This got long. Save it for when you have time.
1. The governor of Montana has started a three-phase plan for reopening the state, starting with allowing non-essential businesses to reopen, but keeping in place all of the social distancing guidelines, limiting groups to no more than 10, etc. Montana has the lowest incidence of COVID-19 of any state (per population), and most of the cases have been in Bozeman and a senior care facility in Shelby County.
2. Montanans as a group are nothing if not stubbornly opposed to anyone telling them what to do, and some have taken the lack of virus as a sign that the whole thing was just an over-reaction by the liberals who are trying to take control of our country. And, you know what? If we follow the rules of social distancing and cautious public gathering, maybe we will be able to avoid an outbreak long enough for a vaccine to be developed, and they will be able to believe that they were right.
3. Which is a really strange thing about this whole situation (among about a million other strange things). There are all these people, one is tempted to say all these idiots, who in spite of the mounting numbers of cases and deaths, are determined to believe that it's not really a crisis. That this is just another in a long string of examples of liberals over-reacting and getting hysterical about something that's really not a big deal, and that if we'd just treated it like the flu, it would have gone away-- and I wouldn't have lost my job/had to home school my kids/had to cancel my wedding/etc.
As, one is tempted to say, a more reasonable person, you're left in the strange situation of almost wanting things to get bad so that you can prove to these people that see, it really is a real thing. We're not exaggerating. It's like the classic lose-lose situation: either you're right, and hundreds of thousands more people are going to get sick and some of them die (lose); or you're wrong (lose), and those idiots are going to say they were right all along.
4. Anyway. I hate wearing a mask, I hate having anything on my face, and always have. But I'm wearing one, because Dean is one of the faces of our medical community, and I'm trying to be as supportive as I can. Sometimes I forget, but for the most part, when I'm in a building besides our house, I wear a mask. I have a bunch of oversized bandanas that I bought to use as napkins last year when I was trying to cut down on our use of paper products, so usually I wear one of those, quadruple folded. But as it is becoming more apparent that we are going to have to stay masked at least in certain situations for a long time, I finally got on Etsy and ordered half a dozen homemade masks. Yet another time I've wished I could sew.
5. I don't think I've talked all that much about my never-ending sickness, which I've had for a couple of months now. There is a fair amount of evidence that it's not COVID-- I'm pretty sure I did tell you about Mel's negative test when she went back to work after spring break, and it hasn't behaved like COVID seems to behave. But still, once antibody testing becomes widespread enough that I can justify getting tested, I am looking forward to finding out.
What I'm getting around to here is that I have had a lot more headaches than usual. In a good month, I have maybe 10-12 headache days, and about half of them will be bad enough to take migraine drugs. But recently, I've just had a headache all the time. I've had to not take migraine drugs, because I'm worried about running out. In the past month, I had maybe three or four days of feeling healthy and headache-free.
6. So I've finally decided I have to do something to make a change. And the only thing I can really try right now is changing the food I eat. I'm somewhat skeptical about this. Believe me, I tried all the things back when I was having a similar headache-intensive stretch in my 40s. I tried dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free. Sugar and caffeine made a difference, although not a huge one--my headaches decreased in frequency, but were not "cured." Dairy and gluten made no difference at all.
7. But my metabolism has changed. It changed for the first time in my late 40s/early 50s as I was dealing with pre- and post-menopause. And now it seems to be changing again. For example: I've been drinking black tea with unsweetened soymilk first thing in the morning for more than a dozen years now, but more and more often, I come downstairs in the morning and the idea of tea is not appealing. Or coffee, but that's less surprising since my stomach dictated that I quit drinking coffee long ago. I've switched to green tea for the moment, but maybe it's time to get off caffeine again.
ALL THAT LONG RAMBLING MESS was just to tell you that I'm on an elimination diet at the moment. If it was for weight loss, my inner rebel would come out with flags flying and refuse to participate, but since it is to see if I can freaking feel better for a change, I seem to have sucked it up and gotten on board with the plan. I read about Whole30, but the logical inconsistencies in their theories made me nuts (don't get me started), so I just made up my own plan. No alcohol, which is easy because I don't drink much alcohol anyway, no dairy (not too hard since my only dairy is yogurt and cheese), no gluten (harder), and low sugar (which also comes under the heading of "don't get me started" but I'll save that for another post).
Who knows how long I'll be doing it. My initial commitment to myself was to try it for a week and see how I feel and re-evaluate. I'm five days in right now and although I do feel a bit better in terms of energy and general well-being, as I'm sitting here typing this I'm trying to decide whether or not this headache is bad enough to warrant migraine drugs. Ugh.
So in spite of that downer of an ending, other than physically not feeling well, I'm actually doing fine. I seem to have figured out a rhythm for sheltering at home, and my mental status is pretty good. Headaches are status quo for me, so having them isn't necessarily a sign that things are bad.
Have a great weekend. Sorry this got so long. It's about twenty things instead of seven.
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