I went with a 5. I still have my job and I'm considered an essential worker. I cannot work from home, so I have been going into the office every day. I did not do any travelling (for obvious reasons) and I was not able to take my vacation time until late in the year. We only have 4 people in our office and my boss and I are the only ones who have not been sick or exposed or needing to quarantine. That left me covering my other two coworkers for their vacation time plus 3 weeks of quarantine for one and 4 weeks of quarantine for the other. Neither of them actually had Covid, thankfully. I was finally able to take my vacation time to coincide with DD14's Thanksgiving break and Christmas break.
DD14 is doing remote learning and she hates it. I am a single parent and knew I could not leave her at home to manage herself. My boss was kind enough to allow me to set up a school desk for her in my office and she comes to work with me everyday and does her remote learning that way. Even so, she is still doing miserably in her classes and hates not being around her friends IRL. However, she communicates with them incessantly during and after class via chat on her school provided MacBook. So, she has been finishing late/missing assignments over the break. Since I don't have to run her to school and pick her up, I actually only fill my tank once a month, so that's pretty cool.
My father has Parkinson's and got his diagnosis at age 80, he's now 85. He had a fall in early 2019 with a rehab stint and was back home again, having rehabilitated nicely. He had another sliding fall (from standing position back onto the bed and slipped to the floor on his tail bone) leaving him with three compression fractures in his vertebrae. That sent him to the hospital and rehab again in late 2019 and continuing into 2020. He ended up at a rehab facility that is also a nursing home and was, again, healing nicely. That is until the nursing home decided to get their claws into my mom and manipulate her into believing he could not return home without 24 hour care. They convinced her to leave him for one more month and then everything went to H E double hockey sticks. They stopped his rehab 17 days early among other things and his health began to decline. Then they strong armed her into putting him into nursing home care.
That's a very long story for another day, but in short, I saw my dad in February and then they closed down visitation in March. I saw him on Easter and then closed visitation again. I saw him on Father's Day on an outside visit and have not seen him again this year due to them stopping all visitation of any kind. Long story short, he was walking all over the place in March and planning to go home. By October, my mom and sister tried to visit him at his window, as they did every day, and he wouldn't wake up. The nursing home was not bothered and gave excuse after excuse. My mom told them to call an ambulance or she would just do it herself. A few minutes later, an ambulance was pulling into the parking lot. Turns out they had another resident die that same day and all of a sudden they started to worry about my dad! Really?!
Since October, it has been hospital, hospice at my sister's house, hospital, rehab, and then to my sister's house with home health services. He is not going back to that place ever again. He is slowly making progress and we have high hopes that we can still get him back to where he was before they got their claws into him. For anyone who doesn't know, Parkinson's is a slow progression of losing mobility and it does not kill you. It just makes life difficult and you pass away from something else. It does not move this fast and that nursing home is completely to blame for his decline to near death! Many people get their diagnosis in their 60's and live with it for 20 to 30 years. He just got his diagnosis 5 years ago, so there's still a lot of good years in him, if the nursing home didn't shorten his life. The hospital literally diagnosed him as dehydrated and malnourished when he came in. He had lost 24 lbs in 3 months and the nursing home didn't think anything was wrong with that. What idiots!
Anyway, even though I have been extremely careful with my activities, it was decided no non-essential visits with my Dad until the vaccine is available. My daughter and I will be in the last group of the population to receive it, so maybe June of 2021? That will be an entire year before I get to see my father again. Heavy sigh? I just hope all goes well and he's still here by then.
