I am not a futurist. I hate that interview question where they ask where you see yourself in five years. Life has taught me that when I make plans, my body usually does something to throw a wrench in it – a new condition, and old one that needs attention. I really can’t say where I see myself next month, let alone in five years.

I am going into my seventh week of lockdown, and it’s all more of the same: same four walls to stare at, same tv shows to watch, same monotonous job (which I am extremely grateful to have), same rain and wind keeping me off my balcony (boo!). I can feel the hit my psyche is taking (my treadmill is starting to guilt-talk to me again because I’m not using it). And now, for the first time, the coronavirus lockdown is causing collateral damage to me personally.

I am in my fifth week of coronavirus stay-at-home circumstances. The first four weeks actually didn’t feel so different from normal. I can go weeks without seeing friends in person, and my family does not live close. But this week my work circumstances changed, and it’s a problem.

Like all of you, I have this underlying hum of anxiety every day that wasn’t there before. So far, no one in my immediate circle of family and friends has contracted COVID-19. All of them (and me!) are practicing physical distancing – we only go out for exercise and groceries, and even then we wear (non-medical) masks and gloves when appropriate. Sometimes that’s not enough.

These are hard times. Every day we watch the number of coronavirus cases and deaths rise and wonder if someone we love will end up a statistic. Maybe the worst is that we have to deal with it alone.

I have to confess, I have been through my fair share of “this, too, shall pass” moments. Granted, none of them have felt quite like this, but most of them did happen around this time of year.

Even since last week, the coronavirus and its attendant illness, COVID-19, have been throwing life in the United States into a zombie-apocalypse kind of chaos. The unknown is always scary, but based on the information we have, it’s especially scary for us – chronic patients who are, by definition, immunocompromised.

A few weeks ago, a tweet popped up in my feed. I meant to save it, but I didn’t. Basically, a cancer surgeon was begging the doctors who make the diagnoses to tell their patients when they have cancer. It makes the surgeon’s ensuing conversation pretty awkward when they don’t. At the time, it seemed like an aberration. People don’t really do that, do they?

Life is comprised of a set of relationships. Bosses, spouses, delivery people, colleagues, even the woman at the butcher’s counter at your grocery store and the bank security guard who recognizes you by now. Close or not, you have relationships with more people than you think. 

There’s been a lot of talk about the importance of self-care in recent years. That counts double for those of us with chronic and autoimmune conditions. It’s hard since a lot of us are as much caretakers of others as we are in need of care ourselves. Focusing on ourselves comes about as naturally as writing a cover letter (my least favorite thing to write). But it has to be done.