It’s been a rough week in this house, which, if you’ve been a longtime reader, shouldn’t come as a surprise.

A is taking the results of the election very hard. While he doesn’t currently, and hopefully won’t need to, have any loans to pay for his education, his school uses the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to determine the aid that he gets.

Since his school awards scholarships based on financial need only, it is concerning to hear that this federal program could be eliminated.

Granted, anyone who dealt with the rollout of the “new and improved” FAFSA last year probably greatly wishes the whole thing were at the bottom of the ocean, but for those of us that persevered and got through it, it was worth it.

I don’t doubt that his school will have a system in place if needed to account for this, but it’s just going to be another set of hoops we have to jump through.

A and I are also worried about the potential for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as most refer to it.

I still pay a whole lot of money every year for health insurance, even with my employer-backed plan.

All three of my children were born with health issues, and for the rest of their lives can be considered to have a pre-existing condition.

While G and E’s conditions have been able to be corrected, there is always the chance that some odd side effect could happen in the future.

There is a real potential that all three of them could be left without health insurance, without a mandate that pre-existing conditions can’t disqualify you from getting insurance.

No one is lining up to be the insurer of people who’ve amassed hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in medical bills already.

It is also currently reassuring to know that my kids can be covered under my insurance until they are 26. A, at the very least, has plans to continue to graduate school.

While schools offer insurance to students, him staying on my plan is the most cost-effective way to manage this.

The other two aren’t far enough along to have any real plans beyond their college years, but it has been comforting to know that I could at least provide this safety net for them for a few years. I guess we’ll have to see what happens.

I always thought Social Security was something I would have to worry about when I got older, and of course, the running joke for most of us Gen Xers is that it will run out long before we get there.

As our companies have started to do away with pensions, and push us more into 401(k) plans, tying our plans directly to the stock market, well, our retirement was looking sketchy anyway. I assumed we’d figure things out as we went along.

Then Steve died. Suddenly, Social Security is something that has become very important to me.

We are beyond lucky, if you can apply that word to this situation at all, that Steve planned well for us if something would happen to him.

Also, I continue to work and provide for our family.

However, the Social Security checks that come for my children, money that Steve contributed to that fund from the first paycheck he ever got, that money allows my kids to continue being kids.

It allows them to continue to pursue extracurricular activities, rather than after school jobs. It allows the money that they make at their summer jobs to go into their savings accounts.

It has allowed me to know that there is a cushion for them if something happens to me in the short term. It allowed me to put my income to larger home repairs that will hopefully see our home through for many years to come.

Basically, it just gives us breathing room, something I don’t take for granted.

This election changed everything. There have been promises, or threats, because that’s what they really are, to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and to make changes to Social Security.

There are so many other horrifying things that came along with the election, but these are the two that are going to have the biggest impact to my daily life if they are enacted, and the two things that mean I need to start changing the way I live now, immediately.

I have to prepare for the worst-case scenario, which in our case is most likely a lot of medical bills, and not a lot of ways to cover them. Maybe it won’t happen, but I can’t afford to wait to find out.

A commented that he’s been a little too blissfully unaware of the mood of the nation in his “little blue bubble.” He’s in Massachusetts on a college campus. For him, it is a very safe environment. I, on the other hand, am in a very red bubble.

There is a flag on a building near the school that boasts of “The Revenge Tour.” I suspect you all know too well exactly what that means. The ugliness of all of it is what confounds me.

The day before the election, right outside my window at work, two men carried on a particularly vile conversation about our vice president. Reporting it to HR would have done no good, only marked me as a liberal snowflake who can’t take locker room talk. However, if someone spoke about their daughters like that, I can only imagine the “revenge” they would want to seek. This appears to be the direction that our society is comfortable moving in.

It is disheartening after so many years of sharing my family’s story, particularly the part where the unthinkable can happen to anyone at all at any time, that so many people would buy into promises of dismantling a system that is in place to help so many people.

I genuinely hope I am wrong.

I hope that if these programs are repealed or replaced, it is with something even better. However, that piece of paper that I got with my name on it, and degree in history, tells me that that is very unlikely to happen.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News.