Yesterday I spent ten hours at our local hospital with my Mum while they drained 9 litres of fluid from her abdomen as she struggles through the last few short months of her life thanks to ovarian/omentum/peritoneal cancer. I waited for her for 1.5 hours while they did the procedure in the waiting room outside X-ray/ultrasound. While I was there a woman came for an urgent chest X-ray with her scarf wrapped round her face. She was whisked off sharpish. May be CV19 related, maybe not. There were at least 25 - 30 people being processed the whole time. I was close to the reception booth and heard snippets of conversation form the staff - mostly upbeat, but also focussed around not just the clinical implications of it all, but the effects on staffing etc and their personal circumstances. No hysteria, just alot of genuine concern laced with a dose of dark humour.
My Dad is 80 and already has splenic lymphoma and had his spleen removed. He has had stents following a major heart attack , an aortic aneurysm corrected and in the last year two separate lymphomas detected requiring radiotherapy. He is a nuclear test veteran, part of the failed class action against the government. He is my SM's carer. She has heart issues, long term mental health problems and slow burn vascular dementia. In the next few weeks hopefully she will be having a procedure to deal with aneurysms in her neck or she may go blind. They are self isolating. When SM goes for her procedure it is only right I accompany her because my Dad daren't.
My MIL is in a care home with Alzheimers - she went there two years ago after we cared for her in our home for 18 months and my Mum's cancer was diagnosed two weeks before she went there. The care home is some distance away and neither I nor my DH drive. Visiting her has been challenging at the best of times as DH works and I have been trying to build a business - austerity and Brexit plus a decline in the location of said business has pretty much put paid already to any hope of success; the spectre of CV19 means I am now unable to open my non-essential items shop because the three customers I have a week are less likely to visit and as I am the front line in supporting my elderly relatives I have to practise some sort of social distancing.
I don't want to be trying to decide whose deathbed I sit next to - my Mum is inevitable in the very near future. My management of this situation ironically mirrors the govt approach - the right measures at the right time. The govt approach has been shoddy and economically motivated.
Last night my DH and I had our first spat about the whole thing. He is shouldering the entire financial burden working in a non-essential vanity based profession. and feels under pressure. We don't know how long or if his field will continue to make money. My life is one long pleasure free round of juggling care and support. I feel duty bound to ensure we don't end up at each others throats. So my amateur psychotherapy skills are also being stretched because I'm only human.
Aside from all that, everything is fine. Oh, apart from my son and his girlfriend live over the huge pub where she is a manager and they have already had one customer ring up with a confirmed case but then discover it was not the pub they had actually been drinking in (must have been a really great night for them). And if people don't follow guidance about not socialising, she is in the frontline, and may pass it on to my son, who is helping care for my Mum.
Oh, and my son's best friend who I have cared for like my own since he was 13 and has type 1 diabetes so is high risk, lives with his DP and her two pre-teen children. They are now in isolation. His DP has what very much sounds like CV19 after a visit to A&E where they X-rayed her, said it could be a chest infection, and couldn't test because she wasn't being admitted, She is isolated in one room and SBF is managing the kids, trying to keep his artisan business running and they are being fed by the local community which is rallying round.
So, no drama or hysteria out here, in real life, just to reassure you.