COVID anxiety, and how do you get the hood of my car up?

So at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought I was handling it all very well. Others even commented on how calm I was. With my anxiety disorder that specifies to fear of fatal illness, everyone expected me to crumble right to the floor over coronavirus. I didn't. I attempted to use logic, and I was mostly successful. I have none of the risks for a serious reaction to the virus. I am female, young, healthy, and normal weight. I exercise regularly and have no underlying heath conditions. I even have Type O blood, for heaven's sake, which I guess is the best type to have for this virus. It's all good.

That was 3.5 months ago. As time passes and the uncertainty grows, I find my anxiety grows right along with the uncertainty. The fear is getting worse, not better. The past two nights I've lain in bed, terrified, sure I had a fever, because I was cold. Both nights it took every once of courage I could muster to get up and take my temperature, which registered 96.7 and 96.2 Degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. As Shulamith likes to tell me, I'd probably be better off just staying home 24/7, not leaving the house at all. That's what my mom does (and I'm very glad she does!), because she is 80. So far, I haven't gone to that extreme, but I wear a mask and gloves everywhere in public, and I'm definitely not comfortable with people outside of my family coming near me.

Which brings me to what happened here:

Yesterday, Shulamith and I were at Smith's picking up a food order. If you haven't tried this, Smith's online grocery orders and parking lot pickup are fabulous, especially if you don't feel comfortable going inside stores. The Smith's worker brought out the bags of groceries, and we were good to go until Shulamith tried to start her car. Dead. As a doornail. Wouldn't even make an effort to turn over. This didn't make sense. She drove there with no problem, and the car had only been shut off maybe 10 minutes. We decided we needed to try to jump the battery, but how does one do that, we wondered? And where would we find jumper cables?

We called Seth to ask him to check in Isaiah's car, and sure enough, jumper cables! Kindly, Seth came right away to save us. But then that first question. How does one jump a car battery? Shulamith and I are educated, resourceful women, so she pulled out her phone and googled the question. The result was a diagram showing how and where to place the positive (+) and the negative (-) gripper deals. We were terrified! Why worry about COVID-19 when you can just blow yourselves up with jumper cables?!

Okay, we can do this.

So I drove my car around to face hers, but then. Then we needed to get both hoods open. We pulled the release in both cars, and her car hood opened just fine, but neither of us, to save our very lives, could figure out how to get mine up. We tried for several minutes before the nice Smith's truck driver pictured above came over to help. He managed to get my hood up right away and attached the cables for us. And yes, he was so kind to help us, but please everyone, PRAY he didn't have the virus, because there he suddenly was, right in our space, no one wearing masks, talking to us. I nearly freaked and ran away. I should have. I was just so stunned to have a stranger that near me. Oh my goodness. And now I'll be on high alert for two weeks, waiting for symptoms to appear. Blah.

And then the stupid cables didn't even work. Her car still wouldn't start, even with the jump. By now we'd been out in the hot sun for an hour, and her cold food needed to be refrigerated. Matt was on his way driving from work, so I left and took her cold groceries to put in my fridge. Once Matt arrived, they were able to buy a new battery and all's well that ends well.

Except my COVID anxiety is now ten times higher. And I still have no idea how to get the hood of my car up.