"Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” is an old Yiddish adage meaning, “Man Plans, and God Laughs.”

IOW: shït happens. Whatever you hoped or planned for, it ain't gonna & you're fücked. Many have had to learn this lesson HARD the last few months.

How you react shows what you're made of.

You can take a pessimistic viewpoint and always expect the worst to happen, so when it does, you're not surprised. But you may find you're also very rarely truly happy when things (miraculously) go well, because you're always waiting for the shoe to drop.

When shït goes horribly awry, and your plans get the smackdown by forces beyond your control--say, by the Governor of your state, responding to a global pandemic, and the task force given the job of recommending best practices for the NEXT few months--it can be demoralizing.

We've done a great job as a state. We kicked the curve's áss to hell. My county has had only 28 cases, I think, and 5 deaths. There's just 1 person currently hospitalized who's COVID+.

Neighbors are taking care of each other. We're buoying local businesses as much as we can.

The task force commends us for our work.

Recommends SIX MORE WEEKS OF WINTER HIBERNATION.

https://govsite-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/YdEkQPkGTSCwbUoagFhH_Oregon-COVID-19-Projections-2020-04-22.pdf

My plans are NOT compatible with theirs.

_I_ wanna go back to cardiac rehab.

_I_ want to get my bloody IV drug titrated so I can breathe.

_I_ want an appointment with my wakka wakka guy so I'm not in constant fücking pain.

But I don't get any of those things, cuz the universe is laughing at me.

The way I respond to the disappointment and--frankly--the hurt and actual damage to my body, will determine how well I deal with the next six weeks.

I can throw in the towel, to cliché it, but that's not really my thing.

Or I can accept that the world fücking sucks right now...

But "this too shall pass."

It won't be pretty. I--and lots of others--aren't emerging unscathed, that's for sure.

Doing what I can to mitigate the damage--to me & to others--is what I have to do to survive. Layering plans in case contingencies are needed. Reaching out for help.

In the end, though, no matter what I do, what plans I make, this crisis has damaged an integral part of who I am. It's removed a real sense of control I had over the way my healthcare was being handled.

I ... don't have that control anymore. It's completely out of my hands.

I don't like that; it pisses me off badly.

But because I don't have any choice, and the alternative is just sitting in my impotent, inchoate fury for 6 weeks, I need to just deal with it or I'll be even more miserable... psychologically miserable along with physically miserable.

So, I just need to accept another likely 6 weeks...at least... of sheltering in place by order of the governor. I need to accept there will be breathlessness and coughing and figure out ways to mitigate it.

Same with my chronic pain.

Same with getting any rehab work done.

The thing I'm angriest about, of course, has nothing to do with COVID19.

I'm still disconnected from the whole "6months to a year" of it all, but I have a lot of things to do and get put in place before I shuffle off this mortal coil, which I couldn't do if I were freaking.

The upshot: I have to take this garbage sandwich one day at a time, without thinking too much into the future about things I can't have. But also always looking for ways to positively mitigate the damage, or otherwise deal with what's going on....

The rage thing, tho, is hard.

In the past--I've mentioned this before--when I've felt completely out of control, when decisions have been taken away from me, when I'm raging & feel trapped and have no idea how to connect, I've attempted suicide, or cut or punched walls.

Extremely self-destructive behavior.

So, yesterday, when things were getting to a tipping point of absolute fury, &I also couldn't stand up from bed without coughing up a lung &gasping for breath, &hadn't slept in 2 days & with racing thoughts indicative of mania rising....

I put a call into my local crisis center.

The local one (through my county health department) feels more helpful to me, tbh, if only because they keep track of when I've called before so they have an idea of stuff I'm dealing with and I don't have to start from scratch. This erases the anonymity of the national line, but