The worker opens my window a good three or four inches. The icy blast from the -10° weather outside makes me feel like – for a split second – I’m outdoors. I think I can smell pine trees in the air. Is it real or imagined? She turns my heat off and helps me get into my shaggy brown sweater. It’s like wearing a teddy bear. I assume the position: in front of my laptop, chair tilted way back for comfort, in Bluetooth mode so I can run the computer with my joystick. I blog.
As I’m writing, at 10:57 AM, I’m currently OUT of isolation. When I woke up at 7 AM, I was IN isolation. This is my new reality. Every time one of my workers is identified as a close contact, I’m put in isolation for five days. I can see the pattern emerging already. Every five days out of seven I’ll be in isolation. I expect this will continue for most of the winter until the weather starts to warm up in April.
As I go in and out of isolation, so does the swab in my nose as the LPNs check for Covid cooties. In addition, everyone in the entire building, whether in or out of isolation, gets checked every five days. That’s a lot of swabbing.
Yesterday morning, one of the drug mules came in with my breakfast meds. She’d been away the last 12 days because she had Covid. She still sounded terrible and admitted she was exhausted. As well as the PPE, she wore a regular blue hospital mask, NOT one of the N 95 white fitted ones. As a drug mule, she would be going in and out of most resident rooms, potentially infecting pretty much everyone. Admittedly, I’m sure she was following the protocols established by the public health department for workers in LTC. Call me paranoid, but that’s not good enough. At my request, she won’t be coming to my room again for the next week or so.
On the positive side, two workers washed my hair yesterday morning. OMG, they are angels of mercy. It wasn’t as good as a shower, but it sure did help. The previous three weeks of oiliness, grumpiness and itchiness went down the drain along with the suds.
To maintain my sanity – such as it is – I’ve been practising a technique I learned from Andrew Weil’s book, Breathing: The Master Key to Self-Healing. Moving oxygen in and out of my lungs makes me feel balanced and helps keep anxiety at bay.