Allergies in COVID times

The last four months were really good for my lungs. Stayed at home. Was very careful everytime I went to the Sunnyvale Costco, the Cupertino Trader Jo's / Target or the local Trinethra. Always wear a mask, use hand sanitizer very liberally, shower after I come home (not just wash hands, go straight to shower!)

That was pretty much the list of stores visited over 4 months, sometimes once in 7 days or 14 days. 

Apart from that, have had my daily walk around the block either while calling into meetings where I am not front and center but have to be there for an entire hour (most of you know those meetings... where the one day you are not on call, they take your name in vain) or in the late evenings just when the sun starts to go down. 

Two weeks ago things became very difficult. Runny nose, sore throat, blocked nose, difficulty breathing through the nose during the night and end up waking up with a dry mouth, occasional nose bleeds because of too much sneezing which eventually turned into the usual sinus infection. Called the doctor and they promptly told me that I have nothing to worry as I can breathe very well through my mouth. My lungs are still good.. very good.. to the point that once I manage to do the first two breaths of pranayama as part of the daily yoga class, I can keep going. They didn't even bother to ask me to go get tested. 

There was also another thing I observed. The sneezing went into over drive when I shaved after a week. It looks like the cleft below my nose has become super sensitive and I can now shut down when detecting certain smells at much lower levels. 

If not for the daily walk and the 90 minute yoga class everyday, the rest of the day and night is practically spent sitting on one place. So it is not easy to give up the walk because of the allergies. 

The real question was, how can I get this allergies if I wear a mask thoughout the walking! Are pollen smaller than the virus? 

Apparently the Corona virus is 120nm and the size of Pollen is 15-200 um which is 15000 to 200,000 nm. The mask should have blocked the pollen from getting into my nose.Turns out the blooming Lilacs are to blame and when I am sitting in the backyard calling into meetings without a mask, the pollen got me. 

Muddled thorugh the that week and the earlier part of this week working with watery eyes and nose and sounding miserable. Maybe time to take a few days off just to take mind off things and sleep during the day. Staring at a monitor non stop from 8AM to 9PM is also not a good idea. Have decided to go and bring my external monitor from work and move it home. 

If BYSJ was open we would have been going through a summer 60 day challenge. After recovering from that ankle sprain made it 60 days in a row earlier this week.  This would have been my 10th 60 day challenge. In my mind it still is. 

We now have open air classes in the parking lot at the yoga studio. I got to be part of the first ever parking lot class. It was hot, it was not level ground and the sun was directly above us.. but think there were almost 20 of us and we did the class and enjoyed it simply because of the group experience. You have to learn to breathe hard through a mask though, and that was a curveball for me because my mask was not the right mask for this exercise. it was a mask that had already been used for a week and was too soft. A cloth mask or a more rigid mask with some structural strength would have been better.  I almost swallowed my mask during the final breathing exercise. 

There are more classes per week now and more folks are starting to show up. Have been staying put at home content with doing the classes on Zoom or alone to a recording because I was still sneezing like crazy. I have been told there is no chance this is COVID, but others don't. So didn't want to panic my fellow yogis!

My time to participate came again this morning. There is no more sneezing, no runny nose watery eyes etc.. the allergies have gone as of Friday! 

This time went well prepared for the sun and the asphalt in the parking lot. If you saw a guy among a group of yogis who looked like he had just gotten off his camel and looked like a displaced Moroccan, that was me. One beauty of having a lot more clothes during a yoga class is that you sweat more, which was a plus! Thoroughly enjoyed the class.

don't think many of my yoga buddies even recognized me.. they were probably wondering who is the crazy arab who is waving to them..

The allergies and sneezing though presented a very real challenge when trying to do anything outside the house or being able to show my face in video calls. I was not comfortable seeing my own face in that zoom window, so had to say no to a lot of facetime and zoom calls. People get scared even if you sneeze on zoom! that is how much we react or over react to things now. 

The good news is I am back to my usual self and the yoga continues. Now that I have mastered dressing up for parking lot yoga, will be a regular there. 

Wish this COVID blows over and we end up inside the hot room soon enough. A lot of my fellow yogis share the same sentiment. If we are six feet apart and are wearing masks throughout the class, why not just do this inside the hot room?! if anything the fan pushes everything down to the floor! 

