Kings Floyd savors her independence, but it comes at a cost.

She has muscular dystrophy and uses a power chair, which makes tasks like getting dressed, taking a shower, and eating dinner untenable without personal care assistance. Normally, a personal care aide comes to her Foggy Bottom apartment twice a day and helps her with “the stuff that you need to check off on a daily basis,” she says, to the tune of about $400 per week out of pocket.

But Floyd, 24, is a furloughed federal government worker (she asked that we not publish the agency she works for). Since the partial government shutdown began on December 22, she says she has to “balance how much care I can afford with what money I have left. Your brain goes into money-saving mode. It says, ‘Is it necessary that I have clean clothes right now?'”

Floyd is one of about 800,000 federal workers who missed their first paycheck last Friday, as part of what is now the longest government shutdown in recorded U.S. history. (Contractors haven’t been paid since the beginning of the shutdown.) Officials in D.C. and Maryland say that federal workers and contractors filed at least 7,000 unemployment claims related to the shutdown as of last week, and the government says the ongoing shutdown could cost upwards of $50 million daily in lost productivity and wages. Local restaurants have reported an average decline in sales of 20 percent. Industries as far-flung as craft breweries and financial mergers and acquisitions have been impacted across the country.

When the shutdown first began, Floyd says that she wasn’t particularly upset—she had been scheduled to work on Christmas Eve, and didn’t mind having the day off. “Towards the end of the first week is where I started to say, ‘Oh, this might be a problem,'” she says.

She starts listing all of the places her paycheck goes: rent, daily expenses, electric bills. “Right now, I’m trying to think of those little teeny tiny changes that will build up to save me money, but it’s hard because as a young person on a budget I am already trying to do all these things.”

The toughest decision came right after the first week of the shutdown, when she was trying to budget in anticipation of missing her next paycheck. Floyd ran out of her epilepsy medication that week, which she has used since she was 11. She found that she wouldn’t be able to afford to refill her prescription, which requires a copay, and also pay for all her other expenses that month: she would have to choose between her epilepsy medication and her electricity bill.

“I was going to pick the prescription, but the electricity bill is automatically withdrawn from my account,” says Floyd. “I ran out of money, basically.” As a result, she was off the medication for four days.

“It wiped me out,” she says. “It was a headache like you could not imagine, blurry vision, you cannot think in a straight line. Even just tracking down the steps to be able to refill the medication—doing all of this while my brain is functioning at 30 percent is just exhausting.” Plus, she was worried that she’d have a seizure. Ultimately, after days on the phone with her insurance company and doctors, she was able to secure access to the medication by overdrawing her bank account.

She says that, unlike many furloughed feds, she’s also been getting some support from her family, and she’s still on her parents’ insurance. “Me asking for extra support on top of the fact that I have my own income is not only uncomfortable, but it impacts them as well,” Floyd says. “I have siblings. Still, I’m lucky enough that I have that resource.”

Her uncertainty about when her next paycheck will come is also impacting the five women in the D.C. area who serve as Floyd’s personal care assistants, splitting the shifts as a side hustle. They’re not nurses, because their tasks are not medically complicated. (Nurses are also much more expensive.) Instead, they’re all students or people with part-time jobs, looking to make a few extra dollars.

“It’s not just me that’s not getting the help,” Floyd says. “It’s five people who are getting less of an income, because even though they have nothing to do directly with the government shutdown, they work with someone who does.”

Floyd says she’s been “trying to use this time as optimally as possible”: going to doctor’s appointments, writing, and looking for deals for furloughed feds. Floyd hosted a potluck alongside other young government workers last Friday “because we don’t want to buy groceries and we have stuff that’s going bad and we’re trying to combine resources.”

She’s also job hunting. “Moving to the federal government to have a secure position has not exactly come to fruition,” she says.

Update: Here’s the response from the Office of the People’s Counsel, the D.C. agency that protects utility consumers, to this story:

https://twitter.com/DCOPC/status/1085291607715442690