Hello! Today is Thursday, April 2nd and I'm continuing my quarantine blog for 30 days, through out the month of April.
Yesterday before my shower, I did a session of "Yoga For Grief" via Yoga With Adriene and boy was that needed. This particular exercise focused more on gentle movement and lots and lots of deep breathing. I highly recommend it! It was like a really gentle flow yoga with a side of mindfulness meditation built in. Between that and following through with making my goal of writing a blog a day for 30 days happen, it's just what the doctor ordered because my outlook last night was much sunnier.
Eddie came home from work and made a nice dinner of salmon filet and roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts. We then went on our nightly neighborhood walk. It's amazing how much later the sun is going down already. We stepped outside last night at a quarter past 9pm to watch the ISS arch over our sky and I thought it was crazy that you could still kind of see the sunset on the horizon this late at night. That's something I love about Northern Michigan, there's a always a new season to look forward to. Spring and Summer are on their way and with that comes longer days in the sunlight.
I've been using an app on my phone to watch for satellites in our skies for about 5 years now and it's an awesome thing to do together with your loved ones or by yourself. Seeing the ISS in the sky, I wondered what the astronauts that were currently aboard were thinking of the pandemic happening and wondering if they were worried for their families and friends and also how this would effect any payloads going up to send them supplies or how it will affect any upcoming change of staff. I discovered there is a change of staff scheduled for April 9 and they are following through on that. Astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner will be, and NASA staff, will be trying their hardest to send up the next ISS members healthy and Covid-19 free. It turns out astronauts are no stranger to quarantine;
A string of space colds on early Apollo missions pushed NASA to start isolating its astronauts before launch more than half a century ago. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins even lived in their Mobile Quarantine Facility — a converted Airstream trailer — for weeks after Apollo 11 returned from the moon. However, this quarantine wasn’t as much about protecting astronauts as it was about NASA’s desire to avoid bringing uninvited lunar microorganisms back to Earth. (The Soviet Union also kept its Mir space station cosmonauts in quarantine ahead of launches.) -Discover Magazine
I learned a lot from this article quoted above, and I consider myself knowledgeable about the ISS and it's day-to-day operations. I had just never thought about ISS and illness in that way before. I did learn that there are ventilators in the orbiting craft but that no one had ever had to be intubated on the Space Station before. I wonder if all of us, isolated in our own space stations, will now see what it would be like for the first astronaut in history to have to come home on an emergency flight due to a pandemic. Crazy times.
In these scary times, and even before this, I've been a pretty big proponent of using creativity to cure what ales you. What a creative way to look at our current situations, stuck inside, as a mock version of our own little space station. Imagine if we all pretended we were astronauts just quarantining before our next voyage or that we were already in space, floating 250 miles above earth. Most of us are feeling fear right now. I always like to combat my fear with learning new things. If we learn about what is scaring us, maybe then it wouldn't be so scary. Knowledge truly is power. However, I couldn't "learn" my way out of fear recently and it's alarming to me. I tried reading everything I could about this virus and the experiences of others who have already been thrust into this new life, and it made my panic worse. There's just not that many places right now to read sound information about Covid-19. There's not a ton of journal articles and pub-med studies because this is all happening right now. We are history in the making. So, feeling defeated, I asked my therapist about this behavior of seeking out information to feel better and although it's not a bad habit usually, for now I needed to stop. Reading articles, like the one above about the history of illness in space, has helped me to route around the massive amounts of false information going around and focus on something new, but still educational.
Do you have any good examples of articles or other things to read that are related to this pandemic but aren't scary or full of obvious fear mongering lies? Send them to me! Let's learn new things together. Thanks so much for reading and I'll talk to you tomorrow. Please stay safe and as always, know I am here for you and thank you for helping me break the stigma.
Comments
Post a Comment