I read something today that, wow it made me mad. It was about a man who had gone in for training for a second joint replacement and was repeatedly passive-aggressively belittled by the instructor because he didn’t fit her preconceived notions of what a joint replacement patient should look like. (He was much younger than the others.) Though the article was entitled, My Loneliest Moment as a Young Person With Chronic Illness, the patient and author of the piece said that 10 years later, he saw the humor and ridiculousness of the situation. I don’t know whether the initial situation or the subsequent dismissal of his own feelings made me angrier.

I am not built for dealing with more than one major stressor at a time. The day I found out I had kidney disease, I had scheduled outpatient laser eye surgery, as well. It was supposed to be the second of four appointments based on the patient’s pain level, but the emotional strain made me compress the last three appointments into that one. On that day I was just done.

These days the stressor is the deluge of information intended to keep us up to speed on the various crises flooding the country.

So, this is it. My last day earning money since my unbroken stretch started in 2002. There was about a year after my mother’s death when I temped on and off, but I don’t remember what I did during that time otherwise. I can’t tell what is having the bigger impact on my ability to sleep – the last hours of the truly terrible work I had to do to justify my company paying me for the last few weeks or entering (another) huge unknown. Like there aren’t enough of those already in this age of coronavirus.

This blog post originally appeared on The Patient Advocate’s Chronicle on April 18th, 2019.

I’m dragging and I can’t figure out why. My blood sugars aren’t right, and I feel like I have overcommitted on some projects. But this is different, not something that can be addressed with more sleep or caffeine. I know this because I am getting 8-9 hours every night and I have tried caffeine, which I don’t really drink unless I need it to not fall asleep at my desk. No, this is a long-lasting fuzzy headedness that is affecting my productivity. I probably would have spent last weekend in a Game of Thrones watchathon anyway, but I shouldn’t have felt like I needed to. And on Monday, I was tired enough to trip over a free weight right in front of me, and I think I sprained my pinky toe. Even if it’s not sprained, it did bleed all over my off-white carpet.

I never thought I would be laid off. Generally, working for the government is a pretty safe bet, even if you are a contractor. But the timing of the end of my contract just happened to hit right when everything was starting to shut down and my client agency used that as a reason to postpone all new expenditures. The re-bid, which we were likely to win, was postponed indefinitely. Even a tragically understaffed Federal government is vulnerable to economic crises, especially when a poorly handled response draws out the impact.

In the frantic taking stock that followed receipt of the official letter from my company, I learned some interesting things and confirmed some more.

I am going to be laid off in a month. I got the official letter yesterday. I am a government contractor and in all its wisdom, the government has deferred many new contracts indefinitely. Basically, the funding fell through. If I am not making money for my company, they can’t keep paying me. Considering I have only been working for the company for a year and a half, a month is actually pretty generous. But without a job, there is no employer-sponsored health insurance.

It’s been over three months since I saw “my” kids (nieces and nephews). I think that’s longer than I have gone since the first one was born, almost 13 years ago! I am going to have to see them soon, no matter what my risk level is. It would be bad for my mental health if I didn’t. The longer I go between visits, the more I miss. It’s the only time I ever suffer from FOMO. You can’t get back the time you don’t spend with kids, and they change so quickly.

One of the things I miss most about life before the coronavirus lock-down is my commute.

Don’t laugh. I have had a lot of good, creative ideas while car thinking.

In case you are unfamiliar with car thinking, it’s a state of mind that happens when you focus half your brain on the road while the other half is free to roam where it will. Admittedly, it works better on the highway. City driving requires a lot more attention with its lights, stop signs, and pedestrians than a few hundred miles stretched out before you on one road. On most of my trips, I can choose one lane for 90% of the way and let half my brain just zone out. During the hours on the road I think about where I want my blog to go, what my next move should be in my day job, and other big topics. Sometimes I try new ideas out loud for presentations, upcoming phone calls, even the things I want to talk about in therapy.

My condo is a mess. It’s usually not spotless unless family is visiting. Well, family with babies. If family with babies visit, I care more about the state of my floors and what said baby might find and put in its mouth. Nothing new there. I never cleaned my room or put away my shoes growing up. And my dorm room was a maze of stacked books. Sometimes I had to jump over them to get to the bed. It’s probably good we didn’t have a dining hall in our dorm. I’m not the kind of person who would have regularly returned dishes.

Now that I have learned to approximate grownup behavior enough to keep myself out of trouble, I do chores at least sporadically. I cook. I clean the kitchen enough to cook. I even clean the bathroom. I do laundry when I run out of underwear. And I tidy up enough not to be embarrassed if maintenance has to come in.

But these days, even my bare minimum seems to have gone out the window.

While under stay-at-home orders, I have been catching up on one of my favorite TV shows, CBS Sunday Morning. Growing up, my Sunday morning ritual was sitting on my parents’ bed cutting coupons with my mom while we watched. I’ve carried that over into my adult life (without the coupons). It’s a great respite – interesting, cultural, a break from everything political. Even the stories on issues or political figures aren’t inflammatory, and Steve Hartman’s segments almost always make me tear up as he shows us the best of America