Staying Healthy!

As of yesterday my town is on lockdown. No one can leave the house except for emergencies or necessity like picking up medication or food. For the last week I've been ramping up my cleaning and trying to keep my family and myself healthy and safe.

Here's some things I'm doing.

We've all been ramping up our vitamin C intake and eating healthy, balanced meals. This was my breakfast this morning. Slow cooked organic oatmeal sweetened with dates, cinnamon and nutmeg. Mmmmm! We've been having some rain and cold so this warm bowl hit the spot.

I'm also very lucky to have access to good produce. Honeycrisp apples are my favorite and my husband makes sure we always have some in the house.

I made a "cleaning bin" that I have out in our living room. This has the last of my Clorox wipes, spray disinfectant, paper towels, rubber gloves and a spray bottle with 4tbsp bleach and the rest is distilled water (for spray disinfection). Anyone coming or going can find what they need in this bin.

After doing a LOT of research on what will kill the Coronavirus I found that just pure household Hydrogen Peroxide does a great job. I got 2 giant bottles of it at our Costco for $2, then bought spray bottles at the Dollar Store. This whole bottle was about $2 and will last a verrrrrrrry long time. Thinking outside of the box will help my whole family stay health!

This is my son's work area. He's staying healthy by taking his daily medications, taking hand sanitizer out with him and using it after washing hands when out. These lens wipes (also from Costco) have alcohol and are a disinfectant as well. 

We're all wiping our phones and computers down daily. I wipe down our counters, door nobs, fridge handle and other highly used things in the house daily. 

We're also sharing what we have with others. My son was letting friends use his hand sanitizer and I left an individually wrapped wet wipe out for our postal worker. 

I love to see the community coming together and helping each other. Crisis can either bring out the best in people, or the worst. So far I'm seeing the best in people.

Living in fear

Wasn't there once a high school class called "Health and Safety?" I seem to recall making kissing jokes while people tried to perform CPR on a dummy. But that was a very long time ago.

Today with the Coronavirus all over the news health and safety are at the forefront of my mind. Not "stockpiling toilet paper" on my mind, but enough on my mind that I'm taking extra precautions. Given my heath issues I don't think it would surprise anyone if I just self quarantined till this was all over. But I'm not. Here's why.

Shopping at Costco with my cotton gloves on yesterday.

Five years ago I contracted TB. It's also an airborn virus that frequently kills people. Fortunately for me there was treatment for it, although nine months long and damaging. After I recovered and was about to return to work I developed a serious phobia. My phobia was about people coughing and being in close contact with others. Strangers were the worst. If I had to shake someone's hand I was left almost in a panic. I had developed a real germ phobia that was interfering with my life. 

What got me out of it was this. I realized that the fear of getting sick again was ruining my everyday life. My quality of life was going down because of fear. So I rationalized with myself. Told myself I can take reasonable precautions (not hug someone whose sick, buy an air purifier for my office), but that anything outside of hand washing and common sense was just me letting the fear into my life. I refused to do that so I decided not to. And that was it. Literally from that day on the panic stopped. 

Fear was telling me that I was going to get sick again. Something in reality I have very little control over. Zoom ahead five years and I still refuse to let fear dictate my life to me. No one knows how long they have. I could be in a car accident, get run over in my wheelchair, get food poisoning, have a stroke. I have no idea how or when, but I do know that I'm going to make the most of it and not live in fear.

I will wash my hands for 20 seconds, I will brush my teeth twice a day, go to my doctors appointments, use hand sanitizer and not be stupid. But I will not stock pile toilet paper, buy every Clorox wipe there is, or cancel plans I've looked forward to because of fear. Fear will not dictate my life or how I live it. That's a choice that I made years ago and I never looked back.

Gentle Reminders

I have a few favorites in my journal. Things I like to go back and refer to. These two are particularly worth sharing today:

Yes!
One of the reasons I love gardening. 

I read a while back on another chronic illness blog that you can't live your life with sickness at the middle of it. I firmly believe that is true (no matter what the challenge is.) When you just go from appointment to appointment or even symptom to symptom you aren't really LIVING your life. You're just surviving. Of course there are exceptions to this. But typically to go from reaction to reaction is more damaging than the thing you're reacting to.

When I say "don't turn into your family" to myself it's a reminder to not just stop living. That's what my grandmother has done with her chronic illnesses and she's miserable. I don't know what she's living for. She just drifts from appointment to appointment from pain pill to pain pill. It's no life that I want to have. 

I try hard to remember this and instead of going from crisis to crisis I plan. I do. I go. I create. I invent. I discover. I explore. I may have to work around or with things, but I'm not letting these challenges rule my life. 

That's what the journal entry you see above was about. A reminder of things that make me happy and that make life worth living. If you're just going from crisis to crisis, always just reacting, then life isn't really worth living. Savor. Enjoy. Play!