Early COVID-19 Pandemic Memories

I haven't really done much with blogging for quite some time. Today, for some reason, I decided to check out my abandoned blog. I used to love to post weekly. What happened? Life! I probably should have used this when COVID hit. It would would have been a great place to document life in the pandemic!

So here it goes:

I cannot wait until we are out of this pandemic. I can see the light flickering at the end of a long dark tunnel, but it doesn't make the ups and downs any easier. 

Now it is almost February almost a year later. I remember when I was first in the March 2020 days of the pandemic. I woke up everyday asking myself if this was an nightmare or was it real. Each day, as I awoke, I wanted to wake up and it be gone. It was so scary then. I was on spring break when it completely hit my world. School was suddenly cancelled the Friday before spring break. By that time, I was glued to the television. I was just learning how to pronounce Dr. Fauci's name. I began social distancing students in my groups, creating cups with their own pens and markers, and I had my hand sanitizers out and ready to use. During morning duty, that last week before in person school changed to Zoom, I couldn't believe that we had students sitting so close to one another. I tried to have them sit creating with some space between themselves. I remember hearing one young student cough. It startled me. Of course, the young child didn't cover his cough. I make sure that he understood how to cover his cough inside the elbow. Normally a cough is a cough, but a COVID cough is nothing to sneeze at all. Because of what I was learning, it put me on edge. I had just heard that a person had tested positive in Houston and had gone to Ash Wednesday service at St. Cecilia's. My colleagues had also gone there the same time along with several of our students. COVID was spreading all over Houston and was at my back door.

Remembering back to that time, without masks and face shields, seems like an eternity in a pandemic year. The truth was that back then we were just learning about COVID-19. We didn't know then what we know now and are constantly learning more. Back then we didn't speak of variants from Great Britian, Brazil, or South Africa. We were trying to stop the original Corona virus via shutdown. I didn't even know what a shutdown was or how it would be implemented. We heard so many rumors from our friends about how the Homeland Security Department was going to shut down the country with the National Guard. That sent me off to stress spending and buying in bulk the things that I thought I wouldn't be able to buy.   I heard that Amazon wouldn't be able to deliver and the banks would run out of money. I bought 7 months of cat litter, cat and dog food, laundry detergent, hand soap, water, canned goods, soda, and peanut butter and jelly! (You can never have enough peanut butter and jelly!) The week before I heard about the toilet paper scarcity. Luckily, I bought enough to last me about 3 months. One of my friends laughed at me when I told her that I had bought 30 rolls of toilet paper. A week later, she was freaking out because the stores were sold out, and she couldn't find any on Amazon. Toilet paper became scarce along with hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes or spray, rubbing alcohol. I looked everywhere online, but I couldn't find any. 

It was such a stressful time to say the least. I was on spring break, but my mind was on survival. I spent the whole time not enjoying myself by taking walks and frequenting my favorite restaurants. Instead, I lived in the reptilian part of my brain with flight, flight, or freeze. Certainly I was flying online and ordering things each day from Amazon and Target. It was crazy because it was in survival mode. I began watching Dr. Campbell on Youtube. He taught me so much about the SARS 2. I tuned in everyday as my doorbell rang once or twice daily with the non contact deliveries. Shipt came in very handy along with Target Drive Up and Kroger curbside pick up. (There is so much more!)

So...now that I think about it...this might just be the right space to record my experiences and thoughts about living within and through COVID-19. This will be my first post about it.  See you soon!