Isolation Station

The journey continues.

This week, the Ministry of Health and the College of Dietitians threw more policy down the pipe and now I'm working from home unless something specific calls me into the LTC homes where I work.  The idea is to reduce transmission of the virus from home to home, and since I work in three, this makes sense.  It does bring up a bunch of ethical considerations regarding what constitutes essential on-site nutrition care and I'm definitely struggling with that.  I do feel better knowing I'm not going in and using up valuable PPE so the nursing staff can give the best care, but I'm also concerned that my residents are not getting the best care from me right now.

That's a whole ball of wax.  I've had at least 2 video conference calls per week teasing out what it means and I don't want to spend more time on it here, but it's on my mind, so I mention it.

In the meantime, I have been trying to maintain some level of not-going-crazy in the 1000 sq. feet that I share with my husband.  Here's how:

1. I get dressed for work every day.  Even though I'm not going anywhere.  I change into lounge clothes when I'm done. It helps me to distinguish between work time and home time.  Also, it means that if I do have to go in, I'm already dressed. 

2. Staying in contact.  I've been keeping in touch with friends and family a little more than I had been pre-COVID-19.  I'm happy to know they're safe and we commiserate about what's hard about this and what we're hopeful about.  It's nice and I should have been doing more of it.

3. Staying active.  Right now I'm finding that the weather is beautiful all morning and garbage at right around the time I'm clocking off, and this one would be easier if I could get on my bike and ride without getting pneumonia...but I'm trying to get moving regularly.  My gym is closed, but my trainer sent me at-home workouts which I've been doing.  I'm still finding that my joints are starting to feel sore, probably from underuse, and I need to focus more on this.

4. Deleting Facebook from my phone.  I had been toying with dropping FB from my life altogether, but too many groups I'm part of use FB to communicate, including my family.  I disabled the app on my phone, which means I can still use messenger to communicate with people, but I'm not finding myself scrolling through the multiple graphs showing the totally disheartening case-doubling rates of my province, my country and our neighbour to the south, and I'm not doing deep-dives in my friends' comments and getting into flame wars with people I don't really know about whatever it is I disagree with.  I log on once or twice throughout the day from my laptop or desktop, but that's it and I feel better about it.

5. Online scrabble.  My family and I have been playing Lexulous.  This has been good because I have to focus on something very concrete - making the letters I have fit into the letters that are on the board.  I'm historically terrible at this game even though I have a fairly extensive vocabulary.  I remember a friend inviting me over to play scrabble and pulling out all his best stops because he thought I'd be really good.  He skunked me.  Anyway....it's also been good because I'm actually better at it than I remember (or my opponents are taking it easy on me...either way...), and that makes me feel good about something.

Still and all, I'm walking a fine line with my mental health.  I'm actually finding weekends harder because there's less structure to the day and my mind wanders to places it maybe shouldn't go right now.  I'm watching a lot more TV than I normally would and I'm not so proud of that.  Most of what I'm reading is suggesting we've got another month or more of this, so digging in to what's working and getting rid f what's not is going to be extremely important. 

I hope everyone's coping.  I would be really interested to hear what's working for you.