Lost in an unfamiliar place

The shock of suddenly being ill, without the likelihood of getting better

It took a long time to realise that I wasn’t going to recover my health without some help.

I read everything I could about COVID and Long COVID. But I was starting from nowhere. I’d never been ill before. Not long-term ill, without, seemingly, any chance of getting better.

There were diagnostics that we are all familiar with, the PCR and RAT tests. But if you were a long-hauler, as they got called in the early days, there was nothing.

Validating your illness was, well, impossible.

Symptoms were random and different from person to person.

I tried all the usual things to get better. Nothing worked. I could find no patterns.

Pain killers didn’t actually have any effect!

Coughs remained for months but were “unproductive”.

Aches and pains came and went.

Balance and coordination was variable.

My days could be wiped out from the start. On waking I may have some energy, I may not. If I didn’t, I might recover after a few hours, or all of the day, or several days. It seemed random. And, “recover” is a relative term. It really means to have marginally more energy than you have when you are flat on your back and can’t walk, balance or manage to do much at all.

I read about pacing. It didn’t work, not for me at least.

My hunger drove me mad, I was ravenous almost all of the time. But no matter how much I ate, I gained no weight, and my feelings of hunger stubbornly remained.

Resting often made me feel worse. We aren’t meant to sit or lie still for long periods of time, but sometimes there was no option. It didn’t help, and the pains in my chest, back, ribs, hips and knees were likely to be because of being still too long as much as they were due to the illness. Or maybe because of a combination of both.

My brain didn’t work properly. Sometimes, I failed to be able to process and respond to simple questions. I could hear, decode and comprehend, but for the life of me I couldn’t formulate a response. And even if I could, verbalising it was hard, if not impossible.

The frustration I felt for being in this situation was immense. I felt quilty that I couldn’t get better.

Reading was as exhausting as running a marathon.

Thinking was happening, but not in any normal way. Capacity narrowed and became singular and pedestrian. It was also quite exhausting.

Stress made things a million times worse… I ran a company before COVID… it was in tatters and I had no capacity to sort it out.

It was difficult to tell at the time just how much of my physical and mental capacity I’d lost, but looking back, it was both scary, and slightly unbelievable.

So, here I was. Stuck. In a metaphorical bog. And unable to get out.

I struck me that I was no longer myself.

And I was in a world I didn’t recognise.

This was an adventure game I didn’t really elect to play, but here I was.

Feeling naked, lacking in knowledge, no resoures to bring to bear on the problem, and sometimes having to miss a turn because someone had rolled my dice for me and my character got to be unlucky.

I was lost in a strange realm without a map……