Photo Friday, No. 734

Current Photo Friday theme: Looking Back at 2020, Part 2

Because this challenge has run for two weeks, last week, I showed some of the things that have kept me busy and creative since March.

This is a different view of 2020, and it has to do with anxiety (mine), panic (everyone’s), and at least here at Houndstooth Hall, coping with and adjusting to the “new normal.” There are a lot of stories in this photo, and I’ll try to explain them along with a view of my 2020.

In December of 2019, I’d begun reading about a possible new contagious virus and bringing it up in conversations with friends. A lot of people thought I was making something out of nothing, but I just had this sense that I wasn’t. Part of it was the nagging memory of the mid-1980s when most of us ignored a new disease, or thought it happened to someone else somewhere else, and for me, by 1990, HIV/AIDS would have a huge impact on my life and the lives of people I loved. This was when I began reading vociferously about epidemics, viruses, immunology, transmission, mortality, and the way a crisis makes heroes of average people including healthcare workers, and villains of silent, profiteering, and dishonest people.

December felt familiar in a bad way. We were doing two transports a week, the weather was often cold and rainy, and not only could I feel my immune system struggling against those conditions (and see the struggle in the daily and once-a-quarter ways as tracked medically for me), but people I saw were always sneezing, coughing, hacking, and complaining about chills and fevers–their own or family members’.

I talked to my managers and told them I needed to stop the volunteer photography for my health and well being. I was working with other volunteers to create a new system for getting the photography done, and we hoped to have me out of it by the end of January.

That date kept being pushed for various reasons, so I continued going to transports. I kept telling myself I was blowing things out of proportion. But the American public was not being informed by “leaders,” and much of my information was coming from photojournalists in this country (essential for informing us, and often overlooked), and news organizations who were consulting with scientists and medical experts in other countries. The information was not good. Once again, I had that eerie sense of deja vu as in the U.S., the medical community was ignored and science was being politicized and downplayed.

I had lived this story before.

At a transport in early March, I watched a woman who brought her foster dog to load on a van. This woman was usually upbeat, positive, and talkative, but on that day, she looked exhausted and was subdued. I thought, She could very well be sick. She could be sick with something infectious. And doesn’t know she is, and none of us knows, and every one of us is at risk for exposure.

That was my last transport by choice, and that’s when I consulted my doctor and was told in no uncertain terms to isolate at home. To wear a mask if I had to go out. And to wash my hands.

MASKS
There were no masks to be found, but people were making their own, or making them to donate, and I told Lynne about this. She began sewing masks to send to her relatives who worked in hospitals, and she made one for Tom, as he was the one doing our grocery shopping and errand running. I had a paper mask that I used over and over while I waited for the disposable masks and cloth masks I’d ordered to arrive. It TOOK MONTHS for those masks to get here. Fortunately, when friends like Michelle G and Jen M found out I didn’t have a mask, they got several to us, so I was able to take care of Debby’s and my medical needs (doctor visits, lab and X-ray requirements, pharmacy visits).

On top of the toilet paper in this photo, you can see Tom’s and my cloth masks given to us or that we ordered online that finally began arriving. Also shown is a box of disposable masks that I found locally. Not shown are the paper masks that arrived by mail months after I ordered them. Now I keep a box of paper masks in a car caddy at all times in case one of us needs one while we’re out and to give away to others who need them.

PAPER PRODUCTS
Who knew we wouldn’t be able to find paper towels and toilet paper in our stores because when people finally began to take this virus seriously, they panic-bought and hoarded them? The toilet paper shown here is a pack we bought on the first grocery store trip we made when people began wearing masks to shop, and stores began making people stand in line outside to limit the number of shoppers in the store. Once inside, Tom went one way, I went the other, and one of his jobs was toilet paper. He found it, and it wasn’t until we got home that I realized it is lavender scented. I don’t know about any females reading here, but I don’t use scented anything like toilet paper or facial tissues because some people’s skin and nasal passages have allergic reactions. Regarding toilet paper, I am one of the “some” people. So we still have our scented toilet paper months later as an emergency supply or to give to anyone who wants it. Let me know. I can hook you up.

HAND SANITIZER, SANITIZING WIPES, ALCOHOL, SOAP
There was none. NONE in all of Houston. It was nuts. There was regular liquid hand and bath soap and I bought it, but I wanted anti-bacterial liquid soap to keep at our sinks. Forget it. There was no anti-bacterial soap on the shelves. That’s when I remembered bar soap, which is not as popular as liquid soap. I welcomed Dial anti-bacterial bar soap back into my life. By the way, bar soap lasts WAY longer than liquid soap, is cheaper, and doesn’t put plastic in our landfills and oceans. Just sayin’.

