COVID-19 Chapter 19: Your Stories

brought that point home. Yeah, because each and every one of us, whether we've gotten COVID ourselves or not, has been impacted by this pandemic. And also, no two people have experienced the same thing, right, So.

and with all of you who are listening. And the truth is we've received way more firsthands than we have episodes planned and since our plan for now is to have just one more episode in this COVID nineteen series after this one, although this pandemic constantly changes, so we could end up re visiting it, absolutely, but we just wanted to devote an entire episode to featuring as many of these stories as we could.

so just keep that in mind. But okay, I think we are ready to get started, so let's take a quick break and then begin.

am a marine biologist. I study maternal age effects in a small species of marine rootifirs. I am educated enough in biological processes to understand that this pandemic shouldn't be taken lightly, but I'm not educated enough to know how you deal with it firsthand when a loved one won't listen, especially after it's too late. My father has an always been around. He was an alcoholic with mental illness, and I can't really blame him for my siblings and eyes upbringing.

In the last six years, however, he has made a resurgence with a will to change. In six years, he has made his mental health his responsibility, gotten sober, remarried, and rekindled a relationship with my brother and me. He finally made life events of priority, sending birthday cards on the right day with proper age, and even attending graduation. He even made it a point to call me every week, regardless of if he had anything new to tell me. Lately, it had been more of aw, do you really think

this is real? So when I had not heard from him in over two weeks, I thought it odd. Maybe he was just back to his old ways. Was he upset that I couldn't make time to go social distance fishing. Perhaps he will only have his tantrum and call me tomorrow or the next day or next week. I didn't expect the call when I did, four o'clock in the morning. Is never a time for good news. A voicemail I

still refused to delete from my phone. My stepmother was frantically letting the cat out of the bag that my father had contracted COVID nineteen about a week prior and didn't let me know. He thought it was no big deal, but now it was a big deal. He was now in a coma oxygen saturation on the floor and he was critical. After rushing to her side, everything became a blur. My job didn't matter, doctor's calls became less than hourly he was up down? Did I really not have time

to go fishing? Does he know I love him? Why won't they let me in with ppe? I'm a scientist, after all, I understand this. I had not understood it thoroughly until it happened to me. The pleas from families and loved ones and medical professionals on the television and social media hadn't shown enough light on this well educated marble skull. I was doing the best I could, so how could I understand what they were going through? I

indeed was socially and emotionally distancing. It's been a month, and in the blink of an eye, fifty five years has been wiped off this planet. The ICU nurses at mass General Hospital allowed us his three children to hold his hands as he went. His sighs and gasps were something I'll never forget as long as I live. As we sent him off into the next world, just as he welcomed me into this one twenty seven years ago, I felt an odd comfort and knowing I wasn't alone.

Plenty of relationships have been interrupted by this pandemic, leaving little room for the good stuff. I'm educated enough now in the part of this pandemic that I have missed. Take part in whatever good things you can with them, and hold out hope that we can all go fishing again real soon.

the judge felt like it took years. Getting a new Social Security card to legally change my name back took almost the entire year because of the pandemic. Before moving, I was working in an animal hospital in Oklahoma, and we had to switch over to curbside service, probably about two weeks before I left. Appointments started by taking as detailed of a medical history over the phone from the owners. Then we would run outside to retrieve the pets and

bring them in for the exam and treatment. Working in veterinary medicine and animal welfare takes a huge toll on employees and their mental health. Compassion, fatigue, and burnout is a huge problem, and working through the pandemic has made it even worse now. I worked ten to thirteen hour days on my feet four to five days a week. It is impossible for my coworkers and I had to keep six feet apart because treating animal usually takes at

least two people. Animals can be fractious. Masks Fallow. I've been exposed to COVID at least five times that I know of, and have been very lucky to not get it up. Until the end of February, I was getting tested at least once a week because of the number of people that approached me outside of my clinic without a mask on. I left my first job in Arizona after two months because they refused to protect us and started to let clients back in the hospital in July.

