Did covid screw anyone else's life up?

[girlmeetsboy]

Interested to hear on this as I have been reading a thread where people loved the solidarity of it all. For me it was redundancy, house lost, business lost and savings...

i wouldn’t say screwed it up but my social life is pretty crap now. Was getting more friendly with some people and it just lost momentum in lockdown.
It did have a detrimental effect on my DCs’ mental health, first lockdown for dd, then 2nd for DS. Prob effected DS’s life more.
i was fine until I got covid a few months ago and haven’t been back to full health since. All investigations have been negative so far (we know in here that LC can mask sinister illness). The only family member who’s been ok is dh. His business kept afloat and is doing well, he got it very mildly (tired for half a day) and no lasting effects.

@Iheartmysmart Sorry for your loss, it's heartbreaking how frightened elderly people became.

More like ' Were made to feel scared'

Sending flowers to everyone on this thread who has struggled through covid, whether due to covid itself or due to the effects of the lockdowns. I lost my job and found another, I have mild long covid, my children have struggled emotionally and socially and I'm not sure they will catch up, and I feel like been lucky, considering everything. Does everyone feel burnt out? It's been an exhausting few years.

@Thatsasmashingblouseyouvegoton @ancientgran I hope you recover soon, and your son @CaptainNelson . I went on the low-histamine diet years ago, it worked and my allergies cleared up. Now I have mild long covid symptoms and histamine is causing a problem again, it does seem to be linked to over activated immune system and long covid, and inflammation. There's a great facebook group called Yoga and meditation for gentle Covid recovery with Suzy Bolt.

Staying well hydrated is important for any muscle problems to help clear any lactic acid which builds up, try to drink a pint of water in one go as it's more hydrating than sipping. I've found magnesium glycinate helps for sleep and muscle pain, although be careful as if you are low on magnesium, it can start off all the processes it fuels and you can feel more exhausted so start very slow. It helps process waste from muscles (lactic acid) and if you have too much your body can't process it quickly enough. If the dose is 400mg per day, start at 100mg or 50mg (half a tablet). Magnesium malate is better for day time as malic acid (the malate part of magnesium malate) is involved in ATP (energy production). If you take different types of magnesium, always make sure it never totals more than the daily limit (400mg). I suspect energy production is impaired in both long covid and ME. It would probably apply to fibromyalgia as well as this has similar issues.

@ganachee This might apply to ME too.

Does everyone feel burnt out?

Yes.

Thank you @luna91 , that's really helpful. I will pass this on. And good to hear about the low-histamine diet, as he's really dreading it as it seems that most of the foods he loves are the ones to avoid!

Thank you. I don't drink alcohol so that one's easy, I don't exactly do meditation but I've started praying The Rosary every night and it has really helped with my sleep, I think it is a meditation really but not the generally accepted sort now. The antihistamine is interesting, I have terrible itching, it is driving me insane and I've thought about getting some antihistamine to see if it would help. I think I will give it a go.

Glad your son is seeing some improvement, it must be hard to cope with for someone younger.

@ancientgran
I'm beginning to try Loratadine, an anti histamine used for hay-fever. It might be worth googling it....

Yeah I'm really burned out too- just had a cold. Normally this would be 2-3 days of early night and regular lemsip.

Now the smaller bug floors me for weeks. I'm 2.5 weeks in and still not 100% clear!

I don't know whether the bug is nasty or my immunity is crap or what.

Staying in this weekend and doing nothing to try and shake it.

It is so boring though isn't it?

Yes I'll look it up. Anything to stop the itch, my legs are raw, I can control scratching in the day but when I'm asleep it's another matter.

Didn't Rishi come up with a poster showing a ballerina with a caption something like "she doesn't know it yet, but she's going to be a computer programmer"

Twitter had huge fun with that one, with people pointing out that you don't just sort of decide you might like to be a ballerina in the same way you decide you might like to be a computer programmer; and that ballet is a profession that starts at a very young age with years of gruelling training, and takes immense dedication.

@GrannyWeatherwaxsHatpin
Very good post. I agree with all you said.

I was also shocked by the vitriol of people during lockdowns trying to control others.

I have 3 children and I also flouted one rule as I considered it totally useless. We have a next door neighbour with a single child. This girl was good friends with my kids and was feeling really isolated at home, crying every day etc. At the start I'd the pandemic she was doing video calls with my daughter.
So I texted her mum and said why not let her play with my kids in mine whenever she wanted, it was clear her mental health would suffer and to me the restriction were going way too far. None of us had anyone high risk at home.This girl was in our house every single day. I do think it was the right decision and her parents are very grateful with our family.

We had neighbours making nasty comments about it, which I completely ignored. What I find more uncomfortable is that some people were quicker at policing rather than helping others.

@Iheartmysmart I'm so sorry to read about your dad. I would feel angry too that fear messaging prevented him from living a normal life.
I'm sorry for your son too. Many of our children have been disproportionately affected with little acknowledgment of what they have been through.
They've suffered rrauma and setbacks and had important years for their own development interfered with, then a layer of societal gaslighting on top.

All seating was removed from our town centre and has not yet been fully replaced. This took no account of anyone who was pregnant, elderly or disabled.

