Like all of you, I have this underlying hum of anxiety every day that wasn’t there before. So far, no one in my immediate circle of family and friends has contracted COVID-19. All of them (and me!) are practicing physical distancing – we only go out for exercise and groceries, and even then we wear (non-medical) masks and gloves when appropriate. Sometimes that’s not enough.

These are hard times. Every day we watch the number of coronavirus cases and deaths rise and wonder if someone we love will end up a statistic. Maybe the worst is that we have to deal with it alone.

I have to confess, I have been through my fair share of “this, too, shall pass” moments. Granted, none of them have felt quite like this, but most of them did happen around this time of year.

Even since last week, the coronavirus and its attendant illness, COVID-19, have been throwing life in the United States into a zombie-apocalypse kind of chaos. The unknown is always scary, but based on the information we have, it’s especially scary for us – chronic patients who are, by definition, immunocompromised.

A few weeks ago, a tweet popped up in my feed. I meant to save it, but I didn’t. Basically, a cancer surgeon was begging the doctors who make the diagnoses to tell their patients when they have cancer. It makes the surgeon’s ensuing conversation pretty awkward when they don’t. At the time, it seemed like an aberration. People don’t really do that, do they?

Life is comprised of a set of relationships. Bosses, spouses, delivery people, colleagues, even the woman at the butcher’s counter at your grocery store and the bank security guard who recognizes you by now. Close or not, you have relationships with more people than you think. 

There’s been a lot of talk about the importance of self-care in recent years. That counts double for those of us with chronic and autoimmune conditions. It’s hard since a lot of us are as much caretakers of others as we are in need of care ourselves. Focusing on ourselves comes about as naturally as writing a cover letter (my least favorite thing to write). But it has to be done.

Grief is not a linear process. I lost my mom nearly 20 years ago to pancreatic cancer, caught late partially because her Crohn’s Disease required the use of steroids for decades. I wasn’t ready. No one is, really. For better or worse, parents shape us both consciously and unconsciously. My mother was the one who shaped how I related to my condition.

There is no such thing as a chronic condition that comes free from psychological issues. One of the most common is the adjustment to being different. We are social animals. From the time we are young, we do everything we can to fit in to our peer group. By definition, a chronic diagnosis puts you in the “different” category. Even if it’s an invisible illness, even if no one knows about it, in your head, you have become “other”.