After telling my bosses I did not feel safe, they told me and I quote, we should assume our clients are taking the right precautions and that they are all negative for COVID. I took my two week COVID leave the next day, and then I resigned because the thought of going back made me feel extremely panicked. The current hospital I work for is a lot smaller, and we only allow clients in with their pets if it's for euthanasia. We are currently very understaffed and overbooked. We still accept

new clients. Our surgeries are booked out at least a month, and our appointments are booking out one to two weeks. I am usually at work two hours late every shift, trying to finish my medical notes, fil prescriptions, and clean. A lot of clients are very understanding and nice, but the other half are very rude and angry, which lands on the technicians and receptionists. I am exhausted, and I

know my friends in the field are too. I was in school, but I took spring of twenty twenty off to move, and then I decided to take this semester off because I mentally could not do online classes and work. I'm hoping to be in a medical lab technician program by next year. I suffer from panic disorder, severe anxiety depression, and I was sick a lot growing up. Even though my asthma and my heart arrhythmia are not severe the thought of getting COVID is still very scary to me,

especially because I do not have health insurance. I received my final Pfizer vaccine February eighteenth, and I will say it has helped my mental health a lot. I have seen a few friends and spend a lot more time with my parents who live here and are fully vaccinated as well. However, large gatherings and seeing people in public

and in stores without masks still heightens my anxiety. I've not seen the real to my family in over a year, but now that they are all vaccinated as well, I have made the decision to fly home to Oklahoma in June to visit them. Hugging my grandma has been and will continue being the light at the end of the tunnel for me, and I'm holding onto that.

new challenges. The frequent policy changes like installation of plexiglass barriers and my driver's area rear door entry, passenger limits, health screenings toward social distancing in the building and buses, last minute schedule changes for reduced service, disinfecting the buses regularly, and mask requirements have been difficult to keep up with. This last fall, university students came back for classes. I think the political climate and science denial increased the challenge

of enforcing our mask policy. I have had numerous altercations with highly defensive and cranky and easily agitated passengers, which sets off my anxiety. This is not a normal thing, since traditionally most of our passengers are pretty mild mannered. I never thought the site of a person's knows would become a source of rage and anxiety in me, but it has. It all actually makes me nervous to go to work some days, and my mental health has taken a hit. At the end of July, I did end

up getting COVID nineteen. For me, it felt just like a sinus cold, and I was actually in denial that it was COVID until they called me and told me I was positive. I didn't experience any of the major symptoms commonly talked about, like fever or shortness of breath. I feel it was almost certainly contracted through my job, but I don't have a known exposure. I was able to be part of a paid monoclonal antibodies drug study, which at least made me feel like I was doing

my part to help. However, there was a lot of shame involved with calling people to tell them I may have exposed them. Unfortunately, Among the exposed was my father, who was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer, and it pushed his treatment back by like a month, which I felt extremely guilty for. Thankfully, he didn't get it. Along with the stress of my job and experience with COVID,

I have NonStop worry and anxiety about my family. I'm close to my grandparents, who are both in their nineties and will most certainly die if they were to get COVID nineteen. The stress of potentially exposing them versus giving up precious time with them has been unbearable. My mom and sister are both essential workers as well. My sister lives on the West Coast working in a lab with COVID positive patient samples, and my mom works in a high exposure position as a cashier. I worry about her

a lot. COVID nineteen has affected so many aspects of my life. I've lost count my job, finances, mental health, family and friends. I feel guilty because I have been pretty lucky when compared to others. I got to keep my job and hours. I didn't have to be stuck in the house all day every day, which would have certainly driven me crazy. To date, I haven't lost anyone from this disease, and to my knowledge, I'm the only one in my family that has had it as an

essential worker. I should be able to get the vaccine soon, which will help me breathe a little easier about getting COVID nineteen again or unknowingly passing it along to my at risk family members. So that's my story. Thanks for listening.

