Coronavirus and Us

My wife and I both work in healthcare, so we are busy right now. My wife is a physician who does telemedicine from our home. She sees patients over the internet. Over the last week, she has 40+ patients in her virtual waiting room at any given time. Some of them wait 5 or 6 hours to see her ( um, what is that they always say about socialized medicine and wait times?). I’m a microbiologist in a hospital lab so I’m sorta in the thick of the specimen collecting and testing aspect of this thing.

We don’t have children. Our only dependent is a sweet 4 year old German Shepherd with the disposition of a puppy and a few koi. My parents are in their late 70s. My dad is in pretty good shape from a pulmonary and cardiovascular standpoint but he can’t get around like he used to. My mother smoked most of her life. She finally quit but it took a nearly fatal episode due to COPD to scare her straight. There is no way she could survive COVID-19 given her condition.

Fortunately they live on the side of a mountain in rural PA so they were practicing social distancing before it was cool. My brother is around and keeps an eye on them.

Unfortunately we will all have COVID-19 stories by the time this is over.

hello all.

i’m a dentist. i work for the government. so my job is pretty safe. my wife and i don’t have to worry too much. we’re relatively young i think. i’m 45. my wife is 39. no kids. just one dog. we’ll be ok most likely.

oddly enough our lives have not really changed. we rarely go out. and so there hasn’t been much of an adjustment to make. although it’s made me wonder if there was something wrong before. perhaps when this is over, we’ll try and make more of an effort to connect with the outside world!

we do worry about our parents who are all still alive. i especially worry for my father and my father in law both of whom have diabetes. which puts them at a higher risk of developing complications. and we live in la. not densely populated like new york and san francisco. but still. that doesn’t it make it any easier for them. we pretty much just stay away from them for the time being.

I’ll be 63 in April, but I’m purty healthy. I figure I’ll be alright if I get the evil chinese-communist-anti-american-virus.

Courthouses are mostly closed now, cept for emergency hearings, so I can spend as much time as i want at home. So thats what i do. Books, weeding, cleaning, internet, exercise…thats about it. The isolation hasnt gotten to me yet, but it might at some point.

I have an 89 year-old mom and an older sister with auto-immune issues. So thats where the worry lies.

Plus, most of my clients are poor and out of work now, and scared shitless of starving to death. They are not scared of the virus. Just starving or being homeless. Poverty is way scarier than the virus.

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While I’m of the “older” folks (80) I’m in good health. Barb and I are hunkered down at home with our 9 yr old Springer. Only activity is taking her for walks in a park or the beach (the Springer). My real concern is for my son who seems to be taking all this in a very caviler manner. He’s in his 60s and his immune system has been compromised due to the immunotherapy treatment he’s been through for two battles of melanoma. He’s a lawyer in Sacramento and his office has not closed down so he works every day. On the weekends he’s been working as a ski instructor in the local Sierras -but they just closed down-ironically since they now have the best snow of the year-and no one is there ! Anyway, that’s our main worry now because he’s just exhausted with that schedule. As a side note-we were supposed to go to China at the beginning of this month so we stocked up on masks. When everything was cancelled we are now giving away the masks to local health care facilities. We don’t need them-we’re not going anywhere.

I am probably in the high risk group. 70 and COPD and diabetes. I live fairly close to St. Louis, but no know infections in Franklin County. The stores have some shortage on stuff like eggs, dairy, flour, not as much produce as usual. I haven’t seen a big effect so far.
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I sort of expect this to run its course. It could change and mutate. I expect them to come up with a vaccine. I hope this is over with in a couple months. Good Luck, everybody.

I got a pair of kittens. They are a blast, a lot of fun.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Agamemnon.

Mackeyser wrote:

UNTIL TODAY!!! As soon as I read InvaderRam’s post, it all hit me like a truck. Like, I saw that text 20 years ago AND told my wife about it. I’m not sure how I feel about all this right now. Like, most of my premonitions I guess could be dismisses as deja vu where it’s simply a malfunction of how the brain observes something and it gets routed through memory instead and makes you believe you’re remembering but you’re not. But this one… We had a conversation about it and everything. I’m gonna do some deep breathing rn…

hmmm…

so what do you think this portends?

Just spoke with my brother-in-law and his wife. It looks like they both have COVID-19. They weren’t tested, but they have the symptoms – fever, nonproductive cough, soreness in the chest…

They live in Miami, Fla. They are both in their mid-40’s with kids from previous marriages. Her three kids are young adults and out of the house. He also has three kids ranging in age from 12 to 17. He’s a professor at FIU and she has a pool maintenance business. Both are in excellent physical condition so I expect them to be fine.

Thanks, Invader.

