Chronic Illness Prepared Them For The Pandemic. What Happens When It's Over?

Chronic Illness Prepared Them For The Pandemic. What Happens When It’s Over?
Refinery29
01/04/2021
The strawberries are an issue, Julie Blackburn thought.
It was March 2020, and a plethora of household staples had already become hard to find as COVID-19 took hold across the U.S. Gone were Clorox wipes and toilet paper. Even yeast and oat milk were hard to come by. But Blackburn’s most consuming concern at that moment was how to get her hands on the only “health food” her three-year-old son would eat willingly: fresh strawberries. 
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Blackburn, who lives in Rhode Island with her partner and two children, both under the age of four, couldn’t simply drive to the store to hunt them down — and she still can’t. Going out during the pandemic comes with some risks for everybody, but for Blackburn, who is immunocompromised, it’s especially fraught. The data scientist has Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (PPMS), a condition that affects the central nervous system. “My own immune system is attacking my nerve endings,” Blackburn explains. The medication she takes to treat PPMS, called Ocrevus, decimates her B cells, the primary builders of antibodies in the immune system. “If I get a cold, it’s going to take a lot longer to recover. If I got COVID?” she asks. “I don’t want to find out.” 

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