Month: July 2020

A new work week! Lucky to have work to do. I’m off for two weeks from the hospital because I needed a mental break. I’m hoping to fix my closet system because it’s pulling screws out from the walls. And I’m hoping to get rid of a bunch of clothes I don’t use anymore (hahaha. I hardly use clothes anymore. Just PJs and scrubs and some running clothes. That’s it.)

I think this will shed a little light on my relationship to my parents. We have not seen my parents in person since March 7th. We’ve done the grocery shopping for them early on with porch pickup (now they are shopping on their own). Do we arrange to get together for a July 4th socially distanced BBQ? No. This text below was the first in-person interaction we’ve had in 4 months… a visit to see if we could still smell cat pee in their rental property. Annnddd….the answer is yes. The cat pee is still odorous. I had a therapist once listen to all the weird issues I thought I had with my parents and then he sat back and said – I’ve listened to lots of parent/kid relationships and you know, you have a great relationship with your parents! I tilted my head and asked, I do? And he said – yes. you do. And so I’ve incorporated this into my thinking. Instead of thinking, isn’t it weird that the first visit after the great quarantine is to smell cat pee, I think – I have a great relationship with my parents. (And I know I do. My parents would do anything for me.)

We celebrated the 4th in the most patriotic way we could. By ourselves in our own house. Jeremy made lamb, we watched Hamilton on Disney +. Vince made margaritas for us. Vince said all his friends’ parents were making them watch Hamilton with them. We didn’t make Vince watch it with us, he kept us company for about 30 minutes.

For a few days there, MD was one of three states where the rate of infection was falling. Go MD! But now we are holding steady. We actually had someone float to our unit yesterday because their unit (the covid unit) had low census and our unit (non-covid) had a full census. Nice. Our little hospital treated the most number of COVID patients in the county. It’s gotta be coming back though. How can it not come back? But for now, it’s ok here. They are ending hospital “thank you” (hazard) pay on July 4th. Hogan is doing well. Jeremy mentioned our Republican gov might be the GOP guy in 2024 if he can keep the #s down in MD through this whole entire crappy disastrous thing that is the pandemic in the US.

We went to the dentist follow up for Edda on Tuesday. It was the first time Edda wore a mask. She hasn’t been outside much. I thought she would hate the mask, but she wore it just fine. It appears from X-rays (omg, I can’t believe we got an x-ray) that she didn’t damage the roots. The positioning seems OK, but they are still a little bit loose. I haven’t been brushing the two teeth that were pulled out because I didn’t want to accidentally move them again. Edda involuntarily grinds her teeth so we knew she had to move the teeth enough so that they would allow for the weird grinding that she does a lot of the day. We are going to follow up with the endodontist. She is a trooper. She’s taking the seizure meds, we are on week 2 of the up-taper, so we are at half dose. She seems sleepier which makes me unhappy. But it makes me happy that maybe she won’t hurt herself as much anymore. The endodontist called today and told me the price for the consultation ($109) and then the price for the root canal ($599 per tooth) while they were confirming the appointment on Monday. I asked – so we can do the root canal on Monday? And she said – if you want, we can do it on Monday. I said that I was not psychologically prepared to do the root canal on Monday and frankly (thought I didn’t say this) I would be surprised if the endodontist would also be psychologically prepared for a root canal on Edda on Monday. I think we’d have to be a hospital admit in order to do that.

Vince’s school is confusing me. On June 29th they sent an update on housing:

It said – we are going to de-densify the housing, you’ll be assigned a bathroom, no visitors, all the common areas will have furniture moved around to enforce social distancing (does furniture in common rooms ever stay the in the same spot? never.) and other various things. And then they reminded us that if we didn’t cancel buy July 1st, we’d not only lose the housing deposit, but we’d be on the hook for the whole fall residence hall fee.

Then they said, whoops, nvm. We’ll extend the cancellation deadline to July 10th. No one knows which classes are going to be in person (a few of them are). No one knows if they are going to be in a triple. No one really knows what is going on. Vince is like – am I going to be sitting locked in my room taking online classes with boxed sandwiches delivered to my door? I’m like – I, uuuuummm, don’t think so. Vince is like – it’s ok to not have roommates, but am I going to have floor-mates? I changed the subject – I’m asked – are all your other friends going to school? In dorms? Vince replied – Lots of people are going to full dorms. Sam’s going to be in a quad. The only people who aren’t going to go physically to their colleges are the ones going to school at community college or to college in Canada. All the Canadian schools are online. I sighed. The Canadians seem smarter than all of us in the US now. I said – at least with the late start, we’ll have about 6-8 weeks worth of college data to see how bad it’s going to be.