Breathless

 Something is wrong with me. I'm beginning to wonder if I've had Covid in the recent past and just didn't know it. I did a couple of at-home tests, both of which were negative, but I still wonder. Since April, off and on, I've been having a lot of trouble with asthma flares. Lately it's been mostly "on". 

I've been short of breath and wheezing almost continuously for about two weeks now, despite (over) using the inhaler the doctor prescribed. I have a dry cough that's keeping me up at night and making my days slightly miserable. Walking the dogs in the heat and humidity has been nearly impossible. I wheeze deep in my chest every time I exhale, and the urge to cough is always there. It's driving me crazy. 

I have a doctor's appointment next Wednesday and I'm trying to hold out until then, but if I have another bad night like I had last night, I'll be going to Urgent Care. I honestly think my oxygen levels are fine, but the wheezing and coughing are keeping me awake most of the night and I can't really enjoy anything when I feel like this. I haven't felt totally normal in a couple of months now.

Could this be the result of an undiagnosed Covid infection? What do you think? I haven't had this kind of trouble with asthma in years and years. 

Omicron

 I woke up about 3am this morning sneezing, coughing, and with a runny nose and mildly sore throat. It might be my typical allergies, or a mild cold, but with Covid cases surging around here and our school overrun with the Omicron variant, I decided it was best to stay home today and get tested. I've been very careful. I've even taken to wearing an N-95 mask at work, that's how bad our numbers are, but even so I have contact with lots of people in the course of a day and over a third of the staff (and lots of students) are out sick. 

I tested negative. Luckily our district is partnering with a local pharmacy that does rapid testing for us for free and I was able to get my answer in 10 minutes this morning. Now I can go to work tomorrow confident that I just have a regular cold, or allergies, or whatever, and I won't be risking spreading the evil virus.

God, I hate Covid. Hate it. I have no idea who they found to fill in for me at work today; two other office people are out and our classroom assistants are all covering classrooms where teachers are absent. I felt guilty staying home, but I know it was the right thing to do.

From bad to worse (quick update in the comments)

It's the worst Thanksgiving I've had in years.

Not only are my parents ill with Covid (my dad seriously so), but Gregg woke up this morning with a cough, fever, aches, pains, a scratchy throat, and bad nausea. 

It's far too soon for us to have caught Covid from going to the hospital on Tuesday even if we were exposed. There's no way he would be symptomatic that fast, but of course he could have been exposed at work or somewhere else days and days ago. 

The soonest I could schedule a test for him is tomorrow morning at a drive through testing site. I went to the drugstore this afternoon looking for a rapid at-home test but they were sold out. The holiday, I suppose. I hope it's just some other bug and NOT Covid, but I have a bad feeling. He's isolating in the bedroom and I can hear him throwing up as I type this. 

I don't know what to do with myself. 

I went ahead and cooked the turkey breast that was thawed in the refrigerator and a few side dishes, but I don't feel like eating and Gregg is too sick to eat. At least there's enough food cooked for two or three days and I won't have to worry about meals while we deal with all this. 

I'm so lonely and scared. What a way to spend Thanksgiving. 

Part of the meal no one feels like eating. 

A bad start to the holiday

Yesterday got off to a such a good start. It was the last day of school before Thanksgiving break and everyone showed up to work cheerful and excited. I was looking forward to getting through the day and the beginning of five days off. Even the "mean girls" were pleasant and friendly for a change. All seemed well with the world.

About 10:30 the direct line at my desk started ringing. I looked down and saw my dad's name on the caller ID, and immediately knew something was wrong. My parents never call me at work. I answered the phone with a great deal of trepidation, knowing that whatever they were calling for couldn't be good. 

It was my mom. "Jennifer, you've got to come home. Can you come home?" I asked her several times what had happened. All she would say is that my dad had been taken off in an ambulance and to please "come home" right now. She soundly oddly calm and but wouldn't give me any details.

I was sure my dad was dead. 

The secretary saw my face when I went looking for the principal to tell him I had to leave. She said, "Mrs. Barlow, what's happened?" "I think my dad may have just died" I replied. By then I was having a hard time breathing and was walking in circles, feeling confused and just in shock. I'll give the office ladies credit here. Even the two who have been so rude and unkind lately were immediately there, offering to drive me home or to call my husband to come get me, asking what they could do, telling me they would be praying for my family. The principal and one of the assistant principals reached out to offer support last night, too.

