Thanks for the support in my going back to school this past Monday.  It got me through.  I've been scrambling, like teachers around the world, to convert years of face to face lesson plans to online instruction for a bunch of courses I'm teaching full time.

This week scrambling like that has meant being up until 2am working on lesson plans and then getting up at 7am and teaching all day from home via Zoom.  I'm really pleased the students are coming to class on their laptops.  I'm really grateful that when I don't know now to do some basic technical task while I'm teaching on Zoom my students help right then and there.  They send me quick instructions via chat or tell me out loud what to click my mouse on.  I'm talking about simple stuff like showing them a Powerpoint I've prepared.

By last night, though, just two days in being back to school, I was really exhausted.  In my down time I was constantly rewriting those lesson plans until the wee hours in my hours outside the classroom.  Then I found my experience of teaching via Zoom took extra mental energy just because I'm not used to it.  So teaching a 50 minute class that would have been routine for me in my physical classroom took more than 50 minutes of energy, if you know what I mean.  It took twice that each class session,easily.  So by the end of the yesterday I was pretty wiped.  I got up this morning concerned about getting through the rest of the week.

Looking back to the last few days, I saw why.  This past weekend was the church year kick off for one of the 2 little churches I work for in my part time weekend job, too.  So I worked with church folks through the weekend.  I found out that D., one of my right hand people at one of my churches, has had his cancer come back.  D. told me he's in a lot of pain and needed some counseling time with me about it, so we took some time for that.  I teach death and dying classes to nursing students at my community college, and his returned cancer has spread through his bladder and colon such that he may die now. 

Comforting him and being the speaker at my church service and all was something I enjoyed but didn't allow weekend time off.  This morning I had some extra back pain and  I realized today I hadn't had a day off since August 16th.  I can't take time off today, tomorrow, or Friday now that school's started, so I'm looking forward to time off come Saturday. 

Please send me your support to get through until then, would you?  I'd appreciate it.  I'm going to drive through McDonald's to reward myself with an ice cream cone, so I'm taking the break I can take.  But then I'll come back home and go back to rewriting those lesson plans and uploading them online for tomorrow's classes via Zoom.  It's simple, but for me it's a lot right now, so support welcome, y'all.  I've collapsed 3 times from this sort of thing and ended up in the hospital from it every time, the latest being this past Feb. 24th. A coworker who teaches at my school, too, just called me to let me know he's praying for me offline, so any prayers or thoughts from here online at DS PTSD will add to his to get me through.  Gracias!