Text Only

How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

November 1, 2020 I have not ever been this late in making a journal entry before, but I have been stressed this week. I am well aware of the end of the month, and I have been out of work for a month. It seems so wrong to get upset about not having a job when so many more people have been out of work for so much longer. I have been looking for a way to work from home, but it seems that my hometown may end up experiencing a lack of service from AT&T, the only real service provider out here. Not that it is making much difference at the moment. You see, my computer equipment is limited and aging rapidly with the introduction of a new iPhone next week. I also have problems with lack of training and licensure for some work from home jobs. So much for finding a job over the internet quickly. If that wasn’t enough, I received a call from my aunt in Houston. She is one of the few blood relatives that I have left, so every time that I get to speak to her is precious, especially since she is over 90 and in assisted living. The home where she lives has been making fantastic efforts to keep her safe, but they cannot slow the march of time. When her heart started giving her real problems last week and she fainted and fell, she was in the hospital almost immediately. Visiting her became a real priority for me. I haven’t seen her in over a year, and she is due to go into heart surgery tomorrow. I felt I needed to see her before the surgery in case something happened. That’s when I found out how sad the state of affairs in my own area is. In four surrounding counties, there is no place that does COVID testing for free. One pharmacy that is listed on the state health department website just charged a neighbor $80 for the privilege of being screened through them. I began looking into options for getting screened myself when I found that the area has no testing to speak of. I was lucky that a visit to the hospital website had a quick prescreen questionnaire and a notice that one visitor per day was allowed after the visitor had their temperature taken. Even though I had called my aunt ahead of time to reserve my 45 minute visit yesterday, I was still stopped because the visitors log said she had already had one visitor that day. I had to plead for time, explaining that I drove three hours to get there. I would have been happy with them minutes. Thankfully, they had moved her to another room, so the log was not accurate. And all that computer service/communications is sure? It got dicey when I found out that my local gas station no longer accepts the gas card that I have. WOW! The neighbors came through again by pointing me to other stations that work.