I’m genuinely concerned that I’ll have no real way to tell when it’s safe for me to start doing things again, because the CDC basically told everyone to get fucked and die, I’m surrounded by people taking the, “eh, if I get covid, I get covid” approach, and I can’t fucking tell what’s a reasonable safety precaution anymore.
I’m exhausted all the time, and I’m still scared of getting sick, but the world is moving on without me, and I’m just so disoriented, y'all.
Covid, or rather this pandemic, has taken so much from me. And yes, I do feel sorry for myself. And there’s nothing wrong with that because frankly, if more people felt sorry for people like me, we would all have more of a life right now.
The virus itself sucks and is probably far more damaging than we currently give it credit for. But the people are worse. The majority of people are happy to allow anyone with a health problem to shield at home and infinitely rot, so long as they can live life as though the pandemic never happened. They don’t care that I’m not on hospice care, bed bound or hooked up to a million machines. They don’t care that two years ago I was living like them; that they couldn’t have picked me out in the street. My home is my prison now and I should just accept that. After all, we the 6 million are the minority.
I think that if we ever get through this pandemic, I will never trust or care for people the same again. I used to think that most people were decent, with just a few bad eggs. Now, you’re a cunt and a danger to my life until proven otherwise.
This pandemic has taken my empathy and leniency. I don’t care for those who are ill if I saw them making poor decisions that caused it. I don’t look the other way when I see people breaking the rules or putting others at risk, instead I make a mental note of their selfishness. I see people I used to care about at pubs and clubs and restaurants and I wish long covid on them. I see people recover from Covid and a part of me is bitter that they never learnt their lesson. I want them to suffer. I want them to regret they ever set foot out their front door. I want them to feel as helpless and trapped as I do.
Josh, I’m training to be a doctor. How can I have such a cold heart? I guess that’s what happens when it seems it’s been broken by 60 million people all at once.
This pandemic has taken my ability to feel much at all. I am so chronically, severely hopeless and angry that there’s nothing but palpable numbness. I read headline after headline of ways the government is making my survival ever more difficult, and I just sigh and roll my eyes. I am a bottomless pit of rage. There is so much in here, yet there is no pile up to see. Sometimes my chest aches. Often I feel an overwhelming urge to lash out or set buildings alight. But I don’t feel the power of anger that I used to feel. There’s just an empty, all consuming hatred of this reality.
This pandemic has taken my family from me. My grandparents go out and live their lives and I can hardly blame them; i don’t rate their chances against Covid so they might as well enjoy their time. But that makes them a risk to me, and their hearing impairments mean I cannot visit them safely with a mask. It’s been three years since I spent Christmas with them; I could go if they swore to isolate for two weeks first, but I just know my aunt, uncle and cousins wouldn’t. My company isn’t worth that to them. My parents work for the NHS and see patients every day; the past two years have been filled with fleeting visits in car parks with takeaway McDonalds and all the windows down. This Christmas, we exchanged presents at a motorway service station halfway between us.
I’ve lost three friends so far to Covid, because asking them to keep me safe was too much. They’re hardly a loss, but the situation hurts to know that all these years, my life had so little value to them. The healthy people don’t understand. “It’s not that deep” they say, “they just want to live their lives”. But it is. Actions in this pandemic reflect our core values. They may want to live their lives, I’d just like to survive mine a little longer.
I can’t even make more friends. I started this uni course with the clear understanding that I would have to choose my health over my social life time and again. And I do. I watch as everyone else gets to know each other and spends time together, at the places where they catch covid and bring it again and again into lectures. I am barely safe to learn, let alone find human connection.
At 18 years old I saved up for a plane ticket and flew to the USA alone. Finishing college really let me learn what freedom was. I’ve been on spontaneous trips up and down the country. I used to catch trains and buses so often and loved how small it made the world feel. I loved making passing visits to cities during changeovers, becoming part of the hustle and bustle. Watching people rushing around me, taking in the departure boards and learning how to almost flawlessly manage the tube networks. I was free and I could go anywhere and do anything.
Now, my world really is small. It’s the size of a one-bedroom flat; 4 rooms to be precise. Without university or medical appointments, I would stay in here for months. I spend my weeks excited to finish my work, only to realize when I reach the weekend that I have nothing to do to reward myself. At best there are films, TV shows, games and books. But they’re all good at giving me a headache. Nowadays, I get most of my serotonin from ordering a takeaway desert once a fortnight. We do sometimes go out, but we have to be mindful of people. We walk around the nearby parks and graveyard and beaches. But there’s only so much grass and sand and ocean you can see before it becomes dull. Some days I sleep in even though I’m not tired, simply because it’s an easier way to pass the time.
