MY LIFE

How I Dealt with the Covid Pandemic While Legally Blind

If you even think you have Covid, don’t come here!

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Living through a pandemic of a novel virus was an experience that I don’t ever want to go through again. I have never in my life seen so many people being so stupid, all at the same time.

Maybe I need to be more patient. Maybe we all do. I think too many of us forget that this pandemic came with a huge learning curve and that all of us, including our country’s leadership in two different presidential administrations, were flying by the seat of their pants, hoping we could trust the advice of people who were only slightly less clueless than we were. Maybe I and the rest of us ought to be more forgiving of mistakes made by leadership.

My story

I work in blindness rehabilitation, so I was considered an essential worker throughout the pandemic. I probably could have gotten vaccinated sooner than I did, because I’m enough overweight to be considered obese, and I was an essential worker. But I waited until people my age were allowed to get vaccinated because I felt older people than I needed it the most.

My feelings about life during the pandemic were mixed. First, staff in my department were allowed to work remotely. As an admin support employee I still had to go into the office one day a week, but at the time, being able to work from home four days a week was seen as an enormous gift.

I, who usually had to spend 3 hours a day commuting to and from my office by bus, could now mostly start work five minutes after getting out of bed. I got three extra hours of sleep a night! It was wonderful!

I missed seeing my coworkers and team leads very much. I also missed seeing the people from my church. Zoom and Microsoft Teams were godsends before they became annoyances. I remember being extremely thankful to have those two remote meeting apps — up until I came to dislike the idea of Zoom meetings because I was tired of them and wanted to get back to seeing people in person.

My church completely shut down for several months — no congregation members were allowed into the building, and only clergy and lay clergy participated in the services, which were televised over Zoom at…