How could there not be alcohol and hand sanitizer? I use these constantly in “normal” times. But there were none on the shelves. I bought alcohol wipes to take care of my need of alcohol in a much less efficient way. I was finally able to order hand sanitizer online. When these products returned to our local shelves after months, I felt like I’d won the lottery. There’s hand sanitizer in almost every room of our house now, and in our cars.

There were no personal sanitizing wipes. Working with dogs and having several dogs at the Hall, these are important. The first ones I was able to find when stores began restocking were the ones without alcohol, like baby wipes. I NEED alcohol. I can finally find those now, too, and a container of sanitizing wipes lives in my car caddy.

DISPOSABLE GLOVES
Depending on where I shop, I wear them (along with safety goggles I ordered online, not shown). I wear them to pump gas. Disposable gloves are another thing I keep in my car always. By the way, my sister-in-law told me to keep used and washed bread wrappers in my car. If you don’t want to buy gloves, you can put a bread wrapper over your hand to pump your gas and afterward, toss it in the trash container at your gas pump.

CLEANING PRODUCTS
We never ran out of Clorox, and I used it a lot to make my own household wipes to clean doorknobs and light switches and things like that, especially after shopping trips or when contractors and the exterminator or cable guy had to come inside our house. One of Debby’s doctors is near a Target, so while I waited to pick her up, I went inside Target. I rounded a corner to enter an aisle at the same time a woman did at the other end. Both of us saw a shelf full of Clorox Wipes, looked at each other wide-eyed over our masks, and she said, “I think I may cry.” Each of us bought a three-pack. This wasn’t winning the lottery, this was winning the lottery AND a date with Chris Pine. Or whatever Chris you prefer. When Clorox spray (my go-to bathroom cleaner) returned to the shelves, it was how I celebrated autumn in a region that doesn’t get changing leaf colors in fall.

THERMOMETERS
We have one we use for dog butts. IT WILL NEVER BE USED FOR HUMANS. Our other thermometers, all digital, never seemed to register a temperature over 95 or 96 for me. I wondered if I was already dead and didn’t know it.

This is where we get into my anxiety beginning in March. Every sneeze, every hint of a sore throat. Every day I didn’t feel “right.” Every time I didn’t think my sense of smell was working correctly. In other words, if anyone published a symptom on the Internet, I became convinced I might have COVID. Along with my mental chant of “you are virus free, you are well, you will stay healthy,” was the other mental chant: “you are so fucked.” I needed a damn thermometer to hold my panic at bay. No grocery store, no pharmacy, no anywhere had a thermometer for sale in Houston. Trust me, I made phone calls, asked pharmacists about other stores, asked my own healthcare providers, and nope. No thermometers here or online.

Same story, different day, Debby at a doctor, me in Target: I spotted a child thermometer that checks temperature via the ear. A Target staffer talked to the pharmacist and he said it would absolutely work for an adult. That thermometer lives next to the bed and has calmed me on many a sleepless night when anxiety kicks in. I would go on a date with that thermometer instead of Chris Pine AND Jimmy Garoppolo. That’s crazy talk, but it’s true. That thermometer is worth every penny I spent on it.

(We won’t get into the things I ordered online that were NOT worth a single penny and for which I fortunately got most of my money back. That’s another symptom of the pandemic. People who rip you off with misleading advertising.)

I will wrap this up with some of my other pandemic anti-anxiety methods, including face misters used with my rose quartz roller to massage my face and neck lymph glands and just generally make me calmer, my lavender eye mask, my obsessive need for candlelight to create a serene environment (you don’t want me to show you my supply of tea light candles–I have said that we are going to have to build an extra room for them), my Melatonin which sometimes helps me stave off an anxiety attack and get to sleep, and those chewable Alka Seltzer for when my stomach starts reminding me of all the things I try not to dwell on: my health, my family’s health, my friends’ health. The stupid risks people take and lie to cover up or justify because they know better. The way my fellow humans are suffering and the way we treat each other badly when we are so capable of kindness and compassion. The way I want to say, “Yes, and Mussolini made the trains run on time” to anyone I know who defends a fascist to me, but I don’t. I haven’t.

(By the way, it’s a myth. Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time. He was just a fascist. Most positive facts about fascists aren’t facts at all. But people like the narrative they like.)

Fear, anxiety, and terror in the dead of night are the dark side of the pandemic for me as for many people. I try not to dwell on them in the blog, or regret the time they steal from me. I try to cancel them with writing and music and my own version of meditating. I miss my friends and “normal” life the same way everyone else does. But I want to live through this. I want to stay healthy. I give up what I have to and hope that it means I’ll get to finish writing these books, see my friends again, travel with confidence, enjoy faraway people once more.

The oddest thing the pandemic has taken from me is my desire to read. I have so, so many books in my to-be-read pile, and that’s never been true. I usually read them when I get them. I guess the part of my brain that reads is the part I’m using to write. I don’t know.

I miss reading.

I miss people.