#coronapocalypse

[roselightfairy]

I hate when my mask fogs up my glasses not so much because of the fog (although that is also annoying) but because it reveals where the seal isn’t strong enough :(

[roselightfairy]

.

I know times have changed and people are coming from various circumstances and I can’t know everyone’s story or the truth of what’s going on with them and I am also just tired from travel and should chill or whatever, but truly sitting in the airport in these days of living alongside covid and listening to the other people around me making INCESSANT sick-noises makes me feel something akin to homicidal rage

[notemily]

in response to this post.

@glenien I think perhaps you are misunderstanding my intention in reblogging that post. it's not to say that masks are ineffective. I'm wearing a mask every day at work; I never stopped. the post is about the abandonment of public health. it says that it's understandable why people stopped masking, because it is. it's the wrong choice, but the responsibility for that choice must ultimately be laid at the feet of our so-called leaders, who betrayed us on a massive scale when they decided our health wasn't worth interrupting the flow of commerce.

while anti-maskers are hugely annoying, they are responding to their circumstances. mask up, but remember who the real enemy is.

[cardassiangoodreads]

“Zero COVID” is one of those Internet microcosms it is easy to be dismissive of because it’s a thing that is pretty much exclusively believed by a tiny group of very online people and has no advocates with real power — but along with that these people are in very firm echo chambers that just constantly reinforce themselves, they are also starting to use it to spread propaganda blaming Biden for the pandemic (because he didn’t extend lockdowns for 4 years which is, again, a thing no politician anywhere did or is proposing) that other ignorant “leftists” are slurping up because they think they have to listen to everyone online who calls themselves a “queer disabled activist.” It’s probably about time we treat it as just as unscientific as the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown-in-April-2020 people are/were. It might not be as dangerous, but I think it’s being made more dangerous than it needs to be because people aren’t spending more effort debunking it. And like, you clearly aren’t going to convince the hardliners, like with anything, but you can encourage others to recognize the warning signs of it and be more skeptical of — to use a real example I saw on Twitter this month — someone comparing Biden’s COVID policy to Reagan’s total inaction on HIV-AIDS.

[hawthorn-and-ivy]

I am still wearing a mask while cooking dinner. He is still testing positive and coughing.

While I stand here, thinking about the 4 appointments I’ve canceled and the house cleaning I canceled and how the only thing I’m allowing myself to do is work, I am mechanically loading the dishwasher.

Sometimes I think about work. I think about how I spent a month stabilizing an asthma flare, and had the person fully out of the ED with an escalation plan and a nebulizer at home, and then they got fucking evicted. They had missed too much work and their paycheck was short and there are no resources available. The county housing assistance office wouldn’t even answer the phone.

I think about the Reddit post from a resident asking what to do when patients start crying and talking about their lives, and all of the doctors who said the best thing was to let them cry alone while seeing the next patient and then circling back “when they’ve calmed down”.

I think about the surgeon refugee I saw years ago, and how he looked at his hands when he talked about working in the dark with no gloves. Somewhere, someone exactly like me is working without gloves while the phosphorus drops.

They’re all dying and there’s nothing that we can do now that isn’t simply witnessing each life. I can’t make the pharmacy have medications or the specialists have beds or the imaging center take state insurance. I can’t keep that person housed so that they can manage their asthma adequately.

How can we witness this? How are we bearing this?

I want to tear the world apart.

I want to look away. I can’t look away.

I can’t rebuild the world on my own.

[hawthorn-and-ivy]

Thursday therapy review:

Guess who qualifies for a PTSD diagnosis again with the surge in cases that started at the end of July?

It’s me. I know.

I look at the rest of the world, just doing whatever the fuck they want. My twins wanted to go to their best kid friend’s birthday party on Saturday night last night.

I knew it was a bad idea. I knew the case rates were too high to go without significant exposure and risk. But I was tired of being the bad mom, tired of saying no, tired of always having to hold the line, tired of being the only ones masked up. So I said it was fine and I let them go, and they had a great time. And less than 5 hours later, got a text that birthday kid’s older brother was sick and covid positive.

And now my kid has covid and I’m masked in my own fucking house again and all of my self care this week is canceled. I’m not testing positive yet so the 60+ people I saw from Monday to Wednesday are probably fine, but if I’m testing negative/still contagious I’ve just altered the care of easily hundreds of people, if even 3 providers go down for a couple of days.

So my options are never to do anything I enjoy, and to also ruin the lives of my children, or to potentially kill or disable people. That’s actually the choice everyone is making, but everyone is choosing, every day, with no apparent second thoughts, to disable and kill people. While saying that this is over! Even though I have to take care of people that it is absolutely not over for! And it’s not going to change! No one even cares.

I am tired to my bones. I wish there was any hope for something different.

[hawthorn-and-ivy]

Outlaw update:

The five of us still testing negative, the two of them still positive.

My MIL has apparently never heard of Typhoid Mary and keeps trying to cook for us. No thanks, trying to Not get infected.

ALSO my mil who is a lifelong smoker came to my asthmatic fucking house, and is smoking in the backyard. So I’m masking 23 hours a day and using my rescue inhaler twice a day.

ALSO even though they both continued to test positive today, they plan on flying back on Tuesday as initially planned, so good luck every immune compromised person that’s going to be interacting with the 2 international airports and Chattanooga which I don’t think is international on Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning.

[hawthorn-and-ivy]

Thursday Therapy Review

My in laws flew in late saturday night and tested positive for covid on tuesday morning. They somehow did not mask on the plane, did not feel confident reading the covid test that was one of the most obvious positive tests, do not seem to understand that surgical masks are less good than the KN94s and N95s we have around, don't understand that actually distance + masking + ventilation are all important if we're not going to get sick about this.

I've been masking 23 hours a day, eating and drinking outdoors only, and testing daily before work. Work is equally full of covid again, well on our way to full surge. The community does not give a single fuck.

Really struggling with the fact that 2 people who have reportedly been listening to me for 4 years flew unmasked, couldn't read a covid test, and don't understand ventilation. FOUR YEARS of me saying the same thing, over and over and over. If they aren't hearing me, is anyone? Is everyone in the world that I talk to about this just skipping through the community, using the "but surely it could never happen to me" defense?

Between that and the hospital shootings and the super typhoon and the people getting burned by falling on the street, it is a fucking bleak timeline.

None of this is in my control. I can only do what I can do. I have vacation in 2 weeks if I can just stay well for 2 weeks, so I'm going to keep being extra about sanitizing my hands and masking and eating and drinking outdoors.