Well, it finally happened. I know someone who has died of COVID-19. I had been lucky thus far in that my circle of friends and family are privileged enough to not have to venture out of our living spaces. We all have the kinds of jobs that allow us to stay home, and the means to have groceries delivered if that’s what we want.

I didn’t know this person well. He was a close friend of my dad’s, but not someone I grew up with. He was one of us, though, a patient with diabetes and physical limitations, as well as a few other conditions. He often told my dad that he was surprised he lived as long as he had, and he used that as a reason to not follow CDC guidelines as closely as patients have been advised to. He did not wear a mask as religiously as most of us do now. He socialized when he wanted to, without self-restriction. He traveled back and forth between Connecticut and Florida multiple times to see his girlfriend and to play golf, especially as it got colder.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

Mental health and depression have always been issues in the chronic and autoimmune community. Every aspect of a physical illness that doesn’t go away can chip away at a person’s well-being. But it’s treatable, and can be mitigated with a good therapist and a regimen that includes a realistic approach to the condition and self-care. But sometimes it just gets to you and you find yourself staring into the abyss of despair. It’s not a technical or medical definition, but to me, despair is the evil stepchild of depression – an exponent or two darker and harder to treat.

One of my friends is dealing with this right now.

It’s approximately 12:30 on January 20, 2021. I can tell you right now that I am going to be useless for the rest of the day. Like many people, I have been looking forward to the end of Donald Trump’s term in office like it was the only lifeline to my future.

I feel it already. It’s not hyperbole to say I can breathe now. My lungs literally feel less constricted than they have since election night, about two-and-a-half months ago. I can go to sleep tonight and not worry that I will wake up to some new horror. Maybe I can even leave my phone in my bedroom now when I get up in the middle of the night to pee.

No, the title of this post is not a typo. I think we need to annex the first three weeks of 2021 onto 2020 and start fresh on January 21, 2021. After all, we have been stress drinking for almost five years. Surely we deserve three weeks to recover from the hangover.

Except we’re not going to get a quiet, dark room and a cold compress in the first three weeks of 2021, are we?

If you are a patient, you know stigma. Whether physical or psychological, when people hear you have a medical issue, they often make the leap to ‘defective.’ Even if you have not experienced stigma firsthand, you live in fear of it – that it will keep you from getting a job or that you will have to expose your differentness to gain access to the things you need. It’s a terrible feeling, kind of a sick tightness in the pit of your stomach.

Which was why I was so dismayed to hear (and hear and hear) that we are now attaching stigma to COVID patients.

Really, people? This year hasn’t been hard enough?

I have talked about the importance of an advance directive before. It is the only way to exert control over some of the most important healthcare decisions of your life, even while you are incapacitated. Well, this week I finalized mine.

Considering all of the potentially life-threatening conditions I have, it is slightly criminal that I haven’t had one since I was 20, after an incident in which I was incapacitated by low blood sugar, inadvertently refused treatment at the 24-hour clinic, and my mom told me in no uncertain terms that we were never doing that again.

After procrastinating for so long, I was finally in a situation where I couldn’t delay.

A few weeks ago I had an incident – not terrible, but not something I was prepared for, either. One of my less active conditions is mild asthma. It predates my diabetes, and is activated by strenuous exercise and certain weather conditions. When the air gets heavy, but it hasn’t started raining yet, the dense air tightens my lungs. I take daily medication for it, and I have an inhaler for emergencies, but I haven’t needed it for a good decade.

This week I needed it.

It’s been a while since I talked about my struggle with weight. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started making plans. They were reasonable plans, not pushing myself too hard. I was aiming for a slow progression that made sense for long-term progress. But, like everyone else, I had no way of knowing that the restrictions that began then would be necessary for this long. I did really well for a while. Then depression and old self-destructive tendencies caught up with me – talking myself out of exercise, overbuying groceries then justifying overeating by telling myself that wasting food is bad (it is, but that’s not a justification for poor food practices.)

So far during this pandemic, I have been lucky. None of my family or friends has contracted coronavirus. And with the right preparation, self-quarantining, and very careful timing, I have even been able to see my family a few times. But I have noticed a particular post-visit sensation that wasn’t there before.

I didn’t notice it until recently. Or maybe it didn’t happen until recently, but the last time I went to see my family, I got really depressed once I was home. I suspect it’s because, on previous trips, I already knew about when I would be back. This time, I was fairly sure I wouldn’t see them again for the foreseeable future. The kids were going back to school in person (cautiously – there is a lot of plexiglass involved), and there is just no way someone like me can take a risk like that.

After over eight months basically confined to my apartment, I was excited to hear the promising news about the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, and now the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is showing promise, as well. For those of us who have, for all intents and purposes, become prisoners in our own homes, (I did the math and it turns out that I spend an average of 98% of every week staring at my own four walls and sometimes out the window) it is difficult to temper our expectations of what this could mean.