stupid disasters, panic fatigue

[cimorene]

First of all, gatherings of more than 10 people are supposed to be avoided, schools are closing except for small children whose parents have to work, and everyone is encouraged to work from home. waxjism does customer support, and they asked them Friday who has high-speed internet in case they have to try to arrange some measures but we don't know how that might work out.

There aren't any elderly people closely related to Wax left alive. My parents are in their 60s and my dad is in a wheelchair and has had pneumonia quite a few times, but my parents in Alabama and my sister in Lousiana seem to be able to self-isolate pretty well, with the exception of my sister's husband, who has asthma but is essential on-site personnel.

But confronted with this... both Wax and I reached panic fatigue months ago. We're panicked out.

Our nightmare started last July and we've been living on figurative tenterhooks not knowing our financial and practical future most of that time, with other disasters intervening. We've been physically dwelling in an incredibly cramped space, sleeping in the livingroom, surrounded by our possessions in teetering piles that don't fit anywhere else, and without a washing machine for over six months, and in that time both of the cats have had severe health scares, as has my dad... and my mom even managed to fall and hit her head and provide a health scare too in that time, although she turned out to be fine. I spent the end of last week so panicky, thanks to the BB being so sick there was apparently some risk of her dying, that I slept for twelve hours Friday night (broken by getting up to feed the cats three times), and I was wobbly Saturday.

There's no question that the global pandemic is worse and more dangerous, it's just we don't have any additional levels of panic left.

Everything can always get worse. We stopped feeling any sort of surprise or betrayal about each new thing that went wrong quite a while ago. It's all just a despairing "Okay, this now."

So today, less than half an hour after the local emergency room closed, Wax managed to get a cm-long splinter so deep under her thumbnail that we couldn't get it out with needle and tweezers (she was trying to empty a basket of metal recycling into a bag to take to the store). The after-hours emergency room is then in Turku, a 20-minute drive, but also you shouldn't go there right now and everyone has to call ahead before going there now anyway obviously, and Wax faints when she hurts herself and she kept getting woozy again even though she already spent a while lying on the bathroom floor with her head on my knee. It's that vagus nerve thing. There was no evident local alternative. We don't really directly know any local people - Wax didn't want to call MIL's BFF cause she's in her 70s - and we weren't sure if it was even possible to obtain needle-tip tweezers anywhere locally. In the process of trying to pry the splinter out, I sterilized a straight pin in a candle flame and then burned the pad of my finger by trying to grip it by the metal part. (It didn't blister; it's a mild 1st degree burn.) We asked the family chat and her brother's brother-in-law who lives in this town had a spare pair, so we drove over there and got it and she managed to get the splinter out, though not without a lot of blood.

In between feeling faint, she kept saying "It's just such a STUPID problem."

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

OH NO

All the hugs.

[cimorene]

💚

[yvannairie]

Being extremely burned out and thus not having any emotional reaction to being told to start making preparations that would normally be stressful is entirely understandable. Hell, I went through my panic before we knew the profile of covid-19, with the aid of my coworkers who love to joke about literally everything either killing us or putting us out of a job, so I basically went through work today smugly bemused about why everyone was so on edge. It's their own damn fault for working themselves into a panic -- I have no fucks left, having spent the past four months getting progressively worse alarm fatigue from their constant panic masquerading as black humour.

Poor Wax :(

[cimorene]

There's probably an element of this in my reaction to the pandemic too. I don't have any coworkers or specific group of people to blame, and I don't accuse anyone in my sphere of misusing humor or being sadistic about it, but I've been seeing the news and predictions for months, so I definitely saw the writing on the wall over a month ago and it's just been a constant level of dread since then, with a healthy dose of 'the information was all there, but you're only panicking NOW?' directed especially at government, organizations, and infrastructures mixed in.

[yvannairie]

Yep, on top of something like six years of general alarm fatigue, at this point any time the English-speaking internet starts acting like the sky is falling, I will have been thinking about the potential consequences of whatever it is for at least a good three months. It really is entirely okay. You've got more immediate stupid to deal with.

You two need anything I could potentially do from a few hundred kilometers away?

[cimorene]

Thanks, but I don't think so! Mostly what we need is... to be able to drive our van but it's out of commission for the winter (because we have too many donations for the Red Cross to fit in the car with winter tires). And also we need to photograph a bunch of things and make ads for them on tori.fi. And google glassware to figure out how much to ask for it.

Well, actually, if you happen to know about art glassware and the stamps/signatures that one finds on it, that might shorten the amount of time we spend googling it.

[yvannairie]

Unfortunately not :'D Good luck, and don't push yourself too hard.

[cimorene]

It was worth a shot, haha. Thanks! I think we're coping okay still.

[mummimamma]

I am not sure what i can say that doesn't sound trite, but you have my thoughts, sympathy and virtual hugs. Constant worries, problems are just draining, and then crazy things like midnight splinters happen.

[cimorene]

Actually the local emergency room closes at 16:00 on weekdays, so it was at like 16:10. Easier to get a night's sleep afterward, much sillier feeling at the moment. Probably made it easier to borrow the tweezers too though.

[mummimamma]

Also probably saved you from sitting at the emergency room for four hours.

[cimorene]

Oh man, yeah. Or longer... I think I was there a few hrs the time I broke my elbow. If they're even a little bit more busy than usual, a splinter could take significantly longer than that I bet!

[fairestcat]

*all the love and hugs*

I'm so sorry this year has been so awful for you and Wax.

[cimorene]

💚

[phosfate]

I'm glad it's not just me. I'm so out of panic that it's manifesting as hyposomnia and writing fanfic.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I'm just emotionally tired of... everything. I don't have any fanfic to write, so I'm occasionally writing my thoughts on the books I read. Sigh.