Where He Leads Me I Will Follow: March/April Pandemic 2020

Since my last post three years ago, our little clinic has grown and thrived. We consist of a nurse, a receptionist and myself in a tiny, but functional 2 exam room, one lab and one office building. We have changed from the original staff we opened with, except myself (my original receptionist is in school training to become a nurse, and my medical assistant was replaced with a nurse, which was a good but sad transition because I lost a special person in the upgrade 😩).

For me, it is a real Twilight Zone to be in the middle of a world wide medical crisis. Until the beginning of March our little clinic was open five days a week. When the social distancing began, people stopped coming to the clinics and hospitals, and this created a crisis with our hospital. In the beginning we weren't given any tools to help people with COVID19 symptoms - we couldn't test them, and we had to just tell them to stay at home and isolate unless they had difficulty breathing. It was new and scary to everyone. We couldn't test them unless they had either traveled to Hubei, China, Italy or were exposed to someone we knew had COVID19 for the first month or so.

Now we are 6-7 weeks into the social distancing, I think. We are allowed to order tests for anyone with respiratory symptoms, thankfully, for the past week or two. We are not seeing zero patients any longer. We "see" 7-10 people a day in our little clinic, which isn't too bad, but they still aren't letting us open more than two days a week. I'm not really sure what is happening when people call in on the days we are closed, because the calls forward to the main clinic where they are supposed to be helped. I haven't really seen people being scheduled on my schedule after those days, and I don't come back to phone messages waiting for me to return them. I do hope people are being taken care of. I don't think this is good for our community, where our only other clinic is closed for remodeling. I hope to be able to add another day to our local clinic schedule soon. I'm hoping by the first of June.

Besides working in the clinic in our small town on Mondays and Thursdays, I am also working on Fridays at our Prompt Care clinic in a bigger nearby town, and picking up a few other random shorter weekend days there each month. I am grateful to have some stored up earned vacation time to help fill in the salary gaps.

This unknown person dressed as a dinosaur walked
down our main street in front of the clinic on Thursday.
It is great to see the efforts people make to keep everyone's spirit's lifted.

At the beginning of March, I got sick myself. It started with mild cold symptoms - headache, low grade fever, body aches, fatigue. Then I got a sore throat and swollen glands for several days. After about a week I developed shortness of breath - not anything too scary. We were in the stage of the pandemic where no one was tested unless they knew there was a high chance of having it - if they had recently travelled to China or Italy, had severe illness in the hospital, etc. Until I ended up showing pneumonia (day 11) on a chest xray, they did not let me be tested. I finally was tested on day 12 for COVID 19. It came back negative three days later. Thirty percent of those tested are falsely negative, so I still wonder if I had it. I slowly got better and at this point I only cough after eating. My illness was never severe, but it had me out of work for a week. In the couple of weeks prior to getting ill, my daughters and I traveled to Chicago where it was just starting to break out. Also at that time shortly before I got sick, three families were coming in to our clinic with flu-like symptoms and high fevers but out of about 12 people only one showed positive on a test for influenza. I wonder about whether they actually had mild COVID19 too. We only know of one positive COVID19 test in our community so far, but he wasn't my patient. Interestingly, he was tested the same day I was.

The schools have been closed and doing school virtually since the beginning of March some time (just before spring break). JoJo's music festival was cancelled, which would have been his first opportunity to play in an orchestra. He had worked hard to prepare. His trip to Washington DC was postponed ($1500!) the next week (so far they're still hoping to reschedule in August). Now the state is mandating school closures for the rest of the school year. The poor graduates this year won't get graduation parties or ceremonies.

I've enjoyed having JoJo home all this time. His school, Princeton Christian Academy, has been assigning schoolwork to do at home. They come in twice a month to get new assignments and bring back finished work.

DH has worked with JoJo to build raised garden beds in the back yard. They have put in dirt, composted manure and peat moss to make the dirt (not the quality we were hoping for) better. I love to see them working on it.

JoJo and DH building a raised bed garden. I'm really proud of them.

JoJo is also doing virtual violin lessons with his violin teacher, Katie Roy. This is not as great as in person, but doable. He has been much more consistent with his practicing too.

LE has been homeschooling for a little over a year. She decided public high school wasn't her cup of tea. Homeschooling has been great for her. She has also plugged into a home school group that does cooperative classes 8 times a semester. This semester she was doing sign language, drawing, and cooking with this group in addition to her other subjects at home. She has made us a meal a couple of times - score!! DH taught a drum building class last semester too, but now that group gatherings have been shut down, he has a bunch of partial drum shells waiting for them to be able to finish some day.

CC had to give up her job of almost two years at the local nursing home. Her back has really been hurting her. She has other health issues too.

CC is growing her hair out. Isn't she beautiful?

JJ has really been depressed. In spite of all her doctor appointments, we've really not found any solutions to her multitude of health problems. We've been working on trying to get her on disability, but that is very difficult.

We've not gone into Walmart since this social distancing has begun. They offer curbside pickup, which works nicely without being exposed to all the people who go into Walmart. When we get home we wash each item with bleach water before we put it away. The fruit we wash and rinse with dish-soapy water and a little bleach. We buy what we usually get at our local grocery store, plus what we can't get at curbside pick-up. It is a real blessing to have a local grocery store in our town for the past 2 years. If all else fails, we order online, mostly from Amazon. Our spending has been cut back a lot because of my hours being cut at the clinic.

Sunday is the highlight of my week. We watch/listen to the online sermon our church posts in the morning and eat homemade donuts (once made by yours truly 😃). At two o'clock some of the people from our church gather virtually in a "Breakout Group" on Zoom. I love this weekly fellowship. Other than the six or so coworkers I see regularly at work, and the patients, this is my one time to meet with friends, catch up a little, talk about the sermon and pray for one another. On Tuesday evenings a small group of us from the community meet over a Messenger phone call to pray as well. We were meeting at the church weekly before the social distancing began, but now we do it from home.

This was our family getting ready for church at home one Sunday.

Other things we have done while virtually distancing have been doing a virtual Passover dinner, celebrating Easter with just our family, and one day we did some geocaching. DH and I have worked on cleaning our room and the garage - both could still use some work. I caught my hair on fire that day we cleaned the garage as I was putting some sawdust and wood pieces in an already lit burn barrel. It flared up and burned my face and hair, but I praise God that it was very minor and didn't need to be cut, since my hairdresser wouldn't have been able to help.