Published on 12, July, 2020
With the Coronavirus has anyone here stopped going to places such as support groups, classes etc.?
Would really encourage people stay in touch online (e.g. Discord), online interaction can be key when you can't see people in person! :)
I like your gallows humour, thanks for making me grin.
I thought that mine would offer skype consultations, it is really one person talking to one or more persons and observing their verbal and nonverbal reactions. That's not even expensive equipment. It's quite different to a dentist check-up.
I'm trying to install some floor joists but it's really hard work and I have CFS and adrenal suppression - I managed to move just 3 today (they're 2" x 9" x 6m) before I felt rather funny and had to stop - only another 21 to go - so it's another week's work if the weather holds out.
A normal builder would have had it all finished in one day.
I need to do the exercise to stay healthy but it completely wipes me out - but I've got nothing else to do right now. .
My gym closed. My world has now officially ended. I bought a curl bar and some weights and my home gym is about finished. Today I planted some veg seeds. What i will miss is the sauna, but plans are afoot to build one in my back garden so that will hopefully be done in the next month.
I'm pulling up the drawbridge - no-one in or out.
Yes, the same was reported on the Disability News Service just recently, and frankly, it doesn't surprise me very much. The vast majority of staff are good, conscientious people, and the pressure from higher-ups to enforce blatantly unfair or impractical policies is relentless and extremely intense. It's a recipe for anxiety and depression even for those staff who don't identify as disabled. On the team I worked in, it was rare that there wasn't at least one member of staff absent for anxiety related reasons.
Sounds awful but it's good you got out of it better the other side. It was recently revealed the Department for Work and Pensions has the worst record of any employer in the UK for losing legal cases of discrimination against its own disabled employees!
Link: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-work-pensions-employees-disabilities-discrimination-cases-pay-out-million-a9385446.html
I'm not sure I should admit this, given how people here feel about the DWP, but...
Part of the reason that I dread going there so much is that I had a couple of melt-downs in the same office...
...while I was working there!
It's a long time ago now, but I was massively in debt and incredibly desperate for a job at the time, and under a lot of JobCentre pressure to apply for and take the job (a lot of front-line staff are straight off the register themselves - and yes, my official job-title was the (oxy)moronic "front-line officer"). It certainly wasn't my first choice, nor well paid, but it seemed better than nothing at the time (and certainly better than a benefits sanction). I didn't exactly try too hard during the interviewing and testing process, but it turned out that I didn't really need to as the turn-over of staff is so high (I saw quite a few trainees walk out on their first day working a desk on their own while I was there). I was made a "second-call" candidate, and enough people dropped out that I was offered the job and wasn't really in a position to refuse.
You couldn't really choose a worse job for an autistic person with vaguely lefty politics (an anarchist punk at one time). Having dozens of unhappy, often argumentative people to grill every day (if a supervisor was watching, that is!), constant crowd-babble, and absolutely pointless and ridiculous targets to hit led to one of the worst periods of burn-out I've ever experienced (I would take a pop bottle with me up to my room when I got home so that I could pee without accidentally bumping into a housemate on the way to the loo).
The melt-downs were incredibly explosive from what I could gather from my manager - screaming and throwing papers around until finally legging it from the building. Very unusual for me; I'm usually a shut-down person. I don't remember anything about them, really, besides coming-to sodden with tears in the park half-way home. My autism diagnosis was decades away yet, and according the Occupational Health shrink that they sent me to, I had a "Messiah Complex" (good luck looking that one up in the ICD-10 - and rather ironic for a life-long atheist!)
Thankfully, the union rep' was a really good egg, and after a period of working behind the scenes in the stores which didn't work out either, they let me go and made it as easy as they could for me to claim Incapacity Benefit.
I did learn one thing though. The jobsworth staff that every claimant (oops, sorry; "customer") dreads seeing are the ones who always end up sitting on their own at tea-breaks because their colleagues usually hate their guts too - the system just rewards the staff who enjoy their daily power-trips.
Going into anaphylaxis on the jobcentre floor and one of security guards seriously looking like he soiled himself over the whole fiasco was enough to ensure I will never need to go to the jobcentre ever again.
Nothing formal in my case, but the regular Friday evening gathering of a few friends that I often attend won't likely be happening for a while (pretty much my only social contact normally). It's also birthday season in my family, which requires many of us to travel long distances; so a few planned family get-togethers likely won't happen.
The cloud does have one small silver-lining; a dreaded appointment at the JobCentre got cancelled.
I've not been doing anything different.
