As I sit here at 2 a.m. eating a big bowl of unnecessary cereal, driven from bed by work-related stress and the need to speedily write a column for a distinguished publication named McKnight’s, it doesn’t surprise me to learn that nearly half of American adults have gained weight during the pandemic, and more than half are losing sleep.
I assume those findings also apply to long-term care staff, maybe more so. The only difference is that they’re trying to sleep and snack while wearing N95s and face shields. I understand how difficult that must be, as I once tried to eat a Twinkie in the middle of the night while wearing a CPAP mask. It nearly killed me.
Oh, and there’s this. Our blood pressure has apparently gone up since the blissful pre-COVID days of 2019. Researchers blame the pandemic, losses of loved ones, lockdowns, loneliness, stress, unemployment and depression. Personally, I blame the death of Meat Loaf, who reportedly would do anything for love except get vaccinated.
In one final cruel twist of the knife, after all the collective anxiety of the past two years, Americans are also losing hair. Male or female, it doesn’t seem to matter, and dermatologist schedules are filling up with weeping patients clutching fistfuls rejected by their traumatized follicles. I feel their pain, and just pray it never happens to me.
All this comes just a few short weeks after New Year’s, when most people have already violated their grand statements of heroic intent. Personally, I didn’t make any resolutions except one: to keep trying. Worrying about weight, sleep, blood pressure or hair loss, along with the dozens of other horrors we continue to experience, just adds one more anxiety to the pile, making everything worse. Instead, as I’ve written before, I just advocate doing better.
In fact, I’m about to do something I’ve never done before: quote myself, pretending for the moment that I’m some sort of expert. “So every time we stop to simply breathe,” I wrote back in early 2021. “Every walk in the middle of a stressful morning. Every bullet point added to a gratefulness list. Every positive food choice, every minute in meditation, every reluctant treadmill step. Every kind word, every step-back from anger, every benefit of the doubt, every gift of grace extended to another struggling human is a victory that should be celebrated.”
So what do we do at this moment of continued struggle against challenges both petty and vast? We do better — that’s all. We try again, because that’s what resilient humans do. Without knowing how each battle will end, we start fighting it.
“Begin what? I begin,” wrote Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my heroes and vicarious mentors. “I have already thus begun a thousand lives.”
Things I Think is written by Gary Tetz, a two-time national Silver Medalist and three-time regional Gold and Silver Medal winner in the Association of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) awards program, as well as an Award of Excellence honoree in the APEX Awards. He’s been amusing, inspiring, informing and sometimes befuddling long-term care readers worldwide since the end of a previous century. He is a writer and video producer for Consonus Healthcare Services in Portland, OR.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
