When you can’t stay at home

I needed more therapy in 2020. Having scrabbled back to something near adequate mental health in the New Year, along came a coronavirus, whatever that was. False optimism that COVID-19 would turn out to be nothing worse than SARS or Swine Flu turned to dust, the world changed and I changed with it. Now my therapy is over and now I have to work out how I can get through the rest of this stuff, assuming of course that the bastard virus doesn’t kill me first.

I am far more paranoid than I was when the first COVID wave came along. For one thing, I was furloughed from work so I was able to follow the government’s ‘stay at home’ instruction. I was wary when I was out of the house, even more so during shopping trips when I would almost fear the legions of senior citizens who clearly had no idea what social distancing meant or if they did, felt it didn’t apply to them. Now, deep into the second wave of the virus and, if anything, I feel worse than I did last time.

For one thing, the very nature of my job means that I cannot work from home, so this geriatric chronic asthmatic cannot stay at home. I do not refer to my job in any way on here but I will say that I do come into close contact with other human beings. That means my chances are getting infected are higher than someone staying at home and my chances of dying from the virus are also much higher. I’d like to say that I don’t think about this very often, but I do; all the time.

Also, I know far more people who have had the virus this time around. It could be that many of those who now have had it might never have been tested back in the spring but everywhere I look, I know people in various states of inconvenience and, occasionally, distress. I know a few people who have been in hospital and indeed two people who are currently in ICU. If you are in ICU, this means you are not doing terribly well and knowing there is no cure, yet, is not a pleasant thought.

Thankfully, my working week is only two days and this time tomorrow, I’ll be hiding in my man cave for the next five days. For all I know, by next week I might have a temperature, yet another hacking cough and – time for an old joke – a loss of taste in which I will be listening to Queen records. Alternatively, I might just limp through the rest of 2020 and hang on just long enough for a vaccine to save the day. If the vaccines don’t work, I’m not sure how much of 2021 I’ll want to see.