Normally we would go to Chat house and celebrate the finishing of a 60 day challenge with some parathas and baturas.. we are in different times now! Hope things open up soon!

Luke warm Solo Yoga where a group class seems so far far away

Not sure how many Star Wars references I have managed to cram into that blog post title...

This is the dairy entry of a hot yoga junkie:

Day 5 of stay in place : In what was yet another attempt to sweat and sweat a lot, progress was made. Ditched the crammed bathroom and restricted movements. Went back to guest room and set up the space heater to "max". It was still luke warm to say the least. Saw my friend Sid's post on the BYSJ group where he was in his bathroom but had a lot more sweat than me.. that got me thinking.. was it because he was still wearing a shirt? So I decide to wear a fleece jacket to force the sweat.

I did sweat a lot more .. but in the jacket. Finally at the end of class two drops of sweat landed on my mat... normally I have two buckets of sweat after class.. calm down I tell myself. Every deluge has to start with a few drops.. I look at those precious two drops and cry.. make that four drops..

My teachers are posting their dialogues as youtube videos. Only problem is the unreliable internet connection at prime time where things start buffering in the middle of the class. I have started recording these in the middle of the night to save them as audio files only. This way the class can go on uniterrupted.  Only problem is that there is a loud pinging noise in the middle of holding poses.. Found out that this is the outlook incoming mail notification going through the internal microphone. Matt Newman will have to recite the dialogue to an empty room at midnight for me to record this again.. Last night I actually fell asleep while this was recording.. had set an alarm just in case to wake up after 90 minutes to turn off the recording. Who knew Bikram Yoga dialogues make for good lullabies?!

Had no idea that last Sunday's class would be my last group class. Given everything we know about the virus, we would probably have quarantined ourselves a lot earlier. Good thing is all my friends seem to be doing okay and posting their own solo yoga experiences from crammed bathrooms and other spaces. 

Tomorrow will be two years since I stopped drinking water during class. That Mary Jarvis class that changed the water habbit seems ages ago. Last Sunday's yoga class seems ages ago! 

I am a social animal of the huggy type. It is not easy to isolate myself, but it is being done. Have been working on a yoga mat all week. It is surreal to be cooped up in a room all day. I see my kids for maybe 5-10 minutes a day. They are on a different time zone within the house. My MIL is still in her own room and watching TV and chatting with friends. We all go for walks one at a time twice a day around the block. The kids have shown no signs of exercising. Perpetually in their beds. I am thinking of going for a family bike ride tomorrow, weather permitting. Things are changing rapidly.. I am the designated shopper for the family. On Monday I made a Costco run at lunch break and this was the situation..

that was one person out one person in with a limit to how many folks who could be inside costco.. but we were all pretty close to each other.. would not call it social distancing... most of the stuff we needed were out of stock.. we do have a lot of cuties.. eating them on a regular basis to get more vitamin C.. which works for colds but not sure if it helps with the new virus..

There are lessons learned in self control, trying to set up the right environments and most importantly hydrating myself. At work we would all walk around between meetings, take a water break, restroom break. At home the meetings just keep coming one after the other.. you cannot just see who is at their desk to go grab the team for an impromptu meeting.. everything has to be scheduled and that means no breaks. 

The last two days, I took one hour breaks in the middle of the day to drink water and walk around the block. 

The yoga journey continues. Hope we get over the virus soon and get to be in a hot room.. something tells me that this is not going to happen anytime soon... but the community is there and everyone is working on cheering up the others. 

Yoga is a blessing, as are my fellow yogis!

Faith Faith Faith

Faith is an interesting thing.. it makes you do things that are ingrained in you from childhood. Everytime I lose something and I have to find it in a time sensitive way, subconsciously say a prayer to Ganesha and say "will light a camphor light(karpooram) for 10 paise at the local temple".. 

a. we don't get camphor lights in the US that easily

b. there is no 10 paise anymore

c. local temple can be anything but was originally intended for Vembadi Vinayagar, a little ganesha under a pipal tree that I have circled with prayers to remove obstacles real and imaginary..

