An Apologia

A short story:

Influenza is going through a community. For most people, it’s a 3-day affair, not bad. Some people take a bit longer to recover.

Some people actually take a few months, but by then they’ve forgotten all about that bug back in October. They figure it’s something else. Probably allergies. And they all say at one point, “I’m just getting old.” Everybody says that.

But one lady…she feels lousy and can’t seem to get better. She tries going back to work but it’s exhausting, and her sick days are slipping away rapidly. Once very active and athletic, she hasn’t exercised in months.

She has no idea what’s happening to her, and doctors don’t either. Some tell her to see a psychiatrist. Nothing seems to help.

And even if she knows it’s been ever since she got the flu, no one probably pays attention. You can’t have the flu for months.

Maybe she’s fortunate, and she has a sympathetic doctor who knows something, and who suggests that she might have myalgic encephalomyelitis, sometimes referred to as “chronic fatigue syndrome” (usually shortened to ME/CFS). There are diagnostic criteria for this, although it’s subjective.

Doesn’t matter. There’s no treatment, at least not yet.

So. Let’s scale this up to, I don’t know, let’s say global. Hundreds of millions get sick. Millions stay sick. Now some people notice.

I used to have several questions about the history of humans that were eventually answered as I became aware that there just weren’t enough of us yet. We had to find better and stable sources of food before we started increasing significantly in numbers, and then ”progress” happened.

We haven’t gotten smarter in the past 50,000 years, in other words. There are just more brains on the planet now.

More people sick means more people who are staying sick. Add in globalization technology and/or events (World War I spread the Spanish flu; now we’re zipping back and forth around the planet all the time), and we are now ripe for pandemics.

And we got one. More people sick, more people staying sick. Instant communication, global news, the internet — we were hyperaware of Covid-19, or many of us were, and so we paid attention to the ones we eventually called “long-haulers.”

That’s the best I can do to explain infection-associated chronic conditions, and to point out that this is nothing new. More of us just know about it now.

About half of the people with long Covid develop ME/CFS by criteria. I figured it out a while back, which is why I stopped thinking I might get better. ME/CFS folks don’t usually ever improve much.

There are lots of theories and it’s almost certainly a combination of some, but it’s easiest for me to think of this as viral persistence. My immune system killed off almost all of the Covid-19 virus, but some, maybe even just a fragment, manages to hide in a place my immune system doesn’t pay that much attention to (e.g., the gut).

So I develop this sickness behavior and these weird symptoms that fluctuate and wander all over body. This is chronic inflammation, hyperinflammation in some people. I’m just a layman, but even I know that stay this way very long and things could start breaking.

All of this is informed conjecture. I turned it into a story so that maybe, if you’re curious, it makes more sense.

I meant what I said the other day. I’m not sure I have that much more to say about me and long Covid. Every day is a little different, and I’m sure there will be things worth mentioning, but there hasn’t been anything new in terms of improvement or worsening in a while now. I’m having some good days at the moment.

But many 80-year-olds can physically do things that I can’t. Like walk a mile. I never forget that this has happened.

There are other things, though, as I mentioned. I feel like I want to talk about some of them. I don’t want to write about politics because there’s plenty of that and you might need a break. But I do have ideas that need expression, one way or another.

So I wanted to get this down, as simple an explanation of what happened to me as I can manage, and then move on to those other things.

Some of them have to do with geology! But don’t worry. I have rock jokes