They guided us to a back room avoiding any common areas. Mom was basically falling asleep at the table as they were explaining things to us. Her mask kept falling off and I kept having to pull it up for her. I never did see any of those nurses faces, now that I think about it.
Once school was out I was getting settled into the new dialysis routine. Mom eventually got good at ordering grocery and food delivery to her apartment so I didn’t add dialysis on top of everything else. The one thing Alabama wouldn’t let anyone deliver was alcohol. So, I still had to make her wine runs and she drank about one bottle a day of Sutterhome White Zin. I always felt the need to explain myself when I would buy wine 7 bottles at a time every week. “My Mom can’t drive and so I have to stock up on wine for her because Alabama won’t let her deliver it.” And I would hope they would just assume that was like…a month or more stash.
My husband had not been happy at his job for awhile and the insanity of having to do meetings for 8-10 hours a day from home was not helping. We were all living in hell for awhile before we got a good system down. The dog barking was one of the biggest problems so if there was a “Code Red” meeting I would drive the dog around. Eventually we started boarding him on non-dialysis days. But even that was insane. As I’m writing this I realize I blocked out a lot of how terrible his job situation was…we were all just stressed all the time.
In the summer he decided he was done and he quit his job for a bit of a sabbatical. He had some big projects he had been wanting to do around the house and it seemed like a good time to do them since we couldn’t do anything outside the house. He built an arbor and a swing, he added another swing under our covered patio, he hung a TV under the patio and created a 3rd wall to close it in. He built me a laundry platform in the garage so I didn’t have to go up/down the weird stairs with large baskets of clothes. He did a few small things like upgraded his bathroom and installed a gorgeous star foyer light.
Entertainment the last 14 months has been strange. None of us remember the last time we ate out pre-pandemic. We think it might have actually been in Chattanooga after Donnie’s 100-miler. We all remember the last movie we saw. For Donnie and I it was Birds of Prey. We still haven’t stepped foot in a movie theater, but we did eat out on a patio once for N’s birthday. We ordered takeout a few times but once Donnie no longer had an income that seemed frivolous. We have an entertainment district downtown where you’re allowed to walk around with plastic cups of beer and I think we did that…once? Maybe twice? We did 3 drive-in movie events. I watched one online concernt. Donnie has met friends from his old job for beers on patios a few times. My book club had 3 driveway gatherings where we just visited, no required reading. And the host was a nurse and she had a “parking” area of her driveway and she actually put the chairs in a circle so that we were all distanced and we all wore masks. One of the times was in December and it was cold and dark and I brought a sleeping bag and basically sat in my chair inside the sleeping bag. Her husband had place 3 fire pits around the circle and we all brought hot drinks. It was perfection.
We have local family, but we only gathered a few times and we tried to keep it outdoors. We haven’t done that in months though. I did get to hug my brother’s mother-in-law this week as she happened to be in Birmingham visiting a friend and she’s vaccinated and so I hugged her and cried and it was probably the best hug I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to start hugging people again.
I have been lucky enough to keep up walks with friends during the pandemic. Sometimes masked, sometimes not, mostly in low populated areas. We had one front-yard gathering on my street. My pool did open last summer, but it required masks when you weren’t in the water. This actually was nice, I enjoyed being able to swim last summer and then chat with friends by the poolside. Even distanced and masked.
I think the thing that has saved us the most was the library. It was closed for awhile, but it started offering curbside services pretty early on and since we were already pretty used to putting books on hold anyway - we used the hell out of that! And even now, I think I’ve been to the library twice already this week? We started using their printing services because our printer died and I’m sick of replacing printers. So while the kids are still in school and they need stuff printed I run over there pretty regularly.
Once Alabama put our mask mandate in place we kinda got back to our regularly life in terms of “shopping” type activities. We never did grocery deliver or pickup because it didn’t really work for our family. I tend to meal-plan while I’m shopping based on what’s in stock and/or on sale and that’s hard to do virtually. My Mom relied mostly on grocery delivery, but sometimes would order some for me to pick up curbside. I like the curbside experience, if I could plan better I would probably use it more often.
I love the pandemic change of waiting in your car at places. When we boarded Zoomie a few days a week they would come get him from my car and bring him to my car. I never had to go inside! When Wes was getting follow-up from his tendon relocation we sat in our car and they called us in when the waiting room was ready. We even got our vaccines in our car! I really wish that kind of stuff would stay in place. I much prefer sitting my car than in a waiting room.
Donnie started looking for work again recently, his head is clear and he decided it was time to stop living off our savings. At the time of writing this he accepting a verbal offer but he hasn’t signed all of the legal paperwork yet so it feels a bit surreal. He starts May 24th and it’s exactly the type of job he was wanting. Programming with minimal management responsibilities. I really really wish my Mom were alive to tell her. She was so nervous about him quitting his job during a pandemic and I kept telling her I had full confidence in him, but she worried.
