Best Of

It has been a rough couple months for me, and I am just coming to vent.

When I moved back across country, I moved in with the parents until I could get back on my feet and get my own place. It has seemed like I was just needed to be here. At the end of the year, they found a brain tumor in my mother. She has native health care, and they just flat out denied even sending her to a neurologist, citing potential cost as the reason for denial. It has now been like 3-4 months of her appealing it and they have not even answered. It seriously affects her way of life, and I eventually worked out some CBD products that allow her to be mostly functional. On top of that, a couple of weeks ago a pet gate fell on her foot, and cause an internal infection. My former mother in law, has her own medical issues and has to have surgery to potentially avoid ovarian cancer. My grandmother has had stage 4 lung cancer for over a year, and we can hardly even visit due to COVID or potentially exposing her to -any- sickness.

On top of all this, my work, which I loved quite a bit, decided that I had missed too much work due to children or taking care of my mother, and fired me. I had been expecting it, because my supervisor kept railing at me about how I needed to fix shit and make better priorities. Finding a job that works with scheduling and not forcing me to pay massive amounts for childcare is super difficult, and I am stressed about that working out. I at least have Door Dash and other delivery things I can do to make some money in the mean time, but its not a steady, regular amount of pay.

I am staying positive, but I am already on board the fuck 2021 train.

I started working in my county's Covid vaccination clinics eat the beginning of the month. Up until today, the hardest parts were the fact that they were long (12-14 hours) and involved different physical things than I've been used to doing up until now.

Sometime between my last clinic and the one today, the county opened up registration for vaccines to include people 65 and over as well as people with high-risk medical conditions, which is estimated to be around 40% of our entire adult population. We already know that people will be on waiting lists for weeks, but we're in the same position as almost every other place - there just aren't enough vaccine doses yet.

So today I was doing the "greeter" position, which included verifying that everyone going into the area had gotten a text saying that they could come inside for their appointment. (Or figuring out why they hadn't gotten the text, helping with translators, etc.) Part way through, an older man came up and said that he didn't have an appointment, but that he'd been through the registration, put on the wait list, and was just trying to see if there was any way we could fit him in because he was 71 and had high-risk conditions. I had to sit and watch for close to an hour while my supervisor, and then hers, and then two people from the registration phone line, all talked to him to see if he had any other options. It was really obvious from watching and listening that he was just desperate because he knew how dangerous it would be for him to get sick, but there was literally nothing else I could do.

I know this is far from an isolated case, but something about seeing and really feeling that sense of helplessness over the whole situation really hit me hard. I hope things end up working out for him somehow.

An edit here after a glass of wine: What happened might literally have been something that was a life or death thing for another human being, and I really couldn't do anything about it. I, and the people I've been working with, are all just doing the best we can with what we have, and we know it's not enough for everyone. Unicorns Covid.