Staying Physically Busy to Keep Mentally Healthy

Disclaimer: This entry is meant to give you some ideas about what to do if you're bored during the pandemic (or when you can't leave the house much). Always listen to the medical officials' recommendations about what is safe and always know what is allowed in your area. If you feel like some of these suggestions endanger your well-being, by all means do not attempt them. This is my personal account only and this blog only documents things I have done safely since the COVID19 pandemic has started. Be kind to yourself! 

I am sure you have probably seen a million of these lists circulating on the internet. Well, here’s a million and one. 

I spoke to a class of medical students about how I handle my FH and heart disease conditions during this COVID19 pandemic, and one of the questions that kept popping up from the students that kinda stuck with me was “do you think this pandemic will have an emotional or psychological effect on people?”. And of course, even without being a medical professional, I am sure it will. Even if it’s not a bad effect, it will have some effect. For me, I truly hope that it will have a good effect just as much as a bad one: I hope this time reminded me to go back to living a simpler life, a much cheaper and less frivolous life, and I hope it reminded me that I have done this remoteness from people before and it didn’t kill me then (growing up in a remote village in communist Romania), and it will not kill me now. Not the isolation alone. At any rate. 

The two main and important (for us) things we had to give up during the stay-at-home period of this pandemic have been not seeing our friends and not able to travel or go see out families. We used to make a point out of going out of town every month, at least once a month. And we usually had 2-3 big trips planned during the whole year. All that came to a halt! 

Our state, NC, has started reopening some businesses on May 22 but given than we both are at high risk from complications from this disease, we are not jumping at the opportunity to leave the house just yet. We are still staying in and trying to keep busy. And that’s just the secret, I think, at least for me: if I keep my hands and body busy not only time will pass easier but I feel more focused, and at the end of the day more fulfilled, less lonely and useless. 

I cannot relate to people that need togetherness so much, so forgive me for not really tackling that aspect of this lock-down. We are both quite happy just doing our hobbies, or finding things to do around our home, or around town that do not involve crowds that we’re not missing the human contact quite terribly. Yet. I am sure the day will come … 

Before I give you the list of things we did to keep busy, I have to say: we do go out only for what is needed, and not wanted. We go out once a week for groceries (sometimes to multiple stores, because things are hard to find all in one place), we go to the pharmacy (usually drive-through only) about once a week, too; we go to the doctor’s office about once a month. We get take-out food about once or twice a week. Outside of these human-contact outings, we pretty much stay inside and do a lot of walking and hiking when we do get out for fun and not necessity, but usually we walk a non-crowded place. 

Here are some ideas from some of the things that we have done to pass the time so far, during the past two and a half months of quarantine (and we are continuing to do, we hope, throughout the summer): 