He’s been hard-wiring internet in our house so he can have an actual home office in our bedroom this time. This means he’ll be locked in behind a door every day instead of in the main area of our house stressing out about the dog barking etc. Since he’s just programming, he can put his good headphones on, work in the bedroom, and forget the rest of us exist. There won’t be near as many meetings with microphones and cameras on. I’m optimistic it will be much more sustainable than it was last year.
We canceled several trips from the pandemic. Two small ones around races Donnie was going to do and one beach trip that we had been really looking forward to as the kids have no memory of ever going to the beach so this was their “first” beach trip. We finally used our Airbnb cancellation credit to book a vacation with my brother and his family Thanksgiving week. I am optimistic we will all be vaccinated by then as my kids are both in the next approved age range.
E moved closer to us during the pandemic and so we’ve seen each other regularly doing movie nights at least once a week. He and I sometimes go for walks together too. He’s only about 1.5 miles away from us so it has been a treat during lockdown. Lord…his experience during a pandemic could use it’s own blog entry. He was getting regular weekly tests through work and one showed up positive so he quarantined for 2 weeks but never felt symptoms. When he gave blood a month later he had no antibodies. Then he got sick but all of his tests were negative but he quarantined anyway and when he gave blue 2 months later he DID have the antibodies. So, he’s pretty confident saying he had Covid, but he has NO idea when.
My Mom did not die of Covid, we all know that, but I often think of her death as one of those secondary deaths people talk about that could be partially blamed on the pandemic. She never really felt any joy being here because she was trapped at home all day. Now, she was kind of a homebody anyway, but being forced to stay home is a whole other story. Especially since she was struggling so much with dialysis. I sometimes wonder if she would have stuck it out longer if there had been no pandemic. Would we have found fun things she would like to do? Would there have been more family gatherings? Spectating kid’s sports? Graduations and birthday parties? Things for her to look forward to? I don’t know. Hindsight is 20/20 but not even hindsight really can tell me how those variables would have changed things. Mom had her own demons with or without the pandemic and she was going to have to face health/financial challenges no matter what. Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not.
Either way I’m glad we still did our few family gatherings together. We kept them to major events: Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Her nurses recommended we gather, not because it was without risk, but because her health was such that (having already been hospitalized 3 times in 4 months) she might not be here next year, Covid or not. I’m glad they eased her mind and encouraged her to gather because I would have been broken hearted without at least those memories from the last year.
Mom dying during a pandemic was weird. We didn’t have a funeral service, we just did a “In Memory” type Zoom call. While my friends and family definitely showed their support in cards and food and gifts…it really would have been nice to have a service where I could have had a line of people offering hugs.
I’m so glad my brother took the risk and flew here for her last week and the days after. I’m also glad we just accepted the risk and stayed close and hugged. I don’t know if I would have survived that week without my brother’s hugs.
I can start to feel a small shift. My kids have been hanging out mostly with their friends in our patio area but we have done a few one-person sleepovers with families we know are still taking the pandemic seriously. Nikki is still all virtual with her school, she tried in person for awhile and it was too stressful. Wes has been in person but there’s masks and desk shields every day and so I still feel relatively safe. This whole year his schools has made kids sit at assigned desks and if anyone is home sick (they don’t even have to take a covid test) with symptoms they quarantine everyone who sat around them in class. It’s kept major outbreaks at the school from happening, although there were a few associated with sports teams I think.
We are making plans for another patio outing for Wesley’s birthday. None of us are ready to eat inside anywhere…vaccine or not. E is looking forward to seeing movies again. “On like, a Tuesday at 10am. I still don’t want to go when there will be other people,” he said.
I know there will be years down the road where all of this starts to fade. Sometimes I forget the details about the week after the terrible Alabama tornadoes in 2011 when we were without power for 5 days. This has been so much bigger and longer and more devastating and while no one close to us died from Covid, our lives changed permanently in several different ways over the last 14 months. I just wanted this here to remind me of what we survived.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
I am glad to read your story. Here where I am it feels like I am the only one who has experienced these months as stressful and traumatic. It seems like everyone else went back to "normal" pretty early on. Schools and school sports were fully normal starting in August except for half hearted mask requirements. I kept mine out in virtual and then later swapped to homeschool. It's been enormously difficult - and more so watching everyone else just keep on keeping on while my daughter has missed out on everything. Ok, that's hyperbole. She hasn't missed *everything* - but it sure feels like it. Add to that, we joined a local homeschool group for support, and none of the members wear masks. Ever. And it is a large group. They had weekly outdoor PE and I let my daughter attend (masked) unless they moved it indoors for weather, but it stressed me out every week. As long as I live, I will never understand how these deeply religious people have decided that other people don't matter. Sorry to vent. It's been a long fourteen months. As I said, it's just nice to see that someone else has been having a trying time too.