Corona Diaries

Penelope

“Why am I sheltered from risk while others have to walk into it? I feel that it is wrong in my heart and I am devastated by it.”

Background Information

Female, aged 35-44, Shielding and working from home as a Nursing Sister, Southwest Wales, Married to Ryan with 3 stepchildren.

April 2020

April 2nd

Last night I didn’t feel well at all, I had a fever and fear set in. My temperature went over 38 and I spe nt an evening frantically doing every symptom checker I can find online. I know I should know this stuff, but I couldn’t help but over analyse things. Today so far, my temperature is still on the higher side, but my breathing is okay, and I do not have a cough.

It is strange adjusting to working from home, it is my first week. Normally this week I have got up and gone for a quick walk. I have tried to notice things, the shapes of the leaves, the clouds in the sky. On Monday I stared at the clouds and imagined shapes and animals and figures forming in them like I used to as a child. It is strange how I used to do that and find myself doing it again. I have been starting to remember things, silly things about my grandmothers and their ways. I wonder if that is because the world is slowing down.

April 3rd

It is strange working from home and not putting on my uniform. I feel like I end every conversation with ‘stay safe’, it feels strange. I miss the contact with the team, with the unit, with my friends.

I still have a fever and I will be tested tomorrow.

While my work is going okay and I do still feel like I am able to be really useful and contribute, I miss being able to go for a walk, the freedom and the sense of space being outside can give. I find myself hoping that I will be here to see the other side of this.

April 6th

Over the weekend I got tested. It was not a pleasant experience, one that makes you gag. The nurse was lovely, and I just felt awful, as if I was putting her at risk. I was glad however to be in the car and just somewhere different. Simple things have given me joy this weekend. A car journey through the countryside to the testing centre which allowed me to see my most favourite view and watching Derry Girls on the telly which made me smile. The milkman came and delivered us milk, I could have cried my eyes out when I saw all the bottles sitting outside our kitchen door.

Our routines have become more grounded, slower. The days seem to have a different speed to them, a steadier pace. I find myself constantly thinking about how things will change, who will be here to see it. Will I be? I find myself vowing to be different, forgiving myself for silly things that I did years ago that now have no meaning other than the fact that I have carried them around with me for all these years and they

have clouded my conscience. But I am setting myself up for another week now, I hope that I can do my bit, do my best.

April 7th

Being made to work from home has been hard. I feel like a total failure, I find myself wondering if I will be able to go back to the job I had before because I feel such a sense of shame at not being able to stand with the team, my team at this time. Why am I sheltered from risk while others have to walk into it? I feel that it is wrong in my heart and I am devastated by it.

I do remain motivated by it. I don’t see sense in giving myself over to being negative and consumed by it, thankfully I am stronger than I have been emotionally for some time. But I do recognise that I too will be changed if I come out the other side of this and it may take me somewhere different in life. I am okay with that. For now, I will work as hard as I can with the means that I have to do my best and do my bit. I am speaking to my Dad every morning, this is new. Hearing his voice calms me and sets me up for the day. He has always been an incredible strength to me.

I should get my results today, I hope so. I need to know. I am over analysing everything, my asthma, my peak flow, my heart rate. How I wish I had a Sats probe here at home. I will definitely be buying one of them once they stop being so damn expensive, and I will buy and keep a box of disposable gloves. After adopting a minimalist lifestyle last year I may take to hoarding, and growing vegetables. Perhaps I will have that bunker after all.

April 8th

I still haven’t had my results. Our Prime Minister remains in hospital. It is strange, I haven’t always cared too much for politics, but it feels unworldly to have the leader of the country in hospital and unwell with this awful virus. It is like something you would see in a Hollywood film, I wonder if there will be one after all of this.

My working day routine seems the same, I get up, I skip breakfast because I am used to running around on my feet all day and I now I am not able to do that. I do as best as I can to feel in what I can only describe as useful. I feel that I have no right to feel sad, no right to complain about being lonely although I miss my work friends desperately. I feel that I must do one thing and that is work as hard as I can to help. And that is what I will do.