I don't do any real life social groups, mainly because being around groups of people for extended periods of time is uncomfortable for me because no matter how interested or included I am I just feel awkward.
I already follow good handwashing practices, thanks to working in kitchens for far too many years.
My work are trialling working from home but my department hasn't been involved in that yet, and to be honest if rather not. It's hard enough for me to stay focused at work at the moment, but I've worked from home before and I always find it difficult to get into work mode when I'm at home with so many distractions. Plus work is basically the only socialising I do outside of the occasional family thing.
I've gone way off topic.
__Pathfinder__ said:Does anyone see the parallels between 28 days later and the world today?
Not quite as apocalyptic as that for the current scare, but given that it's becoming a regular occurence (SARS, MERS, swine-flu, bird-flu, etc.), I do get the feeling that the human species is setting itself up for something really nastly somewhere along the line.
So many impoverished people are now crowded together in cities across the world which have poor housing, sanitation, and healthcare; and air-travel has become unnecessarily (IMHO) ubiquitous, whether for business or for pleasure. I feel that it's about time we moved beyond reacting to each crisis as it occurs and look seriously at what systemic changes to our societies we could make to reduce the risk of something really devastating. Dealing with poverty, income-inequality, and world-trade systems which are so easily disrupted would be a good start, I think.
I'd keep up the running if I were you to maintain some normality. Fresh air is very beneficial. And even if it's only slight, some social contact.
I wouldn't say stockpiling is a very big detour from the topic! : ) My opinion is a bit of stockpiling is sensible to avoid contact with other people. Though since children are still being sent to school I'm not sure the spread of the virus can be slowed down that much. Unlike Israel we haven't quarantined people flying into the country either. And also, when people do go shopping, at least for the foreseeable future there are long queues where people will spread the virus if they have it.
Maybe therapists will start offering more online now this is going on. It's going to change everything. It boggles my mind to think what will happen next.
I was going to go to an Autistic support group ran by the NHS today but it's been postponed so they've made the decision for me.
In the film they were just angry, IRL the catalyst appears to be toilet paper.
I've cleared a few things off my calendar, most annoying of which was an intervention appointment I'd been waiting on for several months, but besides that it's just business as usual for me. Avoiding group situations is pretty much normal for me anyway.
Today i will be setting up a gym in my house, also buying some gym equipment tomorrow, mostly weights and bars. That plus cycling will keep the stress gremlins at bay.
Shopping, well I was discussing it with my parents, I will only be shopping in the middle of the night and only on weekdays. Most people dont shop at 3am, so the stores are empty for the most part, which makes it a good time to shop. Throw in a mask and disposable gloves and then hose down any shopping you get with a bleach solution prior to putting it in the car and you should be fine. I will also be doing bulk runs once a week. If it gets really bad, I may move to online shopping and implement decon protocols upon delivery. or I suppose go to Asda in full level 3 biohazard gear (and scare the crap out of people). In fact I may do that anyway.
All my hospital appointments were cancelled today, my doctors surgery no longer runs drop in clinics, the recpetionist gave me advice that I should essentially avoid the doctors surgery, going anywhere near a hospital and definitely large groups of people for the forseeable future. Does anyone see the parallels between 28 days later and the world today?
I have stopped everything except for running, which I do on my own 3 times a week in an open space. I am working from home which means i can't do as much as I could in the office (slower connections etc with everyone on the same vpn connection).
It's a bit of a conundrum with shopping. If i buy more each time, I can do it less often (say 2 x a month or even 1 x ) and thereby stay isolated more, which the authorities want. But in order to buy more I may be accused of stockpiling. Sorry Roswell, that is off topic - but it was not important enough to start my own thread, lol. Hope you don't mind :-)
In lieu of my therapist and support group I find that exercise helps me so much mentally that I can cope without the other things. If we are not allowed to exercise I don't know what I would do. 1000 star jumps? plank for an hour? makes me sad to think about it.
I am very worried about the open-ended nature of this.
Above all I really want to be tested and find out if i have unknowingly already had it and have the antibodies. A week or so ago I had a bad headache. Could that have been it, the asymptomatic kind? Was that my immunity, defending me ? What about the next time I get a headache?
I hate that so many people don't have access to testing.
I am locked out for the next 3 months or so. I'm in the group that has the flu jab every year and live with parents, both over 70. This year is essentially a complete write off. I dont see Covid going away in 3 months. I think it will still be doing the rounds in a year or two.
TBH even if I wasnt I would avoid group situations. no point in increasing risk factors with such a bad virus. Plus its not just you. The other people around you pay the price if you go down with it.