She is a huge Saints fan. We watched the NFC Championship game between the Rams and Saints together. When the Rams were setting up to attempt the winning FG in overtime, I looked over at her and she was crouched on the floor as if she was pleading with the TV. When Zurlein’s kick went through the uprights, I heard her fall forward onto the floor. Part of me felt sorry for her because I know exactly how she felt, but most of me secretly gloated and thought better you than me, Sis.

So… here we are.

I’m 55 going on 56 in May but am at higher risk because I have asthma. My wife is 56 and is in very good health. My 20 year old son was doing a co-op at Draper Labs in Cambridge, MA. At the end of last week, they told all of the co-ops they could work from home. We went and got him on Tuesday. From a traffic standpoint, it was the best drive to Boston I have ever had.
My 24 year old daughter was living in DC. She just got back from a business trip to London 2 weeks ago. Her boy friend recently moved in with her. He is a farm boy from IL. They decided the best thing to do was to go to his parents in the middle of nowhere and hunker down. They made it there late Friday. Hopefully, they aren’t the ones bringing the virus to that community.
I’ve been told I am on a Work From Home protocol. That is fine by me. I’ve been doing a weekly 176 mile commute (one way) to Beverly, MA from here in CT.
We just had our first confirmed case in town, but that is to be expected; we’re only 60 miles from Time Square and a large percentage of people here commute into NYC.
Needless to say, this has been a very strange winter, now turned to spring. The three of us got out and did a lot of spring cleaning raking and leaf removal. Just in time as we’re going to be getting snow and rain today.

All the best, stay well.
Matt

Just found out my beloved niece, who has a newborn, just came down with a lot of the symptoms. She has to isolate in her own house. Her husband, who is as good a man as there is, is taking care of their 2 year old and the newborn. So steadily, this thing keeps creeping closer to home, so to speak. I don’t mean that literally–Lauren and her family live several states away from here. I of course mean that someone I care about now has to worry if they have this. It is all less of a mere abstraction in the news.

…

I’ll be 60 in a few months asthma both the wife and I. The wife is Asian and cannot walk outside alone anymore. Asians have been targeted here quite a bit. I had all the symptoms around the first of the month but they don’t test people like me. I feel pretty good now. That’s a good thing since I’m essential , people can’t survive without their Capt’n Crunch and Cheerios.

zn wrote:

Just found out my beloved niece, who has a newborn, just came down with a lot of the symptoms. She has to isolate in her own house.

Turns out to be okay. In her own words:

Lauren

Our results came back NEGATIVE. We feel really grateful for the ability to be tested, otherwise we would have been quarantining and wearing masks in our homes for 14 days fearful of getting our girls very sick given our positive screens.

Looks like most of us here are at risk, in one way or another, and/or have family and friends in rough straits. I wish you and yours great health, safety and longevity. Be well and wash your hands!!

Not saying anything new here, of course, but difficult times can bring out the best in us, and I think it does for most people. Not all. But most. I’ve noticed for a long time now, for instance, that cancer patients routinely try to make desk personnel and nursing staff laugh, as we make light of our own conditions. I tend to do what some now call “Dad jokes,” because I’ve never been good at repeating better known comedy stuff. Bad puns, more often than not. Since we basically have captive audiences, they don’t throw tomatoes at us, though they might, if they had them on hand.

In the end, there are no good answers, I think I believe. Only love and laughter, which bring us hope. Am reading a good bio of Montaigne right now, by Sarah Bakewell, that has me pondering these things even more than usual:

Books

How to Live. (I loved her At the Existentialist Cafe, so grabbed this one when I saw it on the E-book list in Libby. Makes me want to read his complete essays, which I have on my bookshelf, but have never tackled in full.)

He was greatly influenced by the Ancients, especially the Stoics, Skeptics and Epicureans. Eudaimonia was their goal, and they sought Ataraxia to get there.

A quote I found on the Internet. It’s really not as maudlin or morbid as it may sound initially:

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

Oh, and a shout out and special thanks to all those in the Healing professions, including Rescue, First Responders, etc. You guys are true heroes.

A thousand thanks!!

Hey—it’s good to hear that everyone is doing well under the circumstances. My wife and I are doing okay. We both hit 58 next month. We are both essential workers apparently(she is a McDonald’s manager and I ship paint). So we both still work. The rest of my family is fine. My daughter and her husband just bought a house(and she is laid off for now). But so far so good for us. Like others, I have asthma so I worry about that a bit.

But for now I’m fine. I would love an antibody test to find out if I’ve been exposed to the virus.

Insane year.

I can’t really even think about football (not a fan of the logo though). I mostly watch movies or comedy shows for distraction.

Stay safe everyone.