Day 3 at home

Day three didn’t get off to a great start, as I woke at about 2.30am with quite bad chest congestion and spent at least half an hour awake trying to cough to clear my chest.

Thankfully I eventually fell asleep, but woke again at about 8am with more chest congestion. Steam inhalation from a bowl of hot water, my inhaler and more coughing did the job again, but I stayed in bed until about 11am to recuperate a bit after a disrupted night’s sleep.

When I got up, I spent the morning working on resources for one of the Leaving Cert Biology chapters. I was very productive. By about lunchtime, however, I was not feeling in a good place mentally. Fiona has just told me the news of her work colleague that has suspected Covid19, after her boyfriend’s co-worker contracted it. I have also been spending much of every day so far reading Facebook, Instagram, boards.ie, twitter and lots of WhatsApp groups. There is so much sad and scary news out there, especially about what’s happening in Italy. This is in addition to all the rumours that are wildly circulating, and I think it’s all just come in on top of me a bit.

By 4pm, I was back in bed for a nap, and when Peter came in to check on me, the floodgates opened and I had a good cry! It was only yesterday that we were laughing at the RTE weather woman who was tweeting about breaking down and crying, and saying that she was going to stay off social media. Today, it’s me. I never really believed it before when they said that this kind of scenario could have a negative impact on people’s mental health, but here I am and it’s only day three!

I’ve decided to drastically reduce how much time I spend reading things online, and I’m going to try to get my daily update from the six o clock news on television only, as much as possible. Me and Peter are also going to try to talk about nice things, and not just the virus, as much as we can too. It also doesn’t help that I seem to have a mild chest infection, while Peter has a cough also. I’d probably be better able to deal with things if I wasn’t feeling sick myself!

Anyway, it turned out that a nap was just what I needed. Following this, we also headed out for a walk in the sunshine, up to the SuperValu and home again. To maintain social distancing, Peter went into the shop while I waited outside. It was amazing how many people walked close to me though, even though I was standing in the far corner of the car park! We also saw one particularly big group of teenagers all hanging out together on our way home. Why would their parents let them do that?

This evening, I made homemade chips for me and Peter to have with our dinner. I cut up the potatoes in our living room, while the Dancing with the Stars final (which was actually meant to be on next week) played out on the TV, in an almost completely empty television studio!

I decided to head to bed a little earlier tonight, but not before putting in an online order with Tesco. There’s rumours that the country will be locking down completely tomorrow, so we don’t want to have to go out to the shops if we can help it. The earliest bookable delivery slot with Tesco was nine days from now. Who knows what will be happening by then?!Read more