My school provides me with surgical mass to wearwell teaching, and a package of extra mass for any student who may forget their own. Student temperatures are taken and recorded four times a day, and we have a designated isolation room for any student showing symptoms and designated breakout rooms should any group of students need to be moved. In Beijing, life is very much phone based, and the government has

the power to quickly track and trace. Almost everyone uses an app called we Chat, and within WeChat they build a health registration component. I use that to register my phone number when eating at a restaurant, entering a cinema or a mall. I can also access the results of my COVID tests through this app, usually within twenty four hours of getting the test. There's a balance between feeling

relatively safe. I celebrated Christmas with a gathering of friends and I'm able to go out to a restaurant to see a movie, but also still very cautious. Mask wearing is very consistent and the quarantine policy here is strict. When seemingly small numbers of cases are found, entire communities are tested, and that might mean millions of tests over

a few days. Here, a positive test, regardless of illness severity means isolation at a government quarantine facility, even for very young children entering the country involves weeks of centralized quarantine and testing. As a teacher, this has definitely been a year of rapid emergency growth. In the first days of remote learning, I was incredibly thankful to have already started technology routines and know that my students had access

to technology. But those beginning days were definitely hit or miss, and the teaching communities that I follow were still months away from their own remote learning switch. In the early days, given the unknowns at the time, international schools totals staff and students. If they were not required to be present in Beijing, they could stay put wherever they were on holiday,

but should be ready to return at short notice. After much agonizing, my partner and I opted to stay, worrying about risk of exposure during travel and not having an appropriate place to self isolating Canada. As both their parents have risk factors. We all had the sense that things would be back to normal in a few weeks. As an educator, I really struggled to help my students make sense of this new reality that extended way beyond a

few weeks. Many students ended up in different time zones, dealing with the separation from friends and the uncertainty of different lockdown responses as the pandemic unfolded. Some of my students are of Asian descent, and it broke my heart as they also had to navigate the racist rhetoric emerging on their social media platforms as the world began to point fingers. In late March, China closed the borders to

foreign passport holders, regardless of visa. This added a whole level of uncertainty as most of our colleagues were out of country. The local community did a lot to take care of us and our other colleagues who had stayed, making sure that we understood news updates and checking in on us quite often. Looking back, I don't know if I would change our early day's decision to stay in the country. It turned out that we had a lot

more freedoms than back home. Beijing never fully shut down, but we were also cut off from family and friends when we initially decided to stay last January. We hadn't even considered that there was still being an issue in the summer when we would normally go home to Canada, with the process of re entry to China quite complicated, and still knew we could not leave during the summer. And I haven't seen my family in over a year. It's taken around six months and we've got almost all

of our teachers and students back to the city. It feels bizarre, almost as if the time of part never happened. Things are oddly normal, but with an undercurrent of al alertness. I just really like to see my family safely again sometime soon.

had to be laid off. Without active live shows, there wasn't enough money or work to keep everyone employed. I imagine live concert venues and museums were hurt the same way. I feel grateful that my parents can help me out and that the recent economic relief package passed because I have asthma and have been scared to be around too

many people in enclosed spaces. Luckily, I was just vaccinated the day before I recorded this, So I'm going to start looking to see if there are any jobs in my area in restaurants or retail, but I have no idea of anyone's hiring. While there's still a lot of places that have reduced capacities indoor. A lot of people have asked me how creative I've felt or if I have accomplished anything musically this past year, and I've struggled to feel creative, which along with the feeling of isolation,

has caused my anxiety level to worsen a lot. And frankly, I'm also most creative when I'm busy, so working always help me. While I've furthered a few projects very slightly, there hasn't been a full product that I've been able to complete this year. I am also a queer man, and I am feeling a loss of connection to the LGBTQ community. I used to be around numerous LGBTQ people almost daily, and now the only member I'm around daily

is my roommate. I don't know what interactions I could have with queer people until the theater company I work for reopens and a lot of our bars and clubs have so many LGBTQ people are fully losing their place to gather. Without places to gather, it is much more difficult to feel a sense of community and to heal together.

