A view from within
realising how ill I was
It’s slightly imponderable to think now but not so long ago I was in a deep pit that I didn’t know whether I would ever escape from. Long COVID. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, its been around about 5 years and shows no signs of giving up yet.
I thought I would recover from the acute bit of the illness like a cold or flu. And to start with I thought that was exactly what was happening. Until it wasn’t, and as a hard headed bloke who thought some exercise would help shake it off made me fall into a deep pit the like of which I’ve never encountered before.
The pit caused all sort of things to happen including stopping me from being able to work.
I was exhausted.
I couldn’t think.
I struggled to walk the dog.
Gradually all the normal bits of life retreated until I was unable to do much at all.
And it want on for months and months… well, years actually.
My thinking was so impaired that although I could hear my wife talking to me, and I could understand what she was saying BUT I struggled to respond. Sometimes, I couldn’t formulate a response at all and just sat there like an idiot.
Sometimes, I could think what I wanted to say but just couldn’t verbalise it… that was quite disconcerting. Not to mention being confusing, “why won’t the words come out?”. And at least a little bit scary… Had I lost the ability to speak?
I hadn’t but the processing chain from hearing, decoding, thinking of a response, and verbalising it was clearly not working properly. And sometimes not at all.
Apparently, although I couldn’t hear it, it took me so long to find the words and seak sometime I sounded like I’d had a stroke… A friend and long time colleague told me later that she was really worried for me because my responses were so poor.
On one short dog walk, flat and very close to home, I realised I couldn’t control my direction very well. I was heading, involuntarily, towards the canal. I stopped myself, and then tried again. Same thing, veering to the right and unable to stop myself. I stopped, turned and headed to the wall at the other side of the canal path. I lent there a while, wondering how I was going to get home.
This happened a few places but it was very worrying when it happened next to water.
And all the time I had no way of describing how this all felt.
What the exhaustion was actually like.
How pedestrian my thinking was.
Everything I tried to do seemed to make things worse.
It was unpredictable and there was scarcely any progress at all. I really was just bumping along the bottom somewhere between sleep and awake but without any real faculty to behave much more than like a zombie.
Some days, with a marginal improvement I felt like I was getting better. I wasn’t, it was just a small up tick in ability.
And it was this sort of thing that made me realise that I was pretty bad. Not nearly as bad as some people.
Only once I’d physically recovered and was working on cognitively recovering (still working on that!) I could look back at my notes from the time, on some of the situations and start to realise just how bad things had been…
I really feel for the people who are still living this and who haven’t found any relief or recovery.