My mom called my cell when I was on the way to her house, and that's when I found out that dad (probably) wasn't dead, but had been close to it when the ambulance took him away. He had collapsed and was unconscious (he has congestive heart failure and several other serious health problems) after several days of being much sicker than usual. Then she explained that she couldn't go up to the hospital to check on him because she was sick too. Sick with a "chest cold", diarrhea, and a fever. (You can probably guess where this is going).

When I got to the hospital dad was still in the emergency room receiving stabilizing treatment. He really was on the verge of death when the ambulance picked him up. His blood pressure was bottoming out, his oxygen levels were dropping, and they suspected sepsis. He was slowly coming around when I got there, so I got to talk to him and tell him I loved him. I stayed for a couple of hours and then went home (after leaving my number with the ER nurse supervisor and getting her promise that they'd call if anything changed). They finally got him admitted to the hospital around 6pm last night.

When I first went in to see dad yesterday I was wearing a regular paper mask, but the first time he started coughing I went to the nurse's station and asked for an N-95. That turned out to be a good decision. This morning my mom called to let me know that he tested positive for Covid despite the fact that he got vaccinated back in March. When you consider that he's in end-stage congestive heart failure to begin with, this might be deadly. My mom is at home and almost certainly has Covid, too. She's diabetic so that's not good, and her cough sounds terrible over the phone. She's going to be lucky if she doesn't end up in the hospital alongside dad. 

All I can do is wait at home to hear any news. Dad won't be allowed any visitors and mom is going to have to quarantine for the next couple of weeks. It's all very worrying.

Happy Thankgiving.

I've had better weeks.

Sunday afternoon was a day to remember. Marco got away from us, flew up into a tree, and refused to come back. We were scared that he was gone for good!

The way it happened was like this. Gregg was on the back porch working on some projects with Marco riding around on his shoulder. After a while, he forgot he was on there, and without thinking walked out the door to the backyard. Mistake. Marco immediately took off and ended up in a big tree on the edge of our yard. We spent an hour and a half trying to coax him down, to no avail. We offered him his favorite treat (walnuts), we called his pal Georgie to come out to stand with us under the tree, we pretended to start walking back to the house while cheerfully calling for him to come with us, we demanded he come down, we shouted. We even threw a rope over the branch underneath him and shook it to try to scare him down. Nothing worked. The little bastard crawled around on his branch, chewing on leaves and occasionally responding to us with "Hey baby!" "Whatcha doin'?" "Woooo!", and, infuriatingly, "C'mere! C'mere Marco!" I swear he even laughed a couple of times. It started to get dark and he seemed to be perfectly fine with the idea of sleeping up in the tree with his newfound freedom. 

Finally, out of sheer desperation I took a chance on a pretty extreme solution. I went and got the hose, turned the water all the way to the "on" position, set the flow setting on the nozzle to "jet", and I blasted his ass out of the tree with a mighty gush of water. He fluttered down to the ground at our feet, dripping and stunned, and we grabbed him up and took him inside. I couldn't believe it had actually worked. So Marco is still with us, safe and sound, and having learned nothing.

                                          The next day, stealing a sip of my wine.

The rest of this week so far hasn't been much better. Gregg had to visit a dermatologist recently and he found out he has another basal cell carcinoma on his face that must be removed. It's right beside his nose whereas the previous two were on his forehead. All those years of sun exposure on his fair skin are catching up with him. He's been pretty bummed about it. 

Work continues to be busy and stressful with Covid still spreading like crazy around here. Another friend of ours got sick this past week and felt like he had a horrible case of flu even though he's vaccinated and very careful. In fact, it's the friend that helped us get our vaccines relatively early on. He works in a hospital so I guess he's exposed to Covid more than most. At least since he was vaxxed he didn't get sick enough to end up in the hospital himself, though. Just last weekend, an unvaccinated young mother who teaches in the school district next to mine died from it. Her reason for not getting the shot was that she was breastfeeding her youngest child and was afraid it might hurt him. Now he and his three siblings are motherless and her family is begging the community to get the vaccine so no other family will have to go through the pain they're experiencing.  This teacher was healthy and active (she coached volleyball) and was only 28 years old. When are people going to wake up and take this virus seriously? How many more people need to die first? 

Speaking of illness, you might notice I'm posting this at an odd time of day for me. I'm at home taking a sick day. Last night out of nowhere I started feeling like I had the worst heartburn of my life. I was walking around, trying to get my stomach to settle down, and all of sudden I started throwing up violently. It was really strange and upsetting. I feel better today except for a bad headache, but decided to stay home just in case I have a stomach bug. I hope that's all it is. This Delta variant is known to have some unusual symptoms sometimes.

