Month: March 2020

We celebrated Vince’s 18th birthday this weekend (his birthday was yesterday – Monday). First a dinner out on Saturday night with his friends and us and my parents at Founding Farmers. I sat closest to the boys so I asked about their jobs, their driving skills and school. My father asked them where their girlfriends were.

Sunday, we had birthday dinner with the extended Martin family. Vince made his own dinner, coq au vin. I watched him pour a whole bottle of wine into the dish and then he said – that’s a lot of wine and then I said – well it’s in the name! It was delicious! Vince knows how to cook.

On his actual birthday, I was working at the hospital and it was a Very Bad news day and Vince is actually not feeling very well – not COVID – no fever, but swollen lymph nodes, achy joints and feeling out of sorts. So when I came home, I wanted to celebrate by helping him register to vote, but he turned me down politely saying he wasn’t in the mood and then today, he stayed home from school. It was a pretty terrible day to turn into an adult.

Jeremy is working from home now everyday which is a plus for him and a minus for me. I like Jeremy a lot, but I also like my alone time in the house a lot. I think if this lasts a long time, we’ll have to negotiate a new home working routine. Right now we both barge into each other’s work space to chit chat. It’s ruining the rhythm of the day. Jeremy was going to cancel his trip to MN next week, but it would have meant hours and hours of lost work trying to set up face-to-face meetings with various people. So it’s still on. Vince was suppose to go with him to UMinn and then onto Toronto, but we’ll have to see how much better Vince will feel by then. Vince is more concerned about his 18th birthday party which is suppose to be held on Friday night, we are seriously thinking of cancelling it. Vince said – I have so many fun things planned! And I said if schools are closed or you are not completely well, we are going to have to cancel.

I was at the hospital on Monday, it was a totally normal shift other than the insane COVID discussions going around. I have a shift tomorrow which I think will be normal and then I’m off for about 10 days and I think that shift when I return will be different. How different and in what way, I’m not sure. We were also told that if the schools close and you have little kids, saying that you don’t have childcare is not an excused absence. You are expected to show up to work.

Edda had another seizure yesterday, so our hopes that those two seizures within six hours of each other on Feb 12 were a fluke do not seem to be true. We still have that neuro appt at Children’s in a few weeks we are going to. We might also follow up at CHOP at their Rett Clinic now that we know that we know the people running it. We are also going to start tracking Edda’s periods to see if the seizures track with monthly hormone shifts. I gotta figure out a period tracking app. I haven’t had a period in something like 14 years via my IUD, so I’m out of practice. Edda’s school seems very chill about the seizures, I was worried that they would all freak out and want to put stringent protocols in place, but I got a calm call from her teacher saying that Edda’s seizure happened at lunch that lasted about a minute and that the para was great and on top of making sure she was safe and that it made him sad to see and that Edda was a bit worn out and sleepy now.

Edda lost her guanine pendant from her necklace in the past few weeks. As you might know, she is missing a single guanine from her DNA which messed up a really important protein. So I replace it with jewelry. And she keeps losing it (well she’s almost 16 now, we’ve probably gone through 4 sets of necklaces) which seems symbolic to me, and I keep replacing it. So I got a new shiny cytosine.

We closed out the week with red, white and blue day for #WoottonStrong!

Vince was not feeling well on Friday and stayed home from school. He’d been preparing a lot for Mr. RM on Friday night (not that he was running for Mr. RM), and had to miss that. He was bummed. He seems better today.

I’m bummed (upset) that he’s going to probably have to pick a college sight unseen. Jeremy kind of admonished me to think that we’d have him travel during the pandemic if schools were closed, but I was like – just to see it! Even if the campus is closed! What about the cities? Couldn’t he get a feel for Minneapolis or Toronto? Vince took it in stride and said it’ll be fine, he’s watching videos, though he acknowledged that the promo videos might cherry pick highlights. Like in Minnesota – only beautiful days and short sleeves are shown in the videos. Hmmm…

We had Edda’s IEP meeting on Thursday, I came bearing six tubs of Clorox wipes. The IEP meeting was uneventful, sometimes they surprise you with things that you weren’t expecting (like cutting services), but this time it was a keep everything the same meeting.

You can look at this local news clip of my hospital prepping for COVID-19. I’m not sure it is completely reassuring. We do have cases now in MD. And I know that one of the confirmed cases visited the Villages in Rockville about 3 miles from the house and about a mile from Edda’s school. I’m nervous and not so much at the same time.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/holy-cross-hospital-prepares-isolation-rooms-for-coronavirus/2230594

I just remembered Joe Biden is fine! Totally fine!

It is spirit week for inclusion at Edda’s school. For example, Monday was PJ day to put offensive language to sleep. Tuesday was Jersey day to team up for inclusion. Normally, I think this is a bunch of malarkey, but what the heck, I went the totally opposite direction. This might be the last bit of fun we have before we are all quarantined in the house eating our rice & beans. Edda wore her eggs and bacon PJs on Monday:

Megan Rapinoe for Jersey day on Tuesday. I got her an RBG shirt for super hero Thursday.