I do find myself staying up a little later, wanted to sit with my family for longer. In some ways I feel more tolerant to things, in other ways I think I feel less tolerant.

Otis my dog stays close to me for most of the day. He represents I suppose the company that I am used to and he sits up on my desk and sleeps for most of the day.

April 9th

I received my results yesterday after an awful 5 day wait. I find myself wondering why it took so long to get the result back but at the same time grateful to have had it done at all. The result was negative. I don’t have it, didn’t have it. I am ill. I remain unwell but its not COVID. I do have mixed feelings about it. Half of me had hoped for immunity. Half of me just hoped it wasn’t it. All of me just wanted to know.

I can now at least focus on continuing to get stronger.

My husband and I started sleeping apart last night after 8 years together we have been used to nights apart because of his shifts mostly but this felt very different. I chose to take the sofa bed. It wouldn’t be comfortable for him, I am smaller and he has to go out to work and I only have to go to the next room. It will take some getting used to and I didn’t sleep well.

But I have realised something. I will never moan again. I wake up now and I am grateful to have been able to open my eyes and see the world. I am grateful to have work, purpose, family. I will never moan about going in to work. Life will feel, it already does, feel so much more precious. I hope we can all take some of that but I know I do and I am glad for it.

April 14th

Over the easter bank holiday weekend life has had ups and downs. We haven’t been anywhere at all. The house remains locked down. I remain paranoid. We all remain together. I am thankful for little things, small victories, still the milkman telling me he can bring us bread. I am also thankful for big major things like seeing that the rates of cases in Italy and Spain are falling. This gives me such hope that the world is moving somewhere else in the midst of all this.

We remain slow here at home outside of my working days at least and I do seem to be managing to adjust a little to life working from home. I think I am generally drinking more water and less tea and being probably a little more active, on my working days I walk in the morning and then again in the evening, I call it bookending my day and it gives me a clear start and end to the working routine. I am doing more Yoga, each morning in the conservatory, a new space for it that I love, and I am reading more. I do miss the buzz of the hospital, but I am determined to make the best of this that I can.

April 15th

Yesterday was not a good day. It felt heavy and weighted. I journaled that I felt as though a dark shadow was chasing me. At the end of last year I struggled with my emotional health and despite feeling okay all day it took just one thing to take me to bad place and the evening was full of a battle for composure. I feel sometimes forgotten, it feels sometimes forgotten and sometimes it feels very hard to feel lightness.

Mine and Ceri’s patterns have fallen into some kind of routine. I am always up first. My working days involve an early walk, some yoga, a cup of tea before hitting the office from 8. I work right through but am slowly learning that I do need to take a break here and there and I do need to eat at some point in the day.

I always end the day with a walk and then before I know it its time for food and I am trying to get settled down. I feel surrounded by work but also very alone in it. No one to talk to, to share things with.

I am learning things about myself. As life slowly down I am looking deeper. Searching for clues that I have been afraid of. Exploring questions I have avoided. I have been so focussed on being okay. I am not sure that I will be able to go back.

I start to think about what life will be like when things open back up, when the fear is gone. I hope so much that I will be here in life, living, awake to see it. And at the same time I am afraid to say that as I fear it will jinx it for me. So instead I fix my heart on a search and wish for hope. I hold on to hope and wish for that.

It is now 17.15. It has not been a good day again today. I am struggling with just such poor decision making. A colleague who phoned me yesterday to say that she felt a little achey but otherwise was well enough to work, no temp, no cough, I did all the obvious stuff with her. She went in to work and as the day has gone on has developed a temperature and is now going to be tested for COVID. This is on me. If everyone goes down with it. The staff, the patients. It is on me. I just honestly feel as though I shouldn’t have this responsibility and while my colleagues are telling me that they would have done the same as me, this is still on me and I feel totally devastated about it. I just feel like one thing after another is piling on top of me and the devastation is mounting up. I am not sure how much more of being strong and keeping strong I can do in the face of all this.