But it gets done.. and we are not even talking about if we actually found the thing on time or not.

In 2014 my MIL was going for a bone marrow test and in pure panic mode I prayed to my family deity (Gunaseelam perumal) that if the test came negative for cancer, will go shave my head in the temple. That was more of an extreme case of the camphor lighting thing.. 

Have made at least 6 trips to India since that time but never got the opportunity to go visit Gunaseelam. Faith is interesting.. seeing your family deity is not up to you, it is up to your deity.. or so the saying goes! Guess on this short trip to see my dad, there was no agenda. 

Three weeks ago, was lying in a hospital bed myself, dreading some worse case scenarios, which fortunately turned out to be something a lot less threatening. While there, the thought of unfinished business with god somehow bubbled up to the top of the already buffering thought process.  What if I died and did not do the "mottai"? After all the bone marrow test for MIL had come out negative! 

The original plan was to just go alone with a driver and get things done and get back. Then my parents said the words "Can we come with you?".. In case you didn't get the reason Faith got mentioned three times in the title, "you cannot say no to someone when they ask to come to a temple with you".. My dad was bedridden two weeks ago and he barely started walking again. An adult in diapers who just started walking, coming on a day trip where we spend 11 hours in the car and 3 hours in a temple is no joke. 

Somehow, we told ourselves, if it was meant to be, we will make it. I did a risk mitigation plan that would make any project manager proud and we left at 3AM. It was still raininig in Chennai but we were off to a flying start.. We had one stop for 25 minutes and were back on the road. 

Given this is my n'th mottai at Gunaseelam, the whole thing was done in 7 minutes.. then came the best part. There was water in the river that flows to the temple! Had a great time taking a dip in the river and have the fishes nibble at me. We were on a deadline and I had to pull myself out of the water to go in and finish the rest of the prayer. 

Our driver and some total strangers helped me navigate a wheel chair through the temple. The priest knows our family and was extremely nice and made sure my dad got to see the deity up close. 

On our way out a puppy came up and lay down under our vehicle. This one knew how to put on a sad face like a pro..

It was time to drive back. My dad is like a kid who just got his tonsils out and knows that his parents won't say "no" to anything... we just got out of the temple and he mumbles "elaneer.. I want elaneer". He wanted coconut water. Was not even sure if this is coconut water season and we were watching the road for it and sure enough we found a vendor selling fresh coconut water. It is not a good idea for a person of his age to drink that instead of lunch. We stopped at an A2B for lunch and it was really delicious. Had a full course meal. As an added bonus this place had a wheelchair ramp!

Then came the bombshell from my dad "I want to use the restroom". That was not part of the plan. It was going to be diapers all the way. But a kid without his tonsils... is a kid without his tonsils. The restrooms here are not typically wheelchair accessible. They are simply not for anyone who is not fit and can manoeuvre around a potty, a door that swishes past the potty with millimeter tolerance and a bunch of taps and buckets on the floor that are trip hazards. In what can only be described as a houdini move, managed to get my kid to go potty and get him diapy changed. That coconut water was a bad idea. Our driver concurred. 

The rest of the drive back was calm and serene. There were cops every 100 feet. So I started counting cops. After 270, I stopped counting. That was only on one side of the road from Dindivanam to Melmaruvaththur. My mind boggled at the efficiency of this whole security apparatus with so many cops just standing on the roadside doing nothing.. then again, maybe this system works, who knows! We actually slowed down to ask one of the cops to find out what the big deal was. He proudly answered "The Chief minister of Tamil Nadu is making his way back to Chennai on the same route!"

We made a dash for it to avoid his motorcade and made it back in exactly 14 hours. For a few minutes after reaching could not find my legs.. had let my dad doze off on me. . . which reminded me of my kids dozing off on me on another recent trip.

It has been another interesting day. 

A picture that says it all..

and a short video of the days experience.. 

It is always a great feeling taking a dip in the river.. mottai or not. Was glad to see my parents smiling again, even if for one day! 

Now the only thought in my head is "the mosquitoes are going to get me good tonight with this exposed scalp.. they will suck my brains dry and I might actually wake up smarter!"

My head feels lighter already, both literally and figuratively...