We went to Vince’s last scout meeting on Tuesday night. You age-out of scouts when you turn 18 and Vince’ll be 18 on Monday. So no more Tuesday scout meetings anymore for us. Vince’s cohort has been one-by-one aging out this year. He’s finishing out as senior patrol leader, meaning he’s the one standing who has been standing in front of the room leading the planning and the meetings since summer last year. He gave a very moving speech (which I did not record because I was almost crying) about how much scouting meant to him and he encouraged the other boys to continue on their scouting path though Vince did acknowledge privately to us that he did not know how much longer the scouting organization will continue on. And this we do not know either.

Vince did put in the work for his Eagle Scout and should get it at the meeting on March 20th. I got behind a little on the sewing and you can see that the last three merit badges on his sash are stapled on. But I eased the staples out and I’ve hand sewed them back on. Vince did the minimum number of merit badges necessary for Eagle. He was never into getting the merit badges – he loved the camping, the parking at the fair, etc. I was worried he wasn’t going to be able to pull it off, but I shouldn’t have worried.

College update: Last we left off, Vince was still excited about studying ChemE at Minnesota. He got into Toronto as a chemistry/physics student and he was kind of indifferent. He said he’d rather be an engineer. But then both sets of grandparents chimed in and said – Toronto’s a great school, he shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. We mentioned this to Vince. He looked at us and said – you aren’t making me go to Toronto are you? Other kids’ parents are making them do Powerpoint presentations about how they want to go to a school that their parents don’t approve of, you aren’t going to make me do a presentation are you? We said – no we aren’t making you do anything, we are just encouraging you to visit Toronto. You might as well get a trip out of it. He said OK to the trip. We had already scheduled a trip to Minnesota (with Jeremy on a business trip) and we tacked on a flight from Minnesota to Toronto (by himself) for a few days. Then I got worried. I can’t send him across the border with the COVID virus going around. He’ll get stuck on the other side. But then on Tuesday night at the scout meeting, he found out Toronto gave him a generous scholarship, probably worth about a year’s tuition/fees etc, and then Vince’s interest in Toronto immediately skyrocketed. It was a very exciting night. So the visit to Toronto is immediately more compelling. I’m not sure if anyone is traveling anywhere two weeks from now. Jeremy is all confused – he’s like – I thought he wanted to be an engineer! What happened to that? Anyways, that’s the college update for now. He did also get into UCSC (Santa Cruz) which doesn’t have an engineering dept, he got in as a Biomolecular & Bioinformatics major or something like that. There is almost no chance he’s going there, but it did not stop him from asking to visit. I’m like – you aren’t going to go there and he said, it’s beautiful there, I want to visit.

What is there to say? I went to work yesterday and there was a general feeling of unpreparedness. There was no new protocol except for the general public protocol – wash hands, don’t come to work if you are sick, etc., etc. But all of us are a bit freaked out. I had a post surgical patient who wanted to leave the hospital as fast as possible and as I was discharging her she asked if I was scared and I said of course I’m scared, I’m still human, how can I not be scared? We actually have very few febrile patients and/or respiratory distress patients on our unit. (Not that I don’t get coughed on. I do get coughed on.) You have to be pretty healthy to be on our floor – we have a lot of post surgical patients (hysterectomy, bowel resection, appendix, etc) and we do have lots of people with infections – but usually they are blood borne or in a wound or like their arm is swollen and red with cellulitis. The gossip at the hospital was that we had a patient in the ED on Saturday with COVID-19, but I shrugged and said I don’t think the house lab has any test kits yet to confirm. We seemed to have enough protective gear supplies (I think), but that could be an illusion.

I had to tell one of my coworkers to stop touching her face. Everytime I passed her in the hall she was touching her gd face! I’m like – you gotta stop that – and she said once I had pointed it out to her, she noticed she was touching her face all the time. This is the one habit I’m trying to break. No touching of my face, especially at work, but at all in general. It’s not easy. I always rub my eyes, pick at my nose, rest my chin in my hands at a table.

Christine says NIH has cleared the “Ebola” floor for this pandemic. Seth’s work has cancelled all travel and had a very stern note saying to not come to work with *any* symptoms no matter how mild. Jeremy went to the Chinese market and they are completely out of rice (except for 4 bags of brown rice which Jeremy may have bought one). Just on Saturday, we booked a solo trip for Vince to visit U of Toronto which now seems will not happen along with the trip to U of Minn (which was in conjunction with Jeremy’s business trip to Minneapolis which probably needs to be canceled as well). I was worried that Vince would get sealed off from me across the Canadian border and he’d be 18 then, which I couldn’t decide was a good or bad thing. I’m afraid that he’ll be picking a college sight unseen which is not the best way to spend an extremely large amount of money, but what the heck, it’s a minor problem in the grand scheme of things. In the next four weeks, we were planning on personally hosting 4 parties – each one larger than the next, 15 people, 40 people, 100 people and 125 people. I think these parties are not going to happen. Edda’s teacher emailed parents to please buy hand sanitizers and clorox wipes for the classroom. Beloved grandparents, take good care of yourselves <3.

I was not a supporter of Mayor Pete, but somehow with him dropping out, I feel adrift and unhappy (maybe also because it overlaps with the pandemic). It seems clear that the choice for us Dems will be between Biden/Sanders – maybe Bloomberg depending on how his ads help him on Super Tues. Really? A bunch of old, white men? This is the best we can do?