Stranger in a Strange Land

I've read several first-person articles by people with long Covid. They're all done well, frank and clear, nicely illuminating the life of a person with this bizarre sickness.

I'm not sure I could manage the effort it would take to be happy with an op-ed or some other newspaper narrative of my experience. It's what I do, or did – I wouldn't be casual about it, and the stress would be horrible.

Also? I'm not crazy about other people at the moment. It's temporary misanthropy but I feel like, naw. People don't even read the damn things, anyway. People don't really read, trust me. They see what catches their eye.

But I copied this part from a piece I read yesterday:

I endured post-Covid symptoms month after month — shortness of breath, difficulty swallowing, hair loss, successive outrageously loud and deep burping I felt like a croaking buffalo frog, breathlessness and elevated heart rate when bending over, heightened sensitivity to noise, light and the usual food and medicine I have been taking. Hardly have I recovered from one symptom, there came another. I was in a state of permanent crisis with suffering that seemed to be unending.

It was the burping that leapt out at me. It's a constant thing, and so out of character it makes Julie laugh nearly every time I belch. That's a lot of laughing.

It was nice to have company, then. It's from the swallowing – it takes me so long to get a bite down, with multiple swallows, that I swallow a ton of air. Which will need to leave eventually.

This is also not a bad paragraph to keep handy; maybe I could have cards printed, for when people ask how I am. I would never refer to any of this