What a week so far, and it's only Thursday!

At least August is over

September is very, very welcome this year. I can't tell you how happy I am to see the back of August. It was a particularly bad one, and then it felt like it dragged on and on and on. I didn't have it in me to post very much.

Everything seems to be all pandemic, all the time again. The delta variant of this virus is running rampant in this state and our local community. At my school, the principal, his family, the bookkeeper, her family, about a third of the teachers, and dozens of students have gotten sick. And every time a student tests positive several others who have desks near him/her have to go home and quarantine for 10 days. That really pisses parents off, as some kids are on their third quarantine after just a month of school! The nurses get cussed out at least once a day. They're so overworked and worn out that I'm surprised they're still showing up, honestly. Anti-mask parents have been protesting at the district office and at the schools while we do the best we can to keep ourselves and our students safe. Two parents acted so crazy in the office this week (one of whom was a big redneck dad with what looked like prison tats on his neck and arms who took the mask I tried to hand him, threw it to the floor, folded his big meaty arms, and glared at me threateningly) that I felt the need to call for the school resource office to come down there and lend me the support of his presence. People have lost their damn minds. 

And you know what's scary? Most of the staff that have gotten sick in the last two weeks are fully vaccinated. Granted, they're not in the hospital and they're not deadly ill, but they feel like they've caught a bad case of flu. It's beginning to feel like a matter of when, not if, I get sick myself. My friend Karen from book club caught this delta variant despite being vaccinated. She tested positive last weekend after running high fevers for a couple of days. Things are so bad in this area that we're canceling book club meetings for the next couple of months out of an abundance of caution. A couple of days last week South Carolina surpassed Florida for per-capita new infections and deaths. Florida! One of the hotspots of the country!

Meanwhile, over half the people in this community act as if nothing is happening. They're off traveling over this Labor Day weekend, and the town next to mine, Darlington, is hosting their annual big drag race weekend which will bring over 40,000 people to the area. The beaches are packed. Most of the people participating in this stuff are anti maskers and anti vaxxers, of course. They don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. Last week, my husband came close to quitting his job over the fact that most of his coworkers refuse to wear masks and the owner of the business won't do anything about it. Honestly, we were both so fed up with the state of things last week that we both wanted to quit our jobs. 

Here's hoping that September will mean the return to virtual school, at least for a while, and I can work from home again. Everyone in the district think it's a matter of time. At least the weather's nice. We've started off the month with a small dip in temperature and a big dip in the humidity, and those are very welcome developments. Also, it's a much needed three day holiday weekend. I'll try not to think about what all the holiday travel is going to mean for our numbers in the next couple of weeks.

Stay safe, friends. 

Just a Thursday update

 Thanks for all the positive feedback on my last post. It made me feel better about how busy I've been just recently. 

Things are still crazy at my job. Not really my job per se; so many students are out due to either having Covid or quarantining because they've had close contact with a person who tested positive that it's almost like last year with the A/B cohort days and some students using the all virtual option. I'll bet anywhere from a quarter to a third of our student body is out right now, and at the rate things are going I don't see how we'll manage to keep the schools open until Christmas break. A kid at one of our three public high schools actually died last week. It was a 15 year old girl who had some pre-existing health conditions, but it was Covid that killed her. Several staff members at our school have been out sick, and a couple ended up going to the hospital. This includes my teacher friend with MS. I've been so worried about her. She wasn't able to take the vaccine due to her MS treatments and it's monstrous that she had to come to work with the Delta variant raging in this community. I saw the other day that the ACLU is suing the state of South Carolina over the ban on mask mandates and virtual options for school, saying that it denies medically fragile students their rights to a public education. And it damn well does! We'll see what happens.

But my job is okay. I'm staying as safe as possible. Without the awful coworker from last year around things feel much better and the work is a little bit more fairly divided. And hey! I get a lunch break now! That's progress. 

Not much to report on the home front. I picked the last four (half green) Brandywine tomatoes the other day and now the garden is ready to be torn down and cleaned up. I harvested an astonishing 53 pounds of tomatoes this year and more jalapenos than I know what to do with. The last of those (the jalapenos) need to be picked and pickled if I can manage to find any canning jars to put them in.  I'm out and they're hard to find this year. I'm currently drying two massive ristras of peppers and don't need any more of those. I can't believe how much four plants have produced!

