This post has a fair amount of medical stuff in it, if you’d rather not.

At the very end of last week, Edward developed an infection that, after Urgent Care evaluated it and sent us on to the Emergency Room for a CAT scan, turned out to be an abscess that needed draining. It was a brutal process. He was shouting and crying while pitifully apologizing for doing so. There was a scalpel, there was rinsing out, and then there was putting gauze into the wound, leaving a little tail of it out to keep the incision from healing in case there was more draining. He was given IV antibiotics, and a prescription for a week of oral antibiotics.

So already that would have been a tiring day, emotionally and physically. But doing it during a pandemic, going to two separate medical facilities, breathing and talking through masks, being close to health care workers, breathing that air for hours, worrying that handling this medical situation would result in a more dire medical situation—even more stressful.

And then he had to go BACK to Urgent Care a few days later, to have the wound checked. The hope was that at that point the gauze could be removed and a bandage could be put on and it could be over—but it was not quite done, so the gauze was taken out of the open wound, and fresh gauze was put in, and there was more crying.

And we have to go back to Urgent Care AGAIN, today or tomorrow, and they might finally take out the gauze and let the wound heal, or we might do another cycle of gauze/check, or the doctor might find the abscess was not fully removed and there will have to be another incision and more rinsing and more gauze. Back to the medical center again and again and again; contact with health care workers again and again and again. During a pandemic.

He hasn’t been able to shower since Saturday; he’s always in a certain amount of pain from having the wound still open; he’s grossed out by having it still open; he can’t comfortably move around; he feels grim and grubby, and he’s dreading each next step, and it makes it worse not to know how many more steps there are. He’s lost several pounds, and he can’t afford to lose any. I’m fretful and exhausted, and worrying about the next steps too, and worrying that one or both of us will be exposed to Covid-19 during all of this. I’m also worried because he was due to get his Remicade infusion this week, but it’s had to be postponed to next week.

Meanwhile, one of our cats, the one with big paws, has gone from his usual weight of 11-12 pounds (he’s a large-framed cat) to 7 pounds 12 ounces at his appointment this week; we called for the appointment two weeks earlier when he was down to 9 pounds, but they have limited staffing because of the pandemic, and this week was the earliest they could see him.

They did blood work, urine tests, and x-rays. They found a bunch of things, but nothing yet that explains the weight loss. He’ll have an ultrasound tomorrow to see what the deal is with his mismatched kidneys. It would be pretty good news to find that they’re differently-sized because one of them has shut down. (The bad news would be to find out one of them is bigger because of a tumor.) But his bloodwork isn’t showing the serious news the vet said she’d expect to see. (I’m worried this means it’s more likely to be cancer.)

The three times I’ve had a cat with a major medical issue, each time the cat was 16 years old when we heard the diagnosis, and 16 years is a pretty nice full life for a cat, and so each time I’ve had them put down rather than pursuing expensive treatment. But this cat is only 9 years old, and the dear favorite of Elizabeth, who calls him her son. And you know how when you get a larger tax refund than you were expecting, you try to guess whether your car will need an expensive repair or whether a major appliance will go? This time our cat broke.

Again: so much more exhausting to handle during a pandemic. There are the different procedures at the vet’s office (calling from the parking lot, speaking to a vet tech over the phone, then leaving the cat carrier in the breezeway), and it means talking to the vet over the phone rather than in her reassuring presence. (I’m GLAD they’re doing this, but it still makes it more stressful.) And they may want to show me how to give the cat subcutaneous fluids, which I am very willing to learn how to do, but it’s stressful to need to go inside and have someone show me (though easier knowing they’ve been keeping people out of the building as much as possible).

Today I went to the grocery store, and I made two trips into the store because I wanted to get in there before the Fourth of July weekend and then not have to go for awhile. Considering all the posts I saw about Memorial Day get-togethers and Father’s Day get-togethers, I think it’s likely there will be a ton of Fourth of July get-togethers, and I don’t want to have to shop at all in the days between the time people are exposed and the time they start to show symptoms.

But we still have to go to Edward’s Remicade appointment and MRI appointment next week. My hope is that we will be done with those appointments before all the people start arriving at those medical centers from Fourth of July exposures—and that none of the doctors and nurses and technicians we see are people who went to a Fourth of July get-together.

I come from a Mike Pence-y kind of Christian background, the kind where it is understood that the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Thessalonians about “avoiding the appearance of evil” in order to explain why teenage girls can’t have platonic male friends in their rooms and adult men shouldn’t be alone with their female co-workers. So I was a little worried when I wrote the Emails with an Ex post that some of the lingering effects of such an upbringing might be seeping through, and that I might come across as wayyyyyyy overthinking a situation that most people would be way less unnecessarily hand-wringy about. But I needn’t have worried!