It is odd to feel so separated during the pandemic, but because there has also been a rise in hate crimes against LGBTQ people and a furthering of attempts by some politicians to use laws to allow forms of discrimination, the transgender and non binary communities are especially hurt by all of that. I'm hoping that by June we will be able to have our regular Pride celebrations and parades in some form or another, but I'm not sure if that's going to be possible yet. Thank you.

mortem care, and bag the patient and their belongings. Daily, I have difficult conversations with family members that only one healthy visitor can come and say goodbye to their loved one. As a cardiac nurse, this is something that we don't account or often. Our patients are typically those suffering heart attacks and yes, while their heart stops and we give CPR to bring them back to life, they often survive and go on to the ICU for further treatment. COVID

patients are not like this. Each day, we often have one to two emergency situations where we are placing patients on the ventilator and rushing them to the ICU. Oftentimes they may be elderly and by placing them on the ventilator they may never come off. The physicians decide not.

this aerosolizing procedure. We have had families admitted in rooms next door to each other, visitors who have snuck in and given other patients COVID who are never positive, and many staff members who are getting sick currently in my hospital, staffing has also become an issue where we are overriding state mandated nurse to patient ratios just to care for the COVID search that has come into our doors. We went from a COVID positive census of forty patients before

Halloween to over four hundred COVID positive patients. This is not slowing down. As a healthcare worker, I can speak for many of us when I say we are getting tired and our mental health is suffering. I can personally say I have started going to therapy and started medication because of what I am going through. I could go on for hours about the struggles we face as healthcare workers during this pandemic. We are here to do our jobs. And save lives, but it is harder and harder each

and every day. We wear our masks to protect the public, but who is wearing their masks to protect us? It is an everyday struggle for the last nine months, and this is not going away. I am proud to say I'm receiving my second round of the vaccine tomorrow and I hope to do my part in ridding the world of this horrible virus.

little surprised that it was positive. Because the timing was so soon after I'd had my birth control removed, I didn't know how pregnant I was, so I scheduled my first ultrasound for mid March, and my husband and I were really excited about getting to meet with the doctor and see our baby.

an awful, awful day. I came in regularly over the next three weeks as I went through rounds of medication to complete the miscarriage, and that was ultimately unsuccessful, and I to have surgery, and going to a hospital no matter which wing, in the middle of a pandemic is

nerve racking. The one and a half months that I went through my miscarriage happened to coincide with the start of lockdowns here in North Carolina, and our understanding of this disease and how it spreads was changing really quickly.

coping skills to survive these illnesses. I started my first semester at the University of Tennessee and discovered that COVID has not only stripped away the majority of my coping mechanisms for depression, anxiety, and PTSD, but it tripped away my study strategies. That, combined with three months of spotty WiFi, landed me back into the psychiatric hospital, where I was able to meet and talk with other people in the same boat. At the time I'm writing this, it's been

two weeks since my stay at the hospital. My medicine isn't working the way it should, and I'm looking into finding a new psychiatrist to help me sort things out.

Going to school during COVID is immensely difficult. At the start of the semester, everybody was new to the online learning process, which for me meant a lot of assignments fell through the cracks while I learned how to navigate the online environment and I couldn't ask for extensions for little assignments because the teachers were still figuring it out as well. What made learning the ropes especially difficult for me was that each of my teachers had their dashboards

set up differently. On top of all this, my Wi Fi connection was really bad, despite paying a lot of money for it, and often cut out during my lessons. If it didn't turn back on before the end of class, I would have to wait for the recorded lecture to come out to cat later. The spotty WiFi made taking exams exponentially more difficult. Once, during the second round of exams, my WiFi cut out fifteen minutes before the start and I had to drive to my friend's house to use

