Power resting...
When I tested positive for Covid on Sunday I allowed a moment for grumping silently to myself, and then I messaged one of my friends. T is a person who was disabled and immunocompromised before she got Covid and she has been able to examine the experience and articulate the variables very well.
She gave me a very simple list of things to do and an even simpler list of patterns of symptoms to look for that signal time to call the ER and then go to the ER. This was hugely helpful as it gave me very simple things to focus on. The rest of my life did not line up for the simplicity so well, but I emailed and texted people until they participated enough to let me have a full week to do nothing but care for myself. She did not harp on the one thing that she'd mentioned to me in the past, the thing about resting. I remembered that because that's one of those complicated things. Resting is not simple. Resting is hard.
Every day I have an ambient level of body pain, headache, and lethargy. I'm used to pushing through it and knowing in advance how much interest I'll have to pay off for my debt. What T had told me was that with Covid, using that kind of credit can lead to damage.
When you have chronic pain, you learn that some pain signals do not mean that damage is happening. Pain is a great way to communicate, “Don't do that” until that message is being sent all the time and there are no consequences for doing that and no absence of the message for not doing that. Having to remember that this pain that feels like my normal ambient pain means something new requires an uncomfortable level of mindfulness.
Today I told T that I was limiting myself to 10 minutes of activity in every 3 hour block of time. That let me get food and clean myself, take the puppy outside briefly, and throw the sweats that I sweated through last night into the laundry. She cheered and was very proud of me for setting a limit and holding myself to it. I don't sleep all that much, but I keep myself to watching shows I've seen many times before, cuddling the dog, and scrolling the internet.
The thing I was not as sure how to limit has been the cognitive shift. Brain fog is hell. Brain fog is not unusual for me, but this week has me feeling like someone replaced my Cray with a Commodore 64. Still, they got guys to the moon and back with something about the size of a Commodore 64 (and a huge team of hardcore bio-computers) so I'm not panicking. I've just been trying to consciously break down my processing tasks into smaller programs and letting them run for as long as they take.
Rather than processing lots of things (plans, worries, contingency plans, defense systems, escape routes, emotions, past emotions, literary critiques, scientific study reviews, academic papers, and plans for what to do if Batman comes to town) I keep things right in the present by hitting the snooze button for all of those other things. “I'll start gathering estate paperwork on Sunday.” “I'll sort through the mail on Saturday.” “I'll make a pile for cards and set up a folder for thank you notes on Monday.” I'm not procrastinating, I'm implementing a previously devised plan to focus on my own health before tackling important things. Then I throw my mind a bone to chew on. I gnaw on it gently all day and pop out a simplified and brief essay in the evening. There's nothing going on so vital that it needs to be dealt with before I'm sure I have the stamina and coherence to do it reasonably successfully.
But rest is hard. I'm not so tired that I want to sleep, but I'm not up for doing more than the most meager tasks. I stretch out in my chair for a bit, and then I sit up because my nose clogs less that way. I zone out while watching a show and then I sit on the floor and pet the puppy.
Hopefully these essays will serve as a sample of my processing for the duration of this week and until I feel stable enough to have a “new normal.”
It's really easy to get caught up in trying to get a lot of things done. Be that paid work, house work, social connection management, cognitive processing, but there are times when we really need rest. Finding ways to make rest happen is not easy, but when we fail to rest things will break down in far messier and less recoverable ways.