If you remember, the two options were: (1) maybe not respond to the news about his not-doing-well marriage yet, and just respond to everything else for now, or (2) respond to it, but make it neutral and unencouraging and something his wife could definitely read. But some commenters went for the exciting and not-on-the-table Option Three, which looked something like:

Swistle’s Ex-Boyfriend, writing the way he has once or twice a year for decades: *news about Kid 1, and a request for my input on that kid’s relationship with a kid from a strict Christian family like he remembers mine was; news about Kid 2 and a photo of that kid in a sport uniform; general chatting about how the pandemic has affected their city and their household, and a mention of how he might coincidentally be moving soon to a different, safer city, because his marriage isn’t going well; an update on a health issue he told me about last time, plus news about a new health issue; update on his job; casual, normal sign-off*

Swistle: “NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.” *blocks him on Facebook, filters his email address to trash, never explains why, lets him wonder forever what terrible misunderstanding occurred*

My goodness, how thrilling! I can think of no better way to take a slightly delicate situation and turn it into a totally unnecessary GIANT DRAMA FIREBALL. So…I mean, obviously I’m not doing that! Clearly there was some miscommunication involved, perhaps combined with misunderstanding (Paul ((not the apostle Paul but my own Paul)) wondered if this is the kind of thing where it’s nearly impossible for empathetic people not to picture THEMSELVES and their OWN exes, instead of the actual people involved), perhaps combined with some of the same type of upbringing I grew up with—but this is not a threatening, weird relationship with someone who is smoldering with feelings for me. If he DOES have any lingering feelings, he has long since stopped expressing them to me, at which point they became Not My Business, which is as it should be. If he WERE to someday cross a line to the point where I needed to end the friendship, I would certainly explain WHY before throwing a smoke bomb and vanishing forever!

Back when neither of us were married, when we were so young our frontal lobes hadn’t even finished developing, he was indeed rather persistent about thinking/saying that we should get back together: our break-up was his fault, and when he went on to date other people, he found he very much regretted his choices—but by then I had gotten over him and felt nothing but relief to be just friends. Even at his most persistent, I didn’t feel threatened or in peril of any sort, emotional or otherwise; it was just kind of exasperating and pitiful, that’s all. After I was brutally direct and clear with him about exactly how zero our chances were of getting back together, he thanked me for it, and said he hadn’t been able to move on while thinking there was still hope, but now he could. And then he did.

He does still say little things from time to time, nothing that would have to be a line-crossing thing between every set of old exes—but he is as I’ve mentioned a little bit dumb, and also he’s the kind of guy who likes truly sappy romantic movies/songs (the movie Somewhere in Time with Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve; any Mariah Carey song), and talk-show episodes about high school sweethearts who reunite in a nursing home after being widowed, and news stores about couples married 70 years who die within a few minutes of each other—so I just like to make sure I don’t give him any fodder for that mill, that’s all. Plus, I like to make sure I justify his wife’s trust, and of course Paul’s trust, so that everyone feels comfortable with this friendship I enjoy having as part of my life.

There seemed to be some concern that any trouble with his marriage meant I was in some sort of new, fresh danger: that he would now suddenly escalate things, or that he would want to lean on me during the divorce, or that he would have feelings/expectations. I am not sure I can adequately express how calm and unstressed I feel about being able to handle any of those things if they did happen. Just for example, let’s say he wanted me to give him tons of attention and support during his divorce. Doing that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and I don’t feel any obligation or pressure to do that, and I don’t feel any stress about the idea of saying so to him. (Note: but he has not asked for that, and he hasn’t escalated contact.) Or let’s say he started suddenly pressuring me to leave my long marriage and be with him, now that he was free: doing that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and hearing it wouldn’t please me, and I feel no stress at the idea of telling him to stop being stupid, and I feel fully capable of figuring out what to do next if he DIDN’T stop being stupid. (Note: but he has not said anything of the sort, and he did not give the news in an even remotely flirty or inappropriate or hopeful way.) Going to DEFCON 2 because of the possibility that he MIGHT do some of these things feels like perhaps this pandemic has us all in a heightened state of emotions right now.

ANYWAY. If you want an update, what I DID do was write back to him saying I was sorry to hear he and his wife were struggling, and that I hoped things would work out for the best. I included that in a whole normal email with updates about my kids, and general chatting about how the pandemic has affected our city and my household, and an update about my job, and an update about a health situation, and a response about his kid’s issue dating a strict Christian.

