Feeling Fairly Positively Negative

If you have not seen already, thankfully our COVID-19 swabs came back negative and, although I am having a hard time trying to stop this cough, I feel a lot better than I did. Having spoken to a few people who have experienced something similar, it’s hard to know at the time if you feel some of the symptoms because you are unwell or if because you are feeling anxiety around having been infected and who you could have unknowlingly infected from that. I can say for certain that worrying as much as I did about potentially infecting family (we attended a family funeral the week previous) and my work colleagues has made me think hard about whether the relaxation of the lockdown restrictions is a good idea and also whether I would feel better continuing to avoid contact with those I care about. A few days of seeing family does not seem worth endangering people, but I suppose we will have to wait and see what the government decides and what happens after December 2nd. I certainly agree that we should not be pushing for Christmas with family when other religions have not had the same treatment.

The work week was a short one for me once I was able to go back, I had three days in the mortuary but they were three quite busy days. I still am feeling a huge sense of overwhelming need to do everything all at once, when I am most productive is when I am happiest, but I think I could see myself burning out soon at this rate. I believe I have figured out that I am worried about work becoming so busy that I don’t have any time again so my brain is telling me to use the time I have. At the height of the last peak there were days and weeks where I did nothing but eat, work and sleep. Washing clothes and cleaning the house were a struggle to keep up with, which is probably why I now take every oppurtunity to do so. I even cleaned our living room furniture this weekend, spurned on by the fact I knew I had time to do so. I definitley need to try to make time for myself, for relaxing and for some downtime in all of this! I am hopefully getting better at this, on Friday at lunchtime the mortuary team had pizza which was a lovely treat. Last night we celebrated Rachel’s (who I host Death Cafe with) birthday on Zoom with a quiz and it was great to do something fun with a few drinks and snacks, plus chat to some friends and some new people too.

I woke up early today with a bit of energy so I decided that today would be a productive but enjoyable day. As with nearly every day I have a to do list, but my list today included visiting a cemetery and walking the rescue greyhounds at the rehoming centre, both of which I had done before midday. I think I will write a seperate blog post about the cemetery I visited but it was one that I had wanted to go to for a while and was very excited about. I was also pleased to see that the greyhound centre has so few dogs at the moment due to many families taking them on which is lovely but very sad for those left there. I would very much love to take one home one day, but my two cats would not be best pleased. The dog I walked was very loving and I felt very sad at leaving him behind. On the way home we picked up a Christmas tree at a local flower shop and when we got back Rocky and Ruby (our cats) seemed very interested but luckily they don’t want to climb or destroy trees!

This is only a short update this week, I wanted to put one out but I also don’t have very much to update people on. There continues to be a fine balance between feeling like the busy nature at work is quite normal and feeling like COVID-19 is slowly having an impact more like earlier in the year. While things are busy I am able to focus on work rather than worrying about what might be, I guess that is another reason to fill my time with tasks and activities. I’ll be posting the next installment in my Paperwork of Death series midweek and at some point one about the cemetery I wandered around.

MG x