This meant that my father in law who would have previously managed to walk the short distance into town for the likes of Iceland, farm food etc, testing as he needed and seeing some friendly faces was barred from this bit of exercise, fresh air, independence and interaction.

It had a massive impact on his mental health and mobility.

@namechangeeeeeeeeed @Buzzinwithbez Thank you. I’m so angry that my parents were scared into spending their final years together too frightened to enjoy themselves.

DS bless him put his plans on hold and worked for Amazon then a supermarket for the last couple of years. Which in itself annoyed me somewhat. There were people on here saying how much they loved lockdown, getting their shopping and anything they needed delivered. Not a single bloody thought for those who went to work every day to enable them to do just that!

All seating was removed from our town centre and has not yet been fully replaced. This took no account of anyone who was pregnant, elderly or disabled.

One wonders what an equality impact assessment of decisions like this might look like. And how many years were knocked off the lives of people who were forced into being sedentary by this sort of stupidity and never managed to get back out.

I still can not fathom how a class action law suit has not reigned down upon the police, government and local councils.

Restriction of trade, intrusion of civil rights, abilty to navigate without hinderance etc

Surley to lord their actions have to contravene every known human rights bill

Just adding to this. Other than on here, no one is acknowledging the impact of Covid. I know that it is what it is, and it's the past and cannot be changed but..

DH lost the last year or so of his mother recognising him. We live overseas, she developed dementia and went into hospital at the start of Covid, then straight into a nursing home when she was released. We weren't able to visit for 2 years, and Facetime doesn't cut it in this respect. We finally got back last summer, and she's gone. I mean, she's still here in body, but mentally she is gone. And he missed that.

DS1 (now 15) struggled at school. His form teacher says that the whole class is unsettled, immature, very reliant on screens and she reckons that the lockdowns had a big impact on their development. We are in an academic system here, and he missed out on key skills due to lockdown and a system that is not well geared up for catching up.

DH and I both drank too much, ate too much and frankly got a bit 'fuck it' about everything. I still remember looking out our living room window during lockdown, on what's usually a busy street and park straight across from us, and it was just deserted and empty. It felt like the world had ended. Sometimes I still feel that.

The question is whether this will all be allowed to happen again without protest. I still think people will just be told what to do.

I think it would be option three, people simply not doing it. That's what most of the non-compliance last time looked like.

We weren't affected too much other than not being able to visit family. My worst loss was my friend of 12 years ended up down the QAnon wormhole, now its all a conspiracy 🤨

The lockdowns were a foolish overreaction and we have now squandered the opportunity of using them as a final option in the future. A virus with a 0.1% mortality rate was not worth shutting society down for. My fear is for a far deadlier infectious disease erupting at some point, which our govt will not have the financial resources to fight or support us through. Then what?

All seating was removed from our town centre and has not yet been fully replaced. This took no account of anyone who was pregnant, elderly or disabled.

This was one of the other things that did - and still does - boil my piss. So many things were done "just in case" or "for the look of it" that had negative effects and the councils/schools/businesses that were responsible for them just didn't give a fuck, it was Covid uber alles. God forbid you'd say removing seats was unfair on the less-abled, or that a one-way system actually brought you into contact with more people than if you'd just walked up to the product you wanted to buy, because you'd get a gob full of "IT'S BECAUSE OF COVID" as if the only reason you'd left your house in the first place was to murder people. And if you answered back? Fuck me, you'd better be ready for the accusations that you weren't "being kind". I've long since held the opinion that some (by no means all) of those who complained about how workers were treated were the ones who were unpleasant themselves to start with. Why was it OK for them to be rude?

DH and I both drank too much, ate too much and frankly got a bit 'fuck it' about everything

I definitely drank too much. I joked about still being on Christmas rules in September and I've dialled it back now, but I think a lot of people started opening a bottle at 5pm just for having made it through another miserable day with no end in sight, knowing that others had it worse but we felt shit all the same (and now guilty for feeling shit knowing that others had it worse).

But I think the "fuck it" attitude pervades. There are definitely things I care less about now ("Well, I could find a recycling bin for this but fuck it, I'll just lob it in the bin") which extrapolates out into an angrier, less considerate, more self-absorbed society. Naff as it sounds, I've made a conscious effort to do something nice - smile at people and say hello, that sort of thing - but it feels like an uphill battle sometimes!

To look back on the queuing for shops, following directional signs, masks, visors, signing in at the pub, constantly changing plans according to the level of rules. It was bloody ridiculous.

My mum died (not from covid) and we couldn’t go and see her in her last days at home. I am more surprised looking back at how I stuck so rigidly to the rules.

My fear is for a far deadlier infectious disease erupting at some point, which our govt will not have the financial resources to fight or support us through. Then what?

The impact on future pandemic responses worries me too. I actually think the internet age means anything really awful would finish society off, and that would be the case regardless of how we'd responded to covid. But if it were a middle ground, a virus that was quite a bit more nasty but not societal destruction level, we'd be really hampered in our ability to respond if something like that happened in the next couple of decades. Financially and socially. It's not just the resources that were used but also the way the population was treated.