Gainfully employed, for the present...

I got an email back from my scheduler and I have a patient for tomorrow as well as the already scheduled patient for Wednesday. As far as she knows, there hasn’t been any scale-back of the clinic schedule, but the requests for exams remain down from the normal (this has been an issue for several months). At this point, as long as I’m not symptomatic (or anyone in our household), I’m going to continue working as long as they can get patients scheduled. I’m going to stick with the belt-tightening until such time as the risk has been deemed as behind us, and the VA resumes normal operations.

This is assuming we’re going to see some downturn in operations, although this hasn’t happened yet. I think it’s inevitable that work will be down from the previous normal for several months, if not for the rest of the year. We had already been down and the coronavirus only stands to impact that further. I think I mentioned in a previous post that this will be an early stress test for “no income” living, even if unplanned and early to boot. I’m not sure we can maintain our bank balances with a mortgage payment, although we are going to attempt just that. If we reduced the budget down to the bare essentials, it may be possible but I’m not sure. There are a lot of large deductions that we haven’t rigorously budgeted for (health insurance, pet medical plan, auto/flood, etc.). We’ve always had plenty of money to pay these off immediately when I’m working regularly, so not only do we have to find ways to meet the monthly needs, we need to find ways to actually put money aside for these bigger annual bills.

I’m hoping that work won’t fall off so much that we have to make some hard decisions, but I think it’s still too early to tell where things will go.