Quarantine Follies - May 1, 2020

I was going to start by saying Day 483 but I know its not day 483 even if it feels like it, so I looked at the calendar and found May 1, 2020.

As a retired person due to health problems, I do not have much of a life without quarantine isolation. In regular life, I would do the following:

• 3 days at the gym for 1.5 hours
• 1 trip to the library
• 1 lunch with a friend
• 1 trip to the grocery each week. 
• A little gardening if its the right season
• And maybe one or two more things

Now that I can't do any of that I am:

• Riding the exercise bike 3x each week, 
• Talking to friends daily
• Scrambling to find digital books to read
• Sending my husband to the grocery store with a very detailed grocery list and a show and tell session to hope that he will get it mostly right
• Weaving and knitting to use up my lifetime supply of yarn (SABLE - stash acquired beyond life expectancy)
• Being bored. Seriously bored.

I am immunosuppressed. This puts me in the very high risk group. I am not taking chances. Put it this way, if someone (like my brother - he's done this twice this winter so I can blame him) has the sniffles and is near me. I then end up with a cold that forces me to cancel my schedule for a week and stay home so I don't need to stay home for 2 weeks and end up with an ear infection.

My immunosuppression is a result of my rheumatoid treatment. Sometimes I think I take more meds than the average 80 year old. My father used to introduce me to his medical team as being more unhealthy than him. 

Being in the high risk group forces me to spend more time away from people. The only people outside of my husband that I have seen in the last couple of months is my sister. 

But on the more positive side. We are doing okay.

• My husband still has his job. He works from home. He has a work laptop and goes into his home office every day and comes out for coffee, bathroom, and food. Its like he's not here. If he was just sitting around all day, every day, things could go 'bad' quickly. 
• Because he is home, this has given us the flexibility to get necessary car repairs done - new inspection stickers, oil changes, winter to summer tires, etc without me being stuck at home with out a car for a day.

I'm not going to lie and say this is buckets of fun because its not. I am used to staying home but I really want, or even need, to see other people. Like the librarians at the library. Or the cashier at the pharmacy where I get all my prescriptions. Or going to the garden center and getting plants for my garden.

But I am still here with my sanity mostly intact. I keep telling myself I can do this and I will.

My Life Has Changed

I used to blog all the time at Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog. I started it in 2007 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It helped me retain my sanity by blogging through cancer treatment - I got to vent about the ups and downs of cancer treatment.

Since then, my body has completely rebelled and I have accumulated multiple chronic ailments. I live a completely different life than I did 11 years ago. Now I feel like I just go to the doctor and the gym to help retain whatever health pieces I may still have.

I decided I need a new blog to write about my life because breast cancer is no longer the focus of my life. For the last few years I have felt I was straying from breast cancer, which was the title of my blog, when I did not write about life with breast cancer. Yes, I survived lived through breast cancer but its no the focus of my life so here I am at a new blog - Life with Chronic Illnesses - because that's what my life is all about.