I have never been a patient person. I always said if patience is a virtue, I’ll take vice. So of course, people wasting my time ranks at the top of a fairly short list of pet peeves. I mean, my conditions already claim a good chunk of my energy. I hate giving up any unnecessarily because people can’t do their jobs right. Or drive properly. Or, well, lots of other things.

It seems, though, that pre-pandemic, I was doing better than I thought. I only know this because I have lost so much patience since stay-at-home orders for people like us became the norm. In fact, I have lost all of it. Two incidents in 24 hours a couple of weeks ago illustrate my current state of mind.

Has anyone ever told you not to let your disease define you? I bet they have. Once, I thought that was a possibility. I thought I could make my regimen routine, automatic. But as the conditions piled up like one blow after another in a boxing match, I realized that whether I liked it or not, I was my conditions.

What does that mean?

The presidential election is approaching quickly, and with it an elevated level of rhetoric and fear mongering. Until recently, most of it was just noise.

I have been telling my father for weeks that there was no need to panic about this election. During our last call I told him it might be time to worry (not panic yet). The incumbent, given as level a playing field as this country is capable of right now, is afraid he cannot win. So he rages against a system that has worked for hundreds of years and orchestrates more and more ways to skew that playing field to his advantage.

I’ve been networking a lot since I lost my job. Since I haven’t gotten a job through direct application in 20 years, networking to find the right fit seems like a good plan, at least for the near term. During a call with a new contact, he asked me what hill I would die on. I had no idea.

In the moment, I said something about treating mental health in tandem with autoimmune diagnosis, which is something I do feel strongly about. But is it a hill I would die on? When we hung up, I was bothered. I didn’t think I had one. If I didn’t have a hill I would die on, what did that mean about me as an activist?

I’m an adult I suppose, but as someone without kids, I don’t have to act like one when I don’t want to. There is no chore I actually like, so I put them off until I feel like doing them. Laundry usually waits until I run out of underwear.

One adult task I’ve been putting off for a couple of decades is setting down an advance directive (also called a living will).

I am a Type 1 diabetic, and as such, I am lucky to have an insulin pump. It is stuck to my body and delivers a constant stream of insulin to keep my blood sugars even. I wear it mostly on the waist of pants or shorts. It jumps off occasionally when I move the wrong way, but it is durable enough that it doesn’t matter.

No, the problem comes when I go to sleep.

Last week I talked about what happened to a patient who was bullied and belittled by a care professional, and how important it is to stand up for ourselves. Standing up for ourselves often means protecting the others who come behind.

This week, I want to talk about a likely offhand comment made by the writer at the end of the article about how he could find the humor and ridiculousness given enough time and distance from the incident.

I read something today that, wow it made me mad. It was about a man who had gone in for training for a second joint replacement and was repeatedly passive-aggressively belittled by the instructor because he didn’t fit her preconceived notions of what a joint replacement patient should look like. (He was much younger than the others.) Though the article was entitled, My Loneliest Moment as a Young Person With Chronic Illness, the patient and author of the piece said that 10 years later, he saw the humor and ridiculousness of the situation. I don’t know whether the initial situation or the subsequent dismissal of his own feelings made me angrier.

I am not built for dealing with more than one major stressor at a time. The day I found out I had kidney disease, I had scheduled outpatient laser eye surgery, as well. It was supposed to be the second of four appointments based on the patient’s pain level, but the emotional strain made me compress the last three appointments into that one. On that day I was just done.

These days the stressor is the deluge of information intended to keep us up to speed on the various crises flooding the country.

So, this is it. My last day earning money since my unbroken stretch started in 2002. There was about a year after my mother’s death when I temped on and off, but I don’t remember what I did during that time otherwise. I can’t tell what is having the bigger impact on my ability to sleep – the last hours of the truly terrible work I had to do to justify my company paying me for the last few weeks or entering (another) huge unknown. Like there aren’t enough of those already in this age of coronavirus.