 

Delta

 Yesterday South Carolina hit a grim milestone: 10,000 people in this small state have lost their lives to Covid-19. It's hard to fathom the true cost in suffering of that number. Not just the physical suffering of the people who died, but the emotional cost to the loved ones left behind. 

It didn't have to be this way. But here we are.

Here's where we also are: the Delta variant is spreading like wildfire in South Carolina and our infection rate, hospitalizations, and death rates are skyrocketing. All while half the population (at least) act like nothing is happening and the pandemic is over. It actually was almost over at the beginning of the summer, but with the variant out there now and such a huge percentage of the population acting like it's their God-given right to go around unvaccinated and unmasked, we're as bad off now as we were back in February. Misinformation about vaccines is rampant here. A local doctor (a guy I went to high school with) said the number one reason his patients give for not getting vaccinated is that they feel it's not "loyal to the GOP". It's maddening that a virus that threatens our very lives has been turned into a political issue.

 Speaking of which, I'm beginning to wonder if governor McMaster (nicknamed, fittingly, "McDisaster") is trying to kill us all off. He's joined other Republican governors in the South in making it illegal to require masking in schools or to offer a virtual option this year. Yes, friends, you read that right. It's illegal and we'll lose our federal funding if we require students and staff to wear masks, and we're not allowed to have a virtual option this year, either. Several school districts in Texas and Florida (two states with governors almost worse than SC) are openly defying these laws and filing lawsuits. All while our schools are a hotbed of Covid transmission.

The students at my school will have been back for two weeks tomorrow. Several students and a couple of staff members have contracted Covid already, and as of early this morning we had over 50 students who have been sent home to quarantine for several days because of close contact with an infected classmate. The number was probably more like 70 by the end of the day. Our school nurse, Lisa, is being run ragged trying to keep up with the tsunami that's her workload this year. She has to document everything, explain the quarantine process to scared parents, finish reports for the county health department, in addition to the normal middle school nurse duties. Normal duties like the little girl that had an accident in gym class and broke her arm this afternoon. It's a giant mess. Pretty soon so many kids are going to be at home quarantining that I'm not sure how we're going to continue to have normal school days. It's that bad.

Needless to say, it's back to masking and being super careful for me. I worry about the kids too young to get vaccinated, and the ones who are eligible but whose parents won't do let them have it. And then there's the teachers and staff: one teacher at our school has Multiple Sclerosis and was taking a type of treatment for it back in the spring that meant she couldn't take the vaccine. She has a choice: come to work,  unvaccinated out of medical necessity, and risk her life with the highly contagious Delta variant that we KNOW is all around us, or stop working to protect herself and lose her career and income. 

What the hell kind of place do I live in to allow such a thing to be possible? 

One whole year

Yesterday afternoon Gregg and I received our second doses of the Covid-19 vaccination. What a relief to know that in two more weeks we'll be fully protected from this dread virus.

It's been almost exactly one year since all this began. I'm glad I didn't know at the time exactly how long the pandemic was going to drag out; I distinctly remember thinking that in a few weeks it would be under control and life would get back to normal. Haha!

I'm thankful for science and the worldwide effort it took to get effective vaccines developed and distributed in such a short amount of time. Well, short is relative but you know what I mean. With all the loss of life and all the suffering, I'm also grateful that neither we nor anyone we're close to and love have gotten seriously ill or died. (I should qualify that and add the word yet so as not to tempt fate). 

So far the side effects from the second shot have been mild. My arm started to hurt sooner this time and was (and is) terribly sore. I had crazy dreams all night and when I woke up this morning I felt jittery and weak and out of sorts, kind of like when you're recovering from a bout of the flu. A good dose of Motrin helped a lot and as I sit here typing this, I feel mostly fine. Maybe a little tired. Gregg felt totally normal this morning and went to work as usual. His arm didn't even get sore this time.

It's strange to think about being able to do social things again soon. I feel a bit gun shy about it, to be honest. The first few times I meet up with other vaccinated friends without masks and without social distancing, I think I'm going to be uncomfortable. After a full year of forced vigilance and fear of getting sick, I can't imagine being able to immediately turn off the anxiety. And some things are probably over forever, like blowing out candles on birthday cakes. It's definitely going to be a "new" normal. I wonder what that will look like?

Still, the President has said that he wants vaccines offered to all adults without exceptions by May 1st, and we're on track to be able to celebrate a normal Independence Day holiday. That sounds good to me! The fourth of July seems like a reasonable target for a return to normalcy if everyone has a chance to get vaccinated starting in May.