• At night mostly, we caught up on TV series or movies that we always wanted to see (The Kominsky Method, The Mentalist, Dead to Me are some examples) and we’re contemplating finding more or rewatching old ones that we love (Downtown Abbey or Twin Peaks)
• We have read books – my husband just finished Moby Dick – now, that is a time sucker! It’ll keep you busy for a long time.
• I have caught up on my magazine reading: I have magazines (several subscriptions)  stacked since the spring of 2019 that I never have time to read. I am going through them mostly during weekend afternoons to relax after a walk or running an errand. Magazines are great because they are like open doors to me – I always find articles so interesting that they lead to searching something more about the topic or the author online and then I keep researching for hours (sometimes days) about something I found in a small filler article.
• We washed our baseboards all over the house – two stories and all white glossy baseboards will keep you busy for at least a day. 
• We washed our windows – or at least most of them. Some of them are hard to get to, especially on the outside.  
• I planted lots of pots full of perennials in the back yard, and a couple in front of the house. I pruned, and cleaned up everything that was in the ground and came and went with the spring. We transplanted some bushes that took over the wrong corners of the yard. This kept us busy for a couple of Saturdays. 
• I started a journal about COVID19 and what this means for us, as a family and what it means for our country and the world. I update it virtually every day with my own experiences and frustrations, as well as the day’s headlines, what the governor’s ordinance says, what the president’s ordinance says, case and death counts, opinions, protests, how other countries do this, and any “new” experiences that are pandemic-related and new to all of us; if you want, you can even turn it into a blog, or write it in a new, fresh notebook. I find journaling very invigorating and I love reading about past experiences. Just think about it: what we’re living through today is active history. One day, your kids and your grandkids will want to know about these times and how you lived through them, what you did, what were your fears, insecurities, heartaches. This is how books like Anne Frank’s Diary happened. Just put it down on paper (or on Google Drive), just your thoughts. One day, it will make a nice little book, even if it is just for yourself or your family. 
• We redecorated a little. We are still to buy several pieces of furniture for at least two rooms in the house, but we have not gone shopping anymore since the lockdown started. Outside of that, we did redecorate our patio and our screened-in porch with things we ordered online or found at the hardware store. That took another couple of Saturdays. 
• We walked. A lot. We are on a mission to find a park, campground, forest, trail, etc, weekly and we walk or hike at least 2-3 times a week. We have found lots of trails nearby that we can drive to, and even some in our neighborhood that we are still to explore. 
• If you enjoy another type of exercise, or driving is not an option to you, you can look online for places in your area that offer online classes. Most yoga studios do, and there are others, like Pilates, Zumba, etc. Take an online yoga class (that’s what I have done), or take some form of online exercise online. If you find no live classes that are free or that you like, there are only millions of YouTube videos for whatever exercise appeals to you. Subscribe to a channel and make a date with your favorite video every day or other day of the week. Your mind will be busy keeping up that appointment and your body will thank you. Plus, don’t we all need to lose all this food we’ve been eating away out of boredom, anyway?! 
• Find a hobby you enjoy and revel into practicing it. You know that craft stores never closed during the pandemic, right? They were deemed “essential” for a reason, and they cater to every hobby there is. I have painted, sketched, and colored a lot. I still have a couple of hobbies I need to start a project in (below), so I am not done yet. My husband is a woodworker and he puttered in his shop a bit too. He made pens, a bowl, and a pendant for his mom for Mother’s Day. He also finished a project for our newly redecorated screened-in porch. 
• Take an online class. I found out through Facebook that one of my favorite writers was having a free online writing class called "Write Through This" and signed up for it on a Sunday afternoon when I normally don't have any plans at all. 
• Go out (with the proper protection and being mindful to avoid crowds) and shoot images of what the quarantine means to your city and surroundings: shoot pictures of restrictions notices, people misbehaving, or people in masks, etc. and create an online photo journal of these times. Just shoot anything that looks and feels different and pandemic-like to you. These times will (hopefully) not come back around maybe in our generation. So, record them in pictures. Again, your kids and grandkids will thank you one day, for documenting this for them. Just think about how much you’d enjoy seeing pictures from The Great Depression or The War that your grandparents or great grandparents might have shot for you. This is living history, again: help document it. We all have smart phones, so we don’t even need cameras for this project anymore. Upload them to your social media accounts, or create a Shutterfly account that you can share. 
• Explore new recipes: we all cook more nowadays, much out of need than pure pleasure. But make it fun: from your magazines (if you subscribe to them, like me), or from Pinterest, or other online sources, find recipes and try them out for the first time - experiment and improve. We made French bread which came out deliciously, Chinese dumplings, and a tomato and ginger jam with field peas curried patties that were to die for! I would have never attempted to make some of these foods, for fear that they might be too complicated, but they came out great. I love a new experience.  
• Meet your friends and family online: whatever your service of choice is, Zoom, Skype, Facebook – make a daily or weekly appointment to see them and catch up. You’ll be surprised at how much newness you will find from people who mostly just stay inside. They will have stories about their kids, the things they do, their neighbors, their coworkers, what shows they watch, what food they cook, etc. We text and email every day, sometimes several times a day, but I find the weekly video calls with my parents and sister recharging. 
• Take a roadtrip to a remote, deserted place and have a picnic - in your car or tailgate, or bring chairs: just park in front of a lake or river and just look at the birds or baby ducks (it’s springtime for a little bit longer, so the babies are here) and just stare at something different than your walls and your window view for an hour or so. You’ll be shocked how much peace and perspective that will bring to you and how much it will refresh your view on life. 

I am making a new list with some things I still have left to do and maybe you can take some of these as ideas we well: 

