It has at the time of publishing been 14 days since we started self-isolating and 8 days since the government imposed a stricter isolation for those of us with certain underlying health conditions.
So far we haven’t noticed much difference. When my illnesses are bad, I can spend a lot of time resting for often weeks at a time and when I feel slightly more on the brighter side of things, I often work from my laptop somewhere in the house anyway.
Both of my children are home educated, which takes many different forms and my daughter is also my carer, so we often find ourselves, even at our most productive; at home.
To be responsible however, we have had to obviously make sure we have stayed in (no single instance of exercise per day, no ‘popping’ to the shops for essentials and no contact with anyone unnecessarily), and so we’ve needed to ask for a lot more help; often in many places we never would have done normally.
We have had help from friends, as one might imagine; bringing shopping from multiple places as and when they are out doing it anyway. We would usually shop for a month and then top it up through the week, however due to limits now put on items, we can only hope we can access everything we need on a weekly basis.
I also contacted my multiple health appointments to cancel them, however these will now be over the phone instead (which is excellent). Friends are picking up my monthly prescriptions and I still have a district nurse visiting to take monitoring bloods infrequently.
We also had help from a wonderful lady in the village who runs the pub. She is the local key-support worker during this time and so she is available to support vulnerable people in finding and getting hold of anything they need. She also makes great food at the pub and so we have made sure to order, just to try and support her a little bit.
The local shop delivered us some supplies too, which was lovely. We had also run out of hand sanitiser (something I always use as I have difficulty getting about to wash my hands as often as I’d like), but of course, we can’t find any now.
So three friends organised some for us. One came and topped up a large bottle that we had, another posted a small bottle they had spare and another sourced someone through our local party who then sent me one large bottle of Boots bacterial hand gel and one identical bottle of home made sanitiser made to World Health Organisation standards (glycerol, boiled water and 75% isopropyl alcohol).
We’re so very lucky to have an extended network of caring people around us, which has so far helped us to stay isolated. I’m extremely thankful.
I am also making an effort to self report to the NHS Covid-19 Symptom Tracker app on a daily basis, which allows scientists and doctors to track the outbreak here in the UK.
Picture: we took it upon ourselves to learn some origami. My daughter and I, among other things, made Yoda, a Swan; and the unicorn from the movie, Bladerunner (pictured).
Emma.