Well. Maybe let’s talk about something else now, maybe not about exes! Actually, no: let’s still talk about exes. I would like to hear LOTS OF STORIES from other people who have a nice, friendly, non-fraught relationship with an ex! It can be your own story, or a story about someone you know. It seems like we could stand a little more normalizing of that sort of thing.

Edward was throwing up in the night, and first of all I would like to say how lovely it is to be at the stage of life where that is something I generally find out about in the morning, rather than having to clean barf out of carpeting and out from between crib railings and out of a child’s hair at 2:00 in the morning. Barf laundry is some of the worst laundry.

But illness is still concerning. The symptoms don’t make me worry about Covid-19, but I do wonder how he would have caught ANY illness considering he’s been nowhere and seen no one. A quick look at my CONTACT CALENDAR tells me that our most recent contact was the guy who came to give an estimate on a replacement water heater; he was here for several minutes on Friday, but he wore a mask and Paul reported that the worker pointedly didn’t touch anything, waited for Paul to open the basement door and so forth. Paul went into his office the day before that, but saw almost no one, and everyone is wearing masks and trying to keep it at one person per room, and his office has one of those machines that atomizes (is that the science verb I want here?) disinfectant and sprays it nightly, after the cleaners go through and do the newly-intensive pandemic cleaning. And none of the rest of us have been sick, and we can’t think of anything Edward ate that none of the rest of us ate, so I feel like we’re gradually ruling out food poisoning and stomach viruses, or at least putting them lower on the suspicion list at this point.

Since the symptoms are digestive, and since so far only Edward has them, that makes me suspect something to do with his Crohn’s disease. I further suspect that this is because of relative inactivity: he used to walk to and from school each day, plus walk around the school building at points throughout the day, plus have gym class—and now he’s mostly in a nest on the couch with a book or his phone. He is the Indoors Type, and that is a fine and worthy type to be, we don’t all have to be hearty and outdoorsy and covered in ticks/sunburn—but physical activity seems particularly useful for digestive health, and so I think I am going to have to work harder to make sure he is doing more of it. He can do indoorsy versions, such as Dance Dance Revolution or whatever.

In the meantime, I am glad we keep cans of ginger ale and Coke on hand for just this sort of sudden issue (I’ve found the little bottles eventually lose fizz if they sit too long before being needed, but the cans don’t seem to), and that we have saltines and applesauce, and we have bread for toast. He is…well, he is in a nest on the couch, but when he feels a little better we will start wheeling him out into the sunshine, or whatever used to be done with Edwardian invalids. (That was an unintentional play on words with his name. I searched lightly online to see why I associate the Edwardian period with invalids being pale and covered in blankets and reading books on the couch and being wheeled into the sunshine, and I still don’t know. Perhaps it is just a time period when the word “invalid” was being used. Or perhaps there was a pandemic near that time that left many people chronically ill.)

The nature of this pandemic/virus means that many of the things we can do to reduce/slow its spread are things we do for the benefit of other people, and we have to hope that other people will also do those things for us. Mask-wearing is the clearest example of this: we wear masks to reduce the harm we might do to others, and we have to hope others will return the favor by wearing masks to reduce the harm they might do to us. If we are all willing to do something that benefits others, we all end up benefiting our own selves—a beautiful, almost fairy-tale example of the theoretical natural consequence of following the golden rule.

Other choices are less obvious than masks, but similarly expose people other than ourselves to more/less risk. It’s not possible to increase or decrease only our own risk: we are deciding for ourselves and also for everyone else we come into contact with: servers, clerks, stylists, caregivers, other customers/participants, friends, family, co-workers, healthcare workers, fellow patients, people we live with or visit or take care of—and also all the people THOSE people come into contact with. And all of those people are making decisions for themselves that in turn affect us.

This is why, if you’re not already writing down where you go, and when (day and approximate time), and who you have contact with (servers, friends, family, etc.), I strongly recommend starting. It’s another thing we can do that benefits others and also ends up benefiting ourselves. If we ourselves get sick, we have a nice clear record for the contact tracer, so they can see who they need to get in touch with to let them know they’ve been exposed, which can be crucial and time-/life-saving information. If someone we know gets sick, or a place we visited is traced as the center of an outbreak, we have at least the start of the information we need to help us determine if we’re likely to have been exposed. If contract tracers turn out to be part of the sensible plans made by scientists and health professionals, but not by the U.S. government, then we are doing what we can to handle it ourselves. And we save ourselves the stressy and inaccurate scramble of trying to recreate our schedule after the fact, possibly while feeling sick.