• I still need to really clean out my closets, pantry, laundry room, cabinets and make a donation pile for GoodWill. We have already done this partially because we sold our camper, so everything that we had in the camper was donated. But we need to move to the nooks and crannies inside our house. 
• I still need to clean out my (physical) files, in our filing cabinet: old receipts, tax documents, refile my important documents that I do want to keep (like birth/ marriage certificates, inheritance papers, stock market accounts, will, etc.). I have a huge filing cabinet that can hardly open it’s so full. I doubt all the stuff in there is truly needed.  
• I have already done this on January 1st, but if you have not, you can organize and archive files in your computer (for those who still have computers and don’t rely solely on tablets and phones). If you have not done this for years, it’s time! And this can take a while! If you can, buy a terabyte drive or some cloud storage and go at it. And as my husband says “Be brutal!”. A resume that is from 1999 is probably outdated. Refresh it and delete the old copy. 
• Make your will if you’ve been putting it off – I know at least one couple who did just that because, like all of us, they never get around to it in “normal” times. 
• If you have not done this already: turn your cd collection into a digital/ cloud archive.
• If you have the equipment, scan your pictures and negatives into the cloud/ digital archive. I am still to do this. I bought a device a long time ago that scans negatives into pictures and I have done about 30% of my negatives but I have a long way to go. It’s around $50, but this will be money well-spent to keep your memories for future generations.
• I still need to iron my husband’s and my dress shirts and dress clothes and cover them so they will stay protected. Something I never ever have time for. 
• I also need to iron my festive tablecloths and napkins – I love a fresh, ironed napkin for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner but I never have the time to do it. 
• I want to start a new knitting, crocheting, or cross-stitching project. I am having trouble choosing which one, but my materials for all these are ready for me. 
• If you are truly, seriously bored with no ideas, just look at baby animal pictures online – I could not read when I was in the hospital recovering from heart surgery and all I could do is look at pictures. This cheered me up so much I could not tell you! 

I hope this will get your imagination going and will make you think of something to do safely in your plenty free time. Of course, our time is also spent at work (if we are lucky enough to still be employed) and with kids, if you have those (I don’t but I see how busy my sister is with two boys). But for the long weekend days, or the empty evenings that have no agendas, I hope some of these ideas will help. 

Stay healthy, all. Stay busy, and well! 

The “Good” and the Not so Good about Living with a High-risk Condition during the COVID19 Pandemic

Summary of a presentation I gave to Romanian medical students about how to handle the pandemic in the US, and how I personally handle it as a high-risk, heart disease patient

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine who teaches English at the Medical College in my hometown of Iasi, Romania asked me to have an online “class” with her first year students. These were students in the Dental and Pharmacy schools of the Medical College she teaches at. The topic was wide open, but I chose to speak about how I am faring through the COVID19 pandemic with a high-risk disease, like FH and heart disease.

Here are some notes on what I covered. I also speak a little about the questions they asked me at the end. Some of them surprised me with their compassion and insightfulness. After all, these are first-year students – so, the majority of them are no older than 19-20.

The COVID19 Pandemic and My Disease

You all know by now that one of the high-risk groups for COVID19 are heart patients. In addition to this, I also spoke in my presentation about how some of the early symptoms of COVID19 are also symptoms I manage daily because of my conditions (FH, heart disease, autoimmune disease).

To compare: some of the COVID19 symptoms and warnings are:

·       High-risk conditions:

o   Heart disease

o   Compromised immune system diseases

·       Symptoms/ complications:

o   Shortness of breath/ chest pain

o   Persistent cough

o   Strokes (30-40 year old patients)

Mirroring some of these, my relevant symptoms and possible complications:

·       Heart disease

·       High risk for strokes (because of FH and mechanical valve)

·       Moderate autoimmune disease (increased inflammation)

·       Persistent cough (side effect of blood pressure medication)

·       Shortness of breath

·       Chest pain (angina)

·       Increased vulnerability with (any) infection (because of mechanical aortic valve)

Some of the concerns I have here are: should I get infected, and should I have any of the early symptoms of the disease, how would I be able to tell the difference between some of my symptoms and the viral infection? Just something we have to think about every day.

Why the Quarantine is Hard for Me

As I mentioned before, I already have some symptoms that might make COVID19 hard to spot:

·       Consistent cough from medication.

·       Daily chest pressure and shortness of breath from angina.

I have had some appointments that have been canceled or might be canceled:

·       My yearly physical was canceled in March and the directive was “call us back in June”.

·       The dentist’s office was closed for 8 weeks (at the time of the presentation I didn’t know when it might open again). Any tooth trouble could be sign of an infection which should be addressed immediately for heart patients, as you know.

·       Canceling or postponing my yearly appointments for my cardiologist, vascular specialist, and all the yearly tests that keep an eye on the state of my heart and arteries. These are appointments that I must keep for my peace of mind, if nothing else. Advanced heart disease can worsen in months, so these are important check points for me to ensure another year (or so) of cardiac health.