their Wi Fi. While I was there, there was a deadly crash on the highway leading back to my apartment, and I wasn't able to go home for two hours after I'd finished the exam. What made this so unbearable was that during this time I was so incredibly lonely. Making friends through Zoom classes with one hundred different people is difficult. Two weeks before finals, I experienced a major

depressive episode. I couldn't eat, I woke up multiple times at night, covered in sweat from nightmares, and every time I tried to go to class I had a panic attack. After a week of intrusive suicidal thoughts and not being able to get out of bed, I checked myself into the hospital. It was there that I was able to

meet and commiserate with people in similar situations. During one of our group therapy sessions, somebody asked the social worker if COVID nineteen had cost an increase in admittance to the psychiatric hospital. Surprisingly, the social workers said no. Admittance rates have remained stable, but of those who are coming to the hospital, many cite COVID nineteen as the reason they need help. What I learned from my stay is that it's important to remember that we are not alone

in this fight. If your current coping mechanisms aren't working, you are not alone. There is help out there available to you. All you need to do is ask thank you for listening.

my plan was to live and work in London. On my days off, explore Europe and still fly home to see my friends and family about once a year. But it's looking like years, not months before I can see my family again. Australia has locked its borders to the rest of the world, and honestly it's for good reason. If you just look at the infection numbers, as we were getting twenty thousand cases a day here in the UK, Australia often had zero. But this means Australians like me

can't go home. I think the hardest period was during Christmas. A lot of my international colleagues at work were from either mainly in Europe or from the North Americas and a lot of them got to fly home to see their families. All they needed was a negative COVID nineteen test. But Australia it's by based with the government. You have to have good reason to visit Australia and with that you also have to pay for your full two week

hotel quarantine. But the biggest issue I have is that I'm not time rich enough to do something like that, Like I'm a nurse and they're not really giving out and you'll leave during a pandemic to nurses in spades right now, And so I would find myself flying all the way down to spend two weeks alone in a hotel room, to then come out see my family for like two days before I have to jump back on a plane to fly back to the UK. After one month of living here in London, I got COVID nineteen.

All my friends and family were in Australia. I had to nurse myself. I felt completely alone in my apartment. It was one of the scariest weeks of my life. I'd only been here for a month, so I hadn't been registered to the free health care here yet in the UK, so I had no idea how to even

access health care if I need it. I remember laying in my bed, hearing the crackles in my chest as I was trying to breathe realizing that no one in this country knew me well enough to even come to my apartment to see if I was still alive in this bed. But I got over it. I still work every day right now. My life consists of going to work, back to my apartment and then repeat. London and the UK has been in some sort of hard lockdown for

eight of the twelve months I've been here now. But I've never been so busy in my nursing career, and that includes crisis nursing during the Australian bushbyers of twenty nineteen. I'm very fortunate and lucky that I live in a world that I can video call my friends and family back home, But it isn't the same as being able

to hug my mum and dad. If I knew it would be the last time I see them in years, not months, I definitely would have held them longer at Sydney Airport before I said bye goodbyes.

infinitet home. My husband was working, as was I, and I was struggling to film live lessons as well as film lessons late into the night. The workload was intense, and I was on my computer from dawn until way past my normal bedtime. We all did our best, and we were met with a variety of responses. Many people were supportive, compassionate, and appreciative, while others constantly ripped us apart and demanded more, especially online. Reading online comments still

is incredibly hurtful. Matters got worse in the fall when we return to the classroom. Many other school districts around the country have been remote, but we've been in person so far the entire year. Being with my students is so wonderful and I love forming the connections with them. I of course, would prefer to always be in school with them. However, I have both in school and remote students,

as well as multiple classrooms. I have no lunch breaks, no preps aside from a bathroom break, and I spend the entire day in one of two classrooms. My workload is triple what it normally is, and I never have a moment to just sit and take a deep breath. The only time I have for that is my long commute.