April 16th

I cried myself through the evening and while the tears eventually dried up I carried on crying inside until I eventually, many hours after I went to bed, finally went to sleep. It was just awful afternoon and evening yesterday and I felt myself disintegrate. I shared though. Ceri got it from me, she told me to talk about how I was feeling so I did. My family listened. My colleagues phoned. They knew I had taken the day badly. They told me things that of course I knew inside were true. I tried to remember that I am not in control o f any of this. I don’t suppose any of us are.

Today I think I will try to eat a lot better. Breathe a lot deeper. Take some proper breaks and go to bed very early for a catch-up sleep. I will try to find some positivity in today. Some hope.

April 17th

It is Friday. Tomorrow is the weekend. I am glad some structure to normal life remains intact and I do have a week and a weekend. It is like something to look forward to and hold on to.

I am finally starting to sleep more; I am adjusting to the softness of the sofa bed. I miss sleeping next to Ryan so much though, feeling his weight next to me. I guess after all this we will have to adjust to that again.

I find myself wishing for things, for walks across hills, for the views that I miss. For the sounds of the sea, the roar of the waves churning and the clatter as the sea drags the pebbles back across the shore on the beach. Will I be braver after this, bolder? Will I get the tattoo? Will I swim in the wilds? One thing I know for sure in my heart is that I want to read more books, I want to have adventures close to home and I want to have a sense that I know my own country before I know the world and I want to paint something that has some worth to it.

Maybe we will all be a little bolder, or maybe surer in our lives after all of this.

For now though we have fallen in to a daily pattern. I get up and walk, do yoga, make a drink and set to work for the day. I have some little tea breaks and I find the day to be long and heavy. I am quite happy working at home but I do still feel a sense of shame and I constantly feel like I either need to apologise for not being there or try to explain myself. I know my family are beyond relieved that I am home with them.

Ceri gets up. Ryan does his own thing depending on his shifts. And then I end the day with a walk, because I so need that fresh air. And then food and rest. The pattern is the same most days. But the weekend does seem to offer something more and for that I am grateful.

April 20th

Small things bring routine back to focus. Like getting paid. Not going anywhere means that the majority of my money is being spent on food to eat at home, which is alright, its quite nice actually and I am enjoying more and more the time we are spending here at home and as a family. I find myself thinking more about our home environment and what is precious.

Speaking to my Father this morning, we have had a lot of profound conversations lately. We have always enjoyed to chat with each other but I find now that we are talking about silly subjects rather than the usual banter that used to shape our days.

I have always enjoyed so much his company. This morning he told me that he feels the future is uncertain. My response, was that this is always the case, it is just that now we are more aware of it and that it has taken something like this to realise how precious live is in each day.

I wonder if I am making peace with some things. I feel like I am searching.

From a practical sense the weekend was stressful and I remain to a degree unwell. Ryan was called in to work to cover for someone who had gone off with COVID symptoms. I feel apart over this and gave him such a lecture before he left the house, at 5 in the morning too. He then had to work two long 14 hou r shifts while I worried myself sick about him and also about us at home in what some days feels like a safe space and other days feels far from it. However the weekend is now over and I need to steal myself ahead of another week of mostly computer work.

I long for life to return to normal, but I also accept that we must focus on whatever it takes to get through this. And for now I just want to focus my energy in to feeling better. So here we go, another week.

April 21st

Numbers are levelling. In other countries there is hope as numbers drop. And yet in Spain yesterday total numbers went over 200,000. That bothered me. And I still cannot believe what has happened in America. The world looks so different now, it is hard to imagine it going back to normal.

I remain at home. It is now over four weeks since I went anywhere other than a walk one morning up to the hills, and that was the last time I drove the car, well over four weeks ago now, and when we went to get me tested. I find myself wondering if I will be able to drive the car again, as if I will have forgotten how to drive.