Our kitchen sink faucet broke. Paul has gotten pretty handy since we moved to his dream house, and he has fixed a few smaller problems with that faucet, but he evaluated this issue as crossing over into Plumber Territory—especially combined with the smaller issues, some of which had called for repeated fixing. We were without hot water in the kitchen for a day and a half (Paul had to turn it off to keep it from trickling steadily out from under the sink, which seemed fair), leading me to first feel some despair about figuring out cooking/dishes, but then to consider what other people in other times/places would think of me complaining that in my kitchen I had only COLD clean/filtered/sanitized running water, and that to get hot water I would have to walk SEVERAL YARDS to the half-bath, or else heat some on my ELECTRIC STOVE. A childhood of reading early-settler literature has really paid off in terms of adulthood contentment/perspective.

The plumber came this afternoon and, after our experience with the water heater guy, I was pretty fretful about it beforehand. I have a partial box of disposable masks left over from my job as an in-home elder caregiver, so we put those out on the counter, and planned to ask the plumber to wear one if he arrived without one, but I was VERY STRESSED about that idea: it feels very, very hard to ask someone to wear a mask when they’ve clearly made a deliberate decision NOT to wear one despite ALL recommendations. I wished that Paul had remembered to specify when he made the appointment that we had an immunosuppressed person in our household and could the plumber please wear a mask: that feels easier to do, because it’s ahead of time instead of on the spot. If some of the plumbers are It’s My Constitutional Right To Swing My Fists Wildly Without Regard For Your Face, then the plumbing company has advanced notice that they should send one of their OTHER plumbers.

But it was all moot because the plumber arrived wearing a mask, and kept distant, and everything was just fine. Except of course that I felt for awhile after he’d left as if the entire kitchen and all the air in the entire house was contaminated. But it’s fine! It’s fine! It’s statistically probably fine, despite that graphic showing how the virus moves in a restaurant on the air-conditioning breezes! And now we have hot water in the kitchen AND no water leaking onto the kitchen floor!

It’s going to seem as if I JUST went grocery shopping and now I’m already reporting in again—but last time, I wrote about it several days after a trip, whereas this time I am writing about it on the same day. Not that you are standing there tapping your foot waiting for an explanation before you enter it into the Justification Log. But just if that sort of thing is ALSO as interesting to you as it is to me. (“LAST time I went ELEVEN days between trips but THIS time it was EIGHT days because LAST time I only filled ONE cart whereas THIS….”)

Today marked an important milestone: the very first sighting of hand sanitizer since This All Began. It was sold in what looked like disposable water bottles, and it was an unfamiliar brand, and it was limited to one per customer, and I absolutely bought one. And it is only at this moment I realize I didn’t even notice/check the price. Just snapped it right up.

Another change: the store had signs up saying that, per city ordinance, face coverings were required for everyone entering the store. This made me so happy. There were still plenty of people with their noses hanging out, and plenty of people pulling the mask down to talk, but still: an improvement. One woman in line was complaining LOUDLY about how RIDICULOUS it all was, but she was wearing a mask and she was complaining to a fellow customer rather than to the poor employees, so we will take it as a partial success.

However, as if to shift the scales back to a universal balance favoring unhappiness, there were THREE SEPARATE TIMES when a male customer stood or walked closer to me than would have been considered appropriate/considerate even if we were NOT in a pandemic. SIRS. GET YOURSELVES TOGETHER. OR I AM GOING TO START CASUALLY BAPPING A PADDLEBALL AT BALL-HEIGHT.

General inventory is definitely getting more normal. There were LOTS of kinds of soup—still not up to full variety/capacity, but so much better than when it was just some Healthy Choice 99% Fat-Free Cream of Onion. There were no restrictions on meats, and they had ground beef in the larger (like, 1.75-2.00 pound) packets again, instead of just 1.00-1.25 pound. They had a LOT of flour, though still very little flour VARIETY (two brands of white), and still a limit of two per customer; sugar products seemed to be stocked normally but were also limited to two per customer. They had the little three-individual-servings strips of yeast, one strip per customer; no jars of yeast; plenty of baking powder and baking soda. Still no crunchy taco shells, but plenty of soft tortillas. Chicken nuggets still plentiful in quantity but extremely limited in variety. Frozen fruit was a lot better than the last few trips, but vegetarian meat substitutes (the fake chicken nuggets, fake chicken patties, etc.) were low—or rather, the case was stuffed full, but almost entirely with fake burgers. They had hand soap, not at all up to usual quantities/selection but pretty okay; they had rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. Still no Lysol spray or sanitizing wipes.