They have made it hard for her to care for herself and as a result, she has some health conditions as well, including sleeping problems in type two diabetes. When the pandemic began, I knew it was going to be a difficult road, but I did not expect it to last as long as it has. I worried about my mom and my stepbrothers so much. My mom didn't understand why it was important to stay home. She would often forget to use her mask because of cognitive struggles due

to the schizophrenia. I had to repeat over and over again the same talk that we had already had about how the virus could affect her and those around her. She hated being cooped up in the house, and although I tried to convince her not to, she went to the store to visit her friend's daily. I was away in Guatemala for the semester when she started having really extreme back pain, and one day when I talked to her on the phone, she told me that she was in so much pain that she wanted it to end.

She just wanted to die. I tried to calm her down, to help her. Somehow I felt too far away. I felt powerless. That's how I felt towards my brother's situation as well. Many people had basically ignored his christ for help, claiming that it was attention seeking or that he would get over it soon enough. He was only fifteen, I think, when he started having these symptoms of depression, but as the pandemic wore on, he felt more and more isolated.

He finally started going to counseling when he was allowed to, which helped a bit, but being away from people. He spent so many days just doing his online classes, playing video games, or listening to music, nothing more, and he was breaking. In talks that he had had with some of us siblings, he said that he just wanted it all to end. He felt like he made everything worse. We tried to console him as best we could, reassuring him that he had always been the one to cheer

us up and to make us laugh. But with school and with our work and everything else, most of us were busy with our own stresses. I wish I hadn't been so busy, and I wish I hadn't been so far away. On January twenty first of this year, my dad sent me a message saying to call him, that it was an emergency. I was in an online class through Zoom, but I turned my camera off and called him as soon as I had seen the message. He told me that my brother took his own life. I

didn't know what to do or what to say. I was stunned and sobbing, but I tried to hold back the tears. He left a huge hole in our family. My brother. I missed him so much. My siblings were all able to be at his funeral, but I was in Guatemala still I couldn't come back, both because of travel restrictions and because of personal reasons. I saw the funeral over the internet. I have since had my own problems with my health, both mental and medical, which has

been harder to cope with than ever. I don't know if my current mental state is just because of the stress and pain because of what has happened with my brother and with my mom, or if it's something that I have just tended well to hide until now. Since then, my siblings and I and many people that were closest to my brother have come closer, but we have also suffered big mental tolls from what happened. We're not doing good.

I don't think anyone is right now. This pandemic has been so difficult for everyone, regardless of party alignment, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status. It's a bad one. I just hope that we can come closer. Although we're mourning, I pray that we've become better towards each other, and we stopped judging those around us and acting like their problems don't matter

or are less significant than our own. We're all fighting our own battles and we need each other now, during the pandemic and always.

it really ramped up. The isolation and inability to go anywhere to take a break from the baby really made things worse. Everyone kept saying, won't make time for self care, but it's impossible when most of your usual se care activities are based on leaving the house, going to movies, coffee shops, etc. I'm only just starting to come out of the postpartum depression now. I know other moms must be going through this too, but there really isn't a platform for it.

new illness. Myself, norma coworkers, knew very much about. I didn't think it was going to be severe, maybe like the flu. I was very wrong. We were also informed about a possible lockdown and how our number of orders were going to increase and march rolls in and that's when everything changed. The number of our orders increased dramatically,

but the way customers reacted to us also changed. Customers were scared, they were confused, and they didn't want any contact with any others, with any other person than themselves. Some of the customers were very nice to us in the beginning, stating that we were keeping the country going alongside the healthcare workers. However, as a lockdown persisted, customers became ruder and their suspect we were given wasn't there anymore.

