By Carolyn Boston, May 7, 2020 — It was very, very difficult for me during this quarantine, and I suffered from tension headaches. I’m not regularly a person who stays in, so I had to relearn some habits that I never practiced before. I found out a lot about myself and I was very grateful to be able to do some of the creative things that I haven’t been doing over the years. One thing was coloring with crayons and pastels, and going back, of course, to doing more writing.
Last week was one of the best days that I had, and just one. And that was when my friends came over and they surprised me with a load of groceries, including gloves and masks. I was overwhelmed by their kindness, and it just made me so happy, and then some of the gifts that some of my friends sent in the mail and the boxes from the Philadelphia Senior Center. It really is an amazing thing to see the goodness of human beings, and I think during these times it rises up in a way that you never imagined it would. I guess the sacrifice of people — the home health aides, and the doctors and the teachers — and how we have just risen from all these graveyard messages to everybody that life is still going on and there are great people out there and there is something to live for and it gives you hope. So those were some great messages to me, to see the models of how people react and respond, even to the perils of losing their own life.
I just said to a friend of mine, “We’re living in a brave new world.” I see the acceleration of technology. I saw this doctor on T.V., he was displaying his eyeglasses that he is now wearing during surgery and he was saying that the technology has helped him during his surgery because he always had to look up at the monitor for the patient’s heart rate and the blood pressure, but now all that is on his glasses. He could see everything without having to look up, and he was excited about this new technology that came out so quickly. I thought about the movie The Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger wore those glasses and the computer would run down everything about that thing that was in front of him, the person or whatever, and I thought, “My goodness, we’re really moving very swiftly in technology.”
I also heard someone explain that they are now scanning your forehead for temperatures. That was portrayed years and years ago in Star Trek (I’m a Trekkie). You see all these things that they did medically and that is happening now. So I’m very excited about what is coming forward, the future of medicine, and the advance of technology.
[During COVID-19 quarantine] I learned more and more about myself and my friends who I call all the times to encourage them when they hear things like the hornets are coming and say, “We’re going to die!” I always say to them, “Look, I don’t think the hornets are going to come this close, just calm down. Stay calm, stay calm.” There’s a lot of great things that are going to come out of this, no matter how dire it looks. Death? No, because everybody you hear [talk] about your mortality and it really gets to you. Well, like it got to me and I said, “I can’t listen to this anymore.” So I shut off the T.V. because it helps me to really focus on being alive. I spoke to my cousin not too long ago. Well, we text one another, and one of the things she wrote, “My mood is gratitude,” and I said, “That’s really cool, I like that!” So my mood is gratitude. I’m really grateful for being alive, I’m grateful for the people that I’ve met that I never met before who have done such tremendous things in helping us and seniors, just wonderful in so many other ways. I stay focused on the good and what will come from this. That’s my take on it.