When I was in the check-out line, I realized the toilet paper I’d added to the cart was gone. When I was relating this story to Paul, he immediately suspected Cart Bandits but, first of all, there was plenty of toilet paper in the paper products aisle, so no one would have any motivation to steal mine; and also, the thing is, when I was at the store several trips ago, I put a pack of paper towels on the bottom shelf of the cart, and it fell off in the produce section, and I don’t know how I didn’t notice it falling off (wouldn’t the cart have run into it?) but I DIDN’T notice until I looped BACK to a previous aisle, saw some paper towels on the floor, thought “Huh, why are there paper towels on the floor?,” and then noticed MY paper towels (the same kind as the ones on the floor) were mysteriously GONE. So I think the same thing must have happened this time, but without me looping back around to discover it. And when it was the paper towels, it happened in the produce section, which makes it a little less mysterious: the produce section is BUSY and FRAUGHT and there are NO ONE-WAY MARKERS, and there are people TOUCHING EVERY SINGLE LEMON and so on. So that may explain the distractedness. I’ll bet it happened again today.

Anyway, I noticed the missing toilet paper very early on in the cart-unloading process, because I also had a big heavy thing on the bottom shelf, and wanted to unload that onto the belt early on, and so that’s when I thought “Hey, but where is…?” So I had the rest of the unloading time to fret and stress about what I was going to do. First I decided I would just skip it. Then I felt very sad and stressy about that, and about going at least another week before having another chance to buy more. Then I looked around to see if by any chance there was a toilet paper display nearby: there WAS one of paper towels, so this was not an unreasonable thing to wonder. But while I was looking around, I noticed I was not at all far from the toilet paper aisle. So I said to the clerk, not knowing how well she could hear me through the mask, “I forgot toilet paper, I am going to ZOOM OVER and get some, I will be RIGHT BACK,” and I zoomed, and I was back WELL before she’d finished unloading the belt, so I consider that a 100% victory, and I felt so relieved to have the toilet paper. For the rest of our lives, I think some of us will feel relieved every time we purchase toilet paper.

As this country continues to re-open during a pandemic despite not having taken any of the steps necessary for safely doing so, I am noticing huge confusion between “permitted” and “safe.” It’s understandable. It’s what we’re used to, to a certain extent: unsafe things are illegal or regulated. We have speed limits, licenses, seatbelt requirements; we’re not allowed to drive in certain reckless ways. We’re not allowed to buy cocaine. Smoking and drinking are allowed only after a certain age, and even after that age there are rules about when and where we’re allowed to do them, and what we are and aren’t allowed to do at the same time. We have to get official permits for certain activities such as lighting fires or doing construction.

And in countries where the officials care about the health and safety of their citizens as well as about the economy and profit, we are seeing a certain correlation between permitted and safe: the officials listen to scientists and medical experts, take steps needed to fight against the pandemic; and then, as those steps take effect, they carefully and slowly and advisedly re-open: the people are kept as safe as possible, the economy is preserved as much as possible. The United States, which has a current administration that ignores scientists, ignores medical experts, and thinks that bluster is the same as actually knowing what it’s doing, seems to think they can follow the same pattern of closing/re-opening WITHOUT doing all the things necessary to deal with the little issue of the disease. And so, since we have been very good and have stayed in our rooms for the entire time-out, it MUST be time for us to come out again, just like those other countries!

Some people have no choice. The companies they work for are re-opening, and if they don’t go back to work, they can’t pay their bills or buy food. I’m not talking about those situations. Those deserve our pity.

I am not talking about outings to acquire necessary items: food, prescriptions, urgent medical care. Those are not safe, but there is not much choice there, either: our country is not doing what it needs to do to make it safe, so we must do certain necessary activities unsafely. Other countries pity us.

I am not talking about the protests. Some things are morally necessary even when they are unsafe.

I am talking about things we don’t need to do, but that, because they are gradually permitted again, or because the words “socially distanced!” are used, are being mistaken for safe. Or restrictions, such as “No more than 10 people in a gathering,” making people think 9 or fewer must therefore be safe. It is making my throat tight to think of all the people who think that because something is allowed, it must be okay. We are going to lose so many more people we didn’t need to lose.

[Edited to add: The comments section is showing me I need to make a further clarification. I am not talking about people who CHOOSE to do unsafe things, knowing those things are unsafe. I am talking about people who are starting to do things because they THINK THOSE THINGS ARE NOW SAFE, because those things are once again permitted—when in fact those things are not safe.]