Customers would scream at us because the store i'd been wiped out of certain items that we had no control over, and our management weren't really the kindest to us either, pushing us to do more and more, even though we were already doing the most that we possibly could. That's when our mental health really took a toll. Many of my coworkers and myself had been working very long hours, even over time, non stop. The grocery chain gave us hero pay, which only lasted about a month before it

became too costly and was taken away. We were also risking our health by being at work. Our department is not big, so coworkers cannot conform to the six foot rule. We're basically standing on top of each other deep cleaning. But a grocery chain was spoken about as if it had happened, but we didn't see it. As I said,

mental health suffered. People considered friends were getting tired of each other, and because we were always around them, where arguments of bad feelings became a prevalent situation for us, we didn't really have that system of distraction that we normally had. We just we couldn't go to restaurants, we couldn't go to movies, we couldn't simply be outside to decompress, and because of that, a lot of us suffered burnout.

What I hope a lot of people understand is that mental health is very important, and it is very important to those essential workers that might not be in the healthcare field but are still doing stuff every day for the functioning of society. My coworkers and I, we were on our feet constantly. Some of us never took our breaks, some of us had to be forced to take our breaks even though we were extremely busy, and we had customers screaming at us almost every day, and we were

just constantly busy. And now, yes, that is nothing like what the healthcare workers experienced, and I don't want to say that we are as equal as them, but mental health, as I just said, is very important and a lot

of my coworkers talked about quitting our department. The pickup department in this grocery store chain is very high stress and we are very much required to be fast, and when that doesn't happen, quinces come, which leads to more burnout and which leads to people being drained and people not being able to do their job efficiently. And as this pandemic persists, the mental health struggle is probably going

to persist as well. And while I'm glad that i had a job during the pandemic, I'm very happy to have moved on into the job that I have now.

been a pretty terrifying and just completely bewildering experience. But there has been one really good thing to come out of it that has allowed me to look at the whole situation in a much more positive light that maybe others haven't had the chance to do. At the end of February last year, I started talking to my girlfriend. We were just arranging to meet up when the UK went into its first lockdown, and so we were kind of stuck on what we were going to do, how

we were going to proceed. The time that lockdown gave us allowed us to really get to know each other, and over the three months, the three initial months of the first lockdown here in the UK that we were able to talk, we really got to know each other on a level that I don't think would have been possible had we dated in a way that is or

was the normal for people here in the UK. When we did finally get to meet three months after three months of talking, while there was a massive amount of pressure to live up to this hype that we kind of built for each other, it was like meeting someone that I'd known for my whole life, and it was an easy transition into talking to this person that I'd met online at the beginning of a lockdown and really gotten to know to then finally being able to meet

them in person. When lockdown restrictions started to ease, we were able to spend a lot of time together and we've been together ever since and it's amazing and I'm so incredibly thankful. But right now we're in the third national lockdown here in the UK, and it's been a month since I saw her, and I expect it will be at least another two months since I see her. Massively grateful for the time we got to spend to

spend together when lockdown was eased over the summer. It's difficult to now go back to having no contacts apart from text messages and phone calls. I miss her a lot, and we're trying to make the best of it, but

it is hard. At the same time, though it is this light at the end of the tunnel, it's a reason to make sure that we're doing the best we can to get through lockdown and the pandemic, and we know that doing our bit to keep infection rates down, wearing masks, washing hands, keeping distances, just staying inside as much as we can is going to help us to be able to see each other as soon as we can. I've had so many people say to me, you know,

how how have you managed, Robin? How have you managed to land yourself in a relationship with someone that you want to spend the rest of your life with during a time when people can't see each other and new people can't really meet. And to be honest, I don't really know how I've managed it, but I have and I'm so incredibly grateful that I have done that somehow, And I just want people to know that there is

light in every situation. And it's hard. I know, it's so difficult out there in every part of the world at the moment. But if you can find some light to hold on to, then there is a promise that this pandemic will be over sooner rather than later if we keep everything crossed and do what we can to ensure that those infection rapes stay low.

to the world around us. But maybe if there's one thing to take away from this episode, or this pandemic even is that every one of us, every person has their own struggles, their own experiences, their own challenges, hopes, fears, dreams, entire lives and remembering that showing empathy. It's so incredibly important.