Adjustment

I was up in Durham when I made the decision. Even though I live in Oxford, I’ve been going up to Durham, where I’m completing my PhD in Anthropology, to teach first year undergraduates about Peoples & Cultures, and Being Human. A small task. Every week or so, during term time, I take a four and a half hour train trip up to teach for one or two hours, fifteen or thirty students, and then return home the same evening, another four and a half hours if I’m lucky.

This time, I was up for the whole week of the 9th of March. It was the only week in which I had both Tuesday and Thursday teaching, so I’d gotten an off-season deal at the Hotel Indigo. I was already having inklings that the virus was becoming more of a threat, and so I’d decided it was worth the money to not risk myself staying with the many wonderful friends who had offered me a place if I needed it. I was also still recovering from an operation I’d had at the beginning of February. It wasn’t a major operation but it had been enough to require general anaesthesia, and I was still tired. I had been hospitalised in January, which had precipitated the surgical solution, and also in November, in Vancouver, when I had picked up a virus at a conference.

I was supposed to go to Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, to visit good friends on the Friday after I finished teaching. Watching the news from my hotel room in Durham, I had become nervous about the rapid spread which I realised was reaching all corners of the UK. By Thursday, I had decided that it wasn’t a good idea to visit my friends, though I was desperate for a catch up and cuddles with their dog. They understood. I managed to snag a delivery spot for groceries for the coming Wednesday and considered myself lucky. I booked a new train ticket home for Friday morning, and called my housemate.

“I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for me to be living with someone who works full time at John Lewis right now,” I said.

He agreed. We made a plan.

I had had the foresight to bring my Vogmask up to Durham with me on Monday, though I hadn’t worn it on the train journey northward. I wore it from the minute I climbed into my Uber to the train station on Friday the 13th.

“I don’t know, maybe I should start doing something like this. I have some health issues,” said the driver. “But I think maybe it’s just hype.”

“It could be very dangerous for you if you have health issues,” I suggested.

“But I think it’s just like the flu, no?” he said.

“It’s much more catching than the flu, and has a higher mortality than the flu,” I replied.

“Less people have died, though. More people have died from flu than coronavirus.”

“Fewer people have been exposed to coronavirus,” I said. “It’s about percentages, not numbers, because the flu has existed for ages but the coronavirus is brand new. That’s why it’s called a ‘novel’ virus. It’s new. Of the people who have been exposed to it, a higher percentage have died than the percentage of people who catch the flu and die.”

“I don’t know…” he said. “We don’t even really know if it’s new…”

“Yes, we do,” I say, glad he can’t see my eye roll. “The scientists can tell it’s new under the microscope.”

He still wasn’t convinced as I got out of the car.

I spent the train journey playing Civ VI on my computer to distract myself. Thank goodness for table seats and power sockets.

On the taxi ride to my village outside Oxford, my driver was using Dettol wipes on the window divider and the change tray.

“I’m working as long as I can,” he told me. “I rent the cab, so I can’t afford to stop working.”

I wished him luck and good health.

“You know what someone else told me today? One of my passengers?”

“What?” I asked him.

“That the virus isn’t really from China. It’s from Italy, and it’s named after a place called Corona.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No really. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

“I mean, Verona is a place in Italy… it’s in Shakespeare,” I say. “There have been other coronaviruses, SARS was a coronavirus, too.”

He laughed. “And MERS,” he said.

I got home and unearthed my Dettol from under the sink, and sprayed all the handles and light switches and taps and anything else I could think of. Some of it must have gotten into the wiring for the light on the stairs, because even though it was off, it started flickering on and off like in a horror movie. I turned it on properly and it was fine.

My house mate came home from work and I stayed in my room and he made his own dinner, after he’d scrubbed himself. The cat knew life was weird and pooped under the stairs and we both told her she was silly. We chatted 6 feet apart, he on the landing, me in my bed. We sprayed the bathroom with Dettol, me using rubber gloves, after each of us used it.

Saturday I rested, and planned. He came home from work and packed enough for the next ten days, all that was left of his job at John Lewis. We bid farewell from a distance and gave each other air hugs. He drove to our friends’, a place with warm welcome, many bedrooms, the best golden retriever you will ever meet, and no one who is immunocompromised.

Sunday I disinfected. I disinfected everything, from the couch to the bath tub. I used Dettol on every surface I could and Lysol on everything else. I opened the windows and turned off the heat and let the world blow clean. Too bad it was an endless drizzle sort of day and there was no sun. I disinfected all of his things and packed them up in the process, and removed bedding and put linens in a 60 degree wash and Lysoled the pillows and duvets and mattresses.

I slept well Sunday night.

Monday I woke and connected with people and took a country walk. I marked (graded) student papers. I tried to relax but couldn’t escape the creeping anxiety that was permeating society everywhere. I went to bed hoping I could sleep but aware of my tension. At midnight, I saw a flashlight outside, which meant that my milk delivery had come very early. It had a lot of food along with milk, and I didn’t want it sitting out over night, so by quarter past twelve I was rubber-gloved-up and disinfecting the milk bottles, the fruit and the veg, the cheese and the yogurt and the crackers. Dettol for things that could safely take it, a scrub with hand soap for the veg and fruit which I didn’t want to contaminate. Was I overdoing it? Maybe. Did I think it was worth it anyway? Totally.