I also find myself wondering what Otis (the dog) thinks about us being home all the time and with him. He is used to spending hours of the day alone and now he has company all day. Mostly he spends his day with me, he sits up on the desk while I work, occasionally he goes and lays on a warm patch of carpet where the sun has been filtering through the windows and has created a little sanctuary for him. He rests there so peacefully in a semi-awake, semi-asleep state. Taking in our movements around the home, listening, not responding. He is so settled. I like to think he is happy.

I have only just realised that today we should have been flying to Japan. We would have been in Cardiff airport right now probably waiting to be called to the gate. Excited. We would have travelled to Amsterdam first and then go on to Japan from there. It was my dream trip and now I find myself afraid at the thought of travelling out of my area. I had saved for 12 months to pay for that trip, dreamt about it. It had felt like a

spiritual odyssey for me. It is odd, I am accepting, not necessarily sad, simply accepting of it and I think I feel like I want to put it in my past.

I wonder how many other people have lost out on holidays, plans, hopes and dreams. Futures altered and their history changed forever. We are now part of something. It is collective. It is global. I wonder what future generations will say and feel about it. Will it continue to bring out the best and the worst in us. What will we appreciate after this. What will the lessons be and who will learn them.

April 22nd

Today we should have been starting our time in Japan. We would have landed, checked in and been out soaking in the atmosphere and environment of Kyoto. I am sure that there will be a lot of ‘could have been’ days during this time, and in the many weeks to come, but I choose this morning to give thanks for being here. For when I became ill a few weeks ago that it wasn’t COVID then and I am still able to wake up each morning and live a little.

I try not to think about life being curtailed during this time. I can still look at the mountains each morning even if I can’t walk amongst them and I have always felt thankful that I still have my parents alive and that they are still with us and they are still healthy and well, even if they are disagreeing over the wallpaper. As Farmers I am proud of them, I always will be.

I am trying to be a little bit stricter with routine, our evening meal is getting later each day, our days are merging together, the structures in our lives are merging together and I feel it is important to be able to maintain some sense of normality. This is a weekday; this is a weekend. I feel I cannot take time off though; I feel I must be always contributing.

April 23rd

It is our wedding anniversary. I find myself feeling reflective. I have at least woken up feeling more myself. I will take that as a good thing. Yoga seems to help. Routine also. Finishing at a sensible time and I am also finding that being outside is positive too. It is strange but the days rocket by. There still seems to be not enough hours in the day for everything and the evening is on me before I know it. There is no freedom in the day. But, I am more contented at home.

April 24th

Last night it felt odd to finish work a little early and enjoy some time off with Ryan. We didn’t so much celebrate our anniversary, but even just being home together and present together and maybe even alive together. Well, that is something.

Our Thursday evenings now revolve fully around the clap at 8pm. It is always so moving and last night we commented that the first week we clapped in total darkness. It was eerie hearing the claps carried out over the countryside. Last nights clap had a celebratory feel to it with small children enjoying banging saucepans and competing with each other to make the most noise. If you had asked me two months ago if our small village of about 12 houses would do something like this I would have had my doubts. Now it just feels so lovely to share that moment all waving and smiling at each other.

I never thought I would feel quite so grateful to live somewhere so rural yet still connected to community in some way.

I keep hearing about a new normal and I think this is it. Am I any less fearful, no. Am I settling in to a routine, yes. Am I worried about going back to normal, also yes. I find myself focussing now on what I am glad for, and those things include a morning walk which I would never have done before work before this time, yoga in the conservatory, being home so my husband comes home to us being here, just simply being home.

I also have found that silly TV is a tonic of the best type, particularly gogglebox and that silly but hilarious programme Gino, Fred and Gordon.

And now it is the weekend. I am glad for it. Plus I feel better. Finally.

April 27th

Sometimes I wonder, what should I write about. Should I write about just the routines of the day or something more philosophical. I probably feel a need to lean towards the latter. This morning for example I found myself wondering as I walked along that if I could make peace with the ideas and concepts of my own death would it mean that I was less fearful of it. If I could work out why I was so afraid of dying. Would that mean I lived a fuller life. And then I considered what I would want from that process, would I want to have a knowing peaceful death that was accepting from my perspective and can you create that even in times such as this where there is a chance the living can be snatched from your grasp at a moment’s notice.

