Re: Covfefe-19 - Part 4- Stay the **** Home
A week ago, the local news did a short piece on a doctor who is living in his basement (independent entry) and is staying away from his family... tough times....
We've been doing similar things for a couple weeks now. We were affirmed by seeing these stories on the news over the weekend.
My wife takes her temp daily. When she comes home from the hospital, I don't get to hug her. She comes in and immediately puts her clothes in a special hamper in the entry way. We bring them down to the basement and launder them. She takes a shower, her second of the day wreaking havoc on her skin and hair. While she's showering, I put her lunch and dinner dishes into the dishwasher. I clean and sanitize her keys, badge, anything else she touched, and all of the doorknobs. I change my outer layer of clothes and wash my hands and arms thoroughly. When she's dried off, we finally get to hug, carefully. We don't get to kiss because who knows if she's asymptomatic at the moment*.
We've already prepared a separate living space downstairs. If one of us gets it, I move down there, and we institute special procedures desperately hoping the other hasn't already caught it. We've got the best furnace filters 3M makes, but we'd also add a second layer to the vents and returns in the rooms. I've got a couple sets of clothing that would last me a few days down there while we discuss our next steps. We have plans for how we'd do laundry and cook meals. I have a secondary home office setup in a spare bedroom down there that would work in a pinch if we need to isolate immediately.
In a perfect world, I'd turn the "sick" room into a negative pressure space with a fan, but that probably a step too far.
*This is really hard as newlyweds. We already cancelled our honeymoon, probably never get to take it. We both want kids but we obviously can't start now. We're in our 30s, so it's already kind of dicey. I'm holding out hope we get through this in less than 18 months, but slowly preparing myself for a reality where we can't. I've delicately asked her if we want to start sleeping in separate spaces until this calms down, but how do you insist on that? It's heartbreaking to have to even contemplate that. To go from vowing to be partners for life to isolation is not something humans were really designed to do easily.