·       One of the warnings for COVID19 is not to go to the ER or Urgent Care, unless they screen you first. But in the case of a heart attack or stroke, I would need to be in there immediately. Not sure how fast this will happen under the quarantine precautions of every medical office, and I hope I will never need to find out. Living with the fear of how it will work or what I will be exposed to once there is unsettling, for sure.

I have had some difficulty finding drugs and supplies:

·       I have a severe Vitamin D deficiency which is an added risk for cardiac health. I take a pretty high daily dose of vitamin D that must be vegan, because I can’t tolerate the animal vitamin D. I can’t find the vegan, high-dose Vitamin D in a store. Online, I have found that most everyone is now out of stock for Vitamin D. I have found one supplier that still had it. It took me twice as long as normal to receive it in the mail and it cost me three times what I normally pay for it.  

·       Everyone is completely out of strips for my INR machine which I use weekly. Some suppliers (like Amazon) still ship them but only to individuals who have an “Amazon medical account” (which I had never heard of before). I also found out that Roche, the manufacturer of the strips and of the machine only ships to medical offices, as well, and not to individuals. I am working with my INR clinic to be a registered “home tester” with Roche so they can send me the strips directly. This requires a bit of setup and lots of red tape – I have been trying to get this set up for three weeks and I am still not officially registered with the home tester providers, and I have still not received any strips.

Why the Quarantine Is Easy for Me

As weird as this might sound, there are some things that this quarantine requires that have come somewhat easy to me. Some of this is due to the fact that I live, every day, with some of the measures now required from everyone in place. 

For example:

·       As I mentioned before, I must avoid infection at all cost, because of my mechanical valve. For this, I have a very strict routine for disinfection and cleanliness to protect me from bacteria and viruses.

·       I already had most of the needed supplies:

o   Disinfectant, and antibacterial soap.

o   Masks and gloves.

So, when all these supplies were out of stores, I already had them in the house. I still have most of it, even two months and almost two weeks later.

In addition, I take PCSK9 and statin drugs (for cholesterol) and they are known to help with decreasing inflammation and boost the immune system.

Some personal reasons that definitely helped with the mental survival during the isolation are:

·       I have worked from home every day with remote offices in three different countries since 2017. So, it took virtually not adjusting to entire days spent on Zoom and being remote from my teams.

·       Another personal benefit is that I am Romanian, and we cook. A lot. So, trying to figure out a home-made meal three times a day has not been that hard.

How the Presentation Was Received

I was really impressed by how the students receive my presentation. Since I was crossing borders and I was addressing students from another country, you can imagine some of their curiosity was aroused by the foreign-ness of it all. Some of their questions were around how we do the pandemic here, versus what they were used to in Romania.

Some of them asked why I think the US has such a high number of cases. My personal opinion is that, outside the fact that we do have a large population, people just don’t listen. I am shocked when I go to the grocery store and people don’t respect the distance, they don’t wear masks and pretty much do everything they can to get others infected – like jumping behind the cash register when the cashier is supposed to be isolated, or sneezing and coughing without covering their mouth, or rubbing their nose, then touching boxes of products and then putting them back on the shelves. Just mindless carelessness.

Another question which I thought was very thoughtful and insightful for 19-20 year olds was how do I think people will be able to cope with this pandemic emotionally. Honestly, I struggle with the answer to this. Right now, I think we (my husband and I, my sister and her family and my parents and mother in law – all quarantined in two different states and three different countries) are doing OK, emotionally. For one reason or another, we can keep busy and stay connected with one another and things are pretty much settled into the new routine. But I do see people struggling all the time with the isolation, with the psychosis of not getting the disease, especially those of us who are at a higher risk of complications. Honestly, I don’t know how people will cope emotionally. What we can do, I think, is reach out and ask, and check and offer a sympathetic ear, and an open facebook/ facetime/ Skype/ Zoom/ phone line …

Unrelated to COVID19, one young gentleman asked a very specific question about the cost of the PCSK9 drugs: these drugs are, for the most part, nowhere near being mainstream in Romania. It was a surprise that a first year medical student knows about them at all. His question was very specific, too: “ I know these are very expensive. How can you afford them? Do you buy them out of your own pocket? Or is your insurance or pharmacy paying for them?” This gave me hope that maybe these drugs, which are life-savers for so many FH patients, might become more familiar in Romania, too, and that one huge hurdle that prevents so many people from getting them (cost) is already familiar to the medical world there.

I hope everyone is doing well, from a physical as well as an emotional perspective. Hang in there, protect yourselves, and others around you. And I hope we can all meet on the other side of this soon. Much health!