I wonder what I can do to search deeper into these thoughts. I know I never really feared death before working as a cancer nurse, I now find myself totally surrounded by it. I wonder if I meditate more that will help.

I also find myself wondering if COVID is actually everywhere already. Someone who I know has been isolating for 5 weeks has tested positive in the last few days. Someone with an underlying diagnosis that I have no doubt will leave her incredibly vulnerable to the effects of this virus. I hope she is strong enough to fight it.

The weekend has passed by, it is Monday. The start of this week a 4 day week. I will take this Wednesday off. It is my Birthday. It is also the due date for my brothers first child something which this week has made my tummy turn with excitement. The idea of new life. A concern for them as they have to navigate the clinical setting but also a wonderful moment for the whole family. The arrival of a longed for and very special child. I hold on tightly to the hope that all goes well for them this week. It will give us all great hope and something to watch unfold. Something so much more valuable than the storm of celebrity distractions or who made the best sourdough this weekend (although I fully intend to sign myself up to that trend).

April 28th

It is strange to feel such excitement at this time. My brothers wife is in labour. These times are getting stranger by the day. I want to write more but I am far too distracted.

April 30th

It is the last day of April. I have spent 5 weeks working from home, 6 weeks in isolation, had a COVID scare, wondered constantly if I am doing the right or wrong thing, felt like time is slipping me by, seen my

brothers baby born and be well and healthy and strong, celebrated my 42nd birthday, my father in law get good news following 6 rounds of chemo and 25 fractions of radiotherapy, and life, well it is changed.

I had supervision on Tuesday evening. I am beyond grateful for a process where I can let things go. I think in my mind that I am going to talk about so many things, but in reality I don’t. I tend to find one thing dominates. On Tuesday it was shame. It was feeding back into the fears I feel for my return to work, will I be accepted back, am I missed, is it better there without me, do I even want to go back?

I am sure lots of people have had lockdown birthdays. Mine came easily to me, I like solitude, so it suits me to be home. I am sure that lots of other people who lean towards a peaceful existence are finding it easier to adjust to home life.

I think I have finally got my tea drinking back up to normal levels. This morning I have written a list of things that I need to maintain. Alcohol is off the list, less time on my phone is. Tea is definitely staying on there. I have also imagined how I am going to spend my Japan money if I ever get it back. That thought will fill an empty hour or two.

This weekend I am going to Garden, order plants from the garden centre (click and collect at the gate), and try to figure out how to make a sourdough starter that I can keep alive.

May 2020

May 1st

A new month. A whole 5 weeks spent now at home, working from home in this strange new existence. I continue to over think everything. I feel like the team is being affected now by poor health. I worry desperately for them. I want to wade in but I cannot. So I continue to do what I deem to be my best in the context of this.

I listen to endless podcasts. Read. I go from catastrophising to feeling hopeful, and definitely try to hold on to the hopeful part. I look at those around me, close to me who seem to be on an endless holiday, very free in their thinking while I feel weighed down by a new reality and full of fear. I am still working. I wonder if I am being bitter and I know I don’t want to be. So I have decided that I will make some adjustments to give me back a little bit of control and structure. This includes less screen time, more good food. Clearer boundaries about what I can and cannot do and achieve from home. But definitely less of the looking at my phone at night and early in the morning and more consuming myself with yoga, nature and books.

I dream of going to North Wales, to see that gentle light reflecting on the mountains. I really don’t care when I go, I just want to be there. To soak it in. The clear and crisp air. The views. The lakes. I hold on to memories of the place and the feeling it creates within me. I long so much to go there and walk, whatever the weather. To feel alive. So, I look at holiday cottages there, I study my map and plan my walks. I will hold on to that as a focus for my hope. I will imagine myself there.