Pandemic Weary

Since March 16 this year, when Cotabato City went into lockdown, I had not gone out from my house. I mostly ordered my grocery items from South Seas Trading with delivery. Staying at home most of the time though was wearisome. I get exasperated with my maids too often. I get frightened and anxious at the slightest bad news. I turn to prayers. But although prayers are helping me to calm down specially at night, yet sometimes it also adds up to my anxiety during the day. In my most disturbing time during this pandemic: when my sister Helen and her family caught the covid, when the househelp of my daughter got sick in Manila, and just recently when one of our office secretaries tested positive in Cotabato; I just keep on adding up more rosaries to my daily regiment. In all my desperation, I reach out fervently in prayers to God for help and intervention. Thank you Lord!!! For God in all his glory, hears and answers and helps me in all my distress. But I must have become crazy during all these times of anxiety, for now I begin to fear God, that if I lessen my rosaries or cut short my prayers, lest if I don’t do it right, I might offend him and he will stop helping and loving me. I must be getting crazy in my mind. I know God doesn’t act that way, yet I continue to worry about finishing all my rosaries and prayers in one day. I get frantic when I wake up in the morning. And I can not rest well during siesta because I have to do a couple of rosaries in the mid afternoon. O Lord, please give me tranquility and peace of mind and heart. Don’t ever lose me. 

Sometime in October, I started having ear ache, throat ache, gum pain, toothache, sometimes my jaws hurt too.  I could not pin point the exact location of the pain on the right side of my face. So I called an EENT doctor and she told me to see her in her clinic. I left my house for the first time to see my doctor on November 9. I was scared and stressed. I was such a paranoid that I even wore a shower cap and a hat to cover my hair. Knowing my condition, the doctor was kind enough to treat me as her first patient in line. Yet she did not find anything wrong with my ear. She suspected the ear ache maybe caused by some trigeminal nerve which she said is common when people gets older. Or it maybe due to acid reflux. She gave me a list of food to avoid and pain reliever too. I was just so glad, that it was nothing more. Then I read somewhere that there are maladies caused by pandemic stress. That there are pain manifestation on the face caused by too much tension, including ear ache. I guess tension was the culprit. I guess tension was it. 

Oh help me God to battle this pandemic stress and weariness. Please spare and protect me and my family and my love ones from the covid 19 virus and all sickness and diseases. May the Lord put an end to the spread of this virus and pandemic very soon. O Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.