Don’t get me wrong, after two years I have learnt to appreciate some of the smaller things. I remember a time when I would have been thrilled to hear I finally had a flat with my partner and that we had our own rats too. I’m insanely grateful for the progress I’ve made and the little family I have. I try my absolute best not to take them for granted; I’m so scared I’ll lose them as well.
The pandemic has also changed my perspective on my memories. There was a time, for around a year, when I had a really fucking good time that all came to an abrupt end when you died. Before covid, I used to resent that it had ended. That my depression, which was essentially in remission, had come back to consume me. All I wanted was to get back to being happy. Now though? Of course I wish to be happy. But I look back on that specific time and I’m just overwhelmed with joy and appreciation that it happened at all. I’m so glad I got to live a little bit of life before all this, and I’m honestly happy that I did it with so much naivety about what was to come. I had and did and felt some amazing things, and I can’t express how grateful I am for that. That’s not to say I’m glad for the pandemic though, as I’m sure in another life I could have learnt to appreciate these things in a less damaging way.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, exactly, Josh. I’m just being honest where I’m at. Maybe one day in the distance future I will able to look back at this with relief that life has improved. It would make a nice change; most of my reminiscing now involves remembering the early pandemic when covid wasn’t this out of control and people still wanted to help one another. I never thought my life would become this bad and now honestly, Josh, I see no way out. I used to think there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but now it’s faded to black. I’m resigned to living in this prison for the foreseeable future, in the hopes that one day I will be thankful I spared the health I do have and be able to start living again. Maybe I’ll be 25, or 35 or 45. Who knows. One thing I know is that I am not the same person I would have become without this pandemic. And I don’t think I’m ever going to be the same again.
Now, Josh, if you could just pull some strings with the guy upstairs and get him to sort this shit out, that’d be grand.
Healthy people asking me for my thoughts on covid is kinda starting to feel like when bullies would talk to you in high school and you knew it was a trap but weren’t quite sure how
Like I know you don’t actually care so just cut to the part where you say we should all just live with it and I should isolate forever and be done with it
Thinking about how a year ago I was interviewed by a very popular radio show about my long COVID symptoms (I was over a year into experiencing them). They ended up not using my story because “it was too sad” and “I didn’t recover like other people”. They told me to contact them when I had recovered to potentially share my story in the future. I wrote back and told them that most people with long COVID will never recover, and that they weren’t accurately reporting on how COVID affects people. They never replied.
A year later and my symptoms still haven’t improved at all. Anyways, here’s your reminder that the COVID reporting you’re reading (at least in the U.S.) is probably not accurate and is not actually reflecting the suffering of real people.
“We’ll be willing to talk about your chronic illness/disability once you’re over it” is hands down the most abled thing I’ve heard in my life.
also, if the patient is overweight, this leap is replaced with “doctor doesn’t know” to “patient needs to lose weight” instantly
[ID: screenshot from the article. text reads “In medicine, the leap between ‘doctor doesn’t know’ and ‘problem is in the mind’ is instant,” O’Leary told me. “They are the same thing.” /end ID]
another enormously important quote from the article:
Our medical system is radically unequipped, practically and conceptually, to serve patients whose tests come back normal and whose chronic symptoms cannot be explained with a biological diagnosis or outsourced to a specialist.
and this:
“They would face skepticism from friends and family, not everyone, but as a general pattern. I knew that when they described their situation to healthy people, healthy people by and large wouldn’t get it,” Rehmeyer [a science journalist with ME/CFS] told me. “The hardest part is the feeling of having fallen off the edge of the earth. All the usual ways you expect the world to work just stop working. You can’t describe your experience and have people relate. You feel like you’ve lost your citizenship in the world and now you’re a refugee.”
and finally:
[…]as Diane O’Leary put it: “The best path to improving care in this area is truthful humility about diagnostic uncertainty.” Chronic medical conditions like long COVID may not be preventable, but chronic amnesia about their existence and neglect of their causes certainly is.
I keep saying that the media only reporting death as THE negative result of getting covid has fucked up how we view catching this virus. Getting it, surviving but not being able to walk 2 blocks without passing out ain’t it.