I wouldn’t realise for two more days that the delivery was missing the tea.

I went back to bed and tried to read but the end of my book included the narrator being locked alone in a dark basement for ten days so it wasn’t the most relaxing reading and I couldn’t sleep until I’d finished the book and she’d gotten out.

Needless to say, Tuesday was not a great day. I was starting to realise how long I was going to be in isolation for. In my head, I had been saying, “For the next few weeks…” for a while. But I new it would be at least 12 weeks, and on Tuesday I started to realise that it could be a lot longer than that.

A friend brought me plants and seeds and we chatted out the window for a half hour or so.

I caught up with a friend I haven’t seen in five years, and then another friend in Germany, over Skype.

I organised a virtual board game group on Facebook and didn’t sleep well again.

On Wednesday my grocery delivery came, and my Gousto recipe box, and I had more food to disinfect and a kitchen to reorganise, because I needed to make room for more tins and more pasta and rice. Having food made me feel safer. I also realised the vast amount of people trying to Skype me was adding to the feeling of life-not-normal, and so I cancelled with a bunch of my friends for the time being. As a chronically ill academic, I’m used to a quiet week at home and this was weird. I wasn’t done putting all the food away but I went to bed feeling a bit better.

Thursday I marked papers, with a 5pm deadline. This was surprisingly refreshing stress. I also realised what I was most anxious about was the lack of physical human contact.

Someone I didn’t know from the Jewish community brought me matzo and matzo meal and horseradish and gefilte fish, purchased for me by the Chabad rebbetzin (wife of the rabbi) in London for Passover. Now the messenger and I are communicating on WhatsApp.

More deliveries I needed came. I streamlined my disinfection station. I tried to get through on the phone lines to report my missing item from my milk delivery, and when I finally did, their system was down.

My house mate came and he stood in the front garden and I put his stuff in the enclosed porch and he gradually took it all to his car. The cat almost let him pet her.

I stayed up too late but I slept well after.

Friday was better. Friday my house was finally getting more organised. Friday I had therapy over Skype, and it worked, and I started to relax, and open, and feel ready to conquer this.

I’m used significant life interruptions for health reasons. I’ve lost months of my life (if not years) to illness, injury, operations and recovery, etc. I’ve lost money due to health situations out of my control, I’ve lost jobs to health, heck, I’ve even lost careers to health stuff. I have definitely been socially isolated because of my health before. Lots of things have taken longer, or taken a circuitous path to get to my goal. I’m not saying it’s been easy; I have had some dreadfully low points in my life (though thankfully not recently). But I do know how to do this. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.

But you guys are new to this game. So here’s a few things I know:

1. It is going to be hard. I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy. You will have bad days. We will lose people. (Some people have already lost people.) Yup, you might lose your job, and some really horrible things may happen. In my personal health battles I’ve lost A TON. But I’ve gained a whole lot, too.
2. You will get through this. It will be very hard to believe this in the worst moments, when your loved one is sick, or in the hospital, or you’re in the hospital. But there will be a time afterwards when you are safely walking in the city, flying to your dream destination, hugging and kissing your relatives.
3. There will be lags… in careers, in plans, in life. Things are going on hold right now. But EVERYONE is on hold… no one is getting that job ahead of you, or that post-doc application in or their wedding booked. My friend just had to cancel her father’s funeral indefinitely. And lags aren’t so bad. We spend a lot of time bemoaning the relentless hurtling pace of our capitalist, success-driven society. View this as a holiday for capitalism. And even if your lag is a little longer than others, that doesn’t mean your life or your career is over. And your love, your soul, will still be just as true a year from now.
4. We are going to need to ask for help. This can be really difficult for many of us. Some of us even have trouble recognising when we need help. It used to be very hard for me, and I still struggle with it sometimes. For many of you, this might one of the first times in your life you have no choice but to ask for help. But asking for help can be the most meaningful type of interaction during this time of isolation. Every request is a chance to build a meaningful connection with another person.
5. Self care isn’t often wine and a hot bath. It’s actually hard and stressful but really important to keep you healthy, for yourself and your loved ones, keep you mentally well, and get you through this. It means making sure you eat right, get enough sleep, get the right kind of exercise for you, and take care of your mental health. All of this is necessarily mediated by not expecting too much of ourselves (see 6), but you are going to start having a lot of other problems the farther we get into this if you don’t take care of yourself. I used to think, “This sucks, I deserve: another cupcake / a day off from work / to stay up watching Glee if I want to / etc,” but it was really a form of self sabotage which did a lot more harm than good.
6. We need to be kind… to others, and to ourselves. It’s easy to start berating ourselves for not holding to our routines, sleeping through that wake up time, not getting the kids healthy enough food, missing the deadline at work. This is an incredibly stressful time for everyone, especially you. Yet during stress we have a tendency to hold ourselves to even stricter standards than normal. Be kind with yourself. And be kind with others. The people who are delivering our goods, staying working in stores, and the vast army of good folks working in healthcare are putting themselves in harm’s way for us. Some of them are even high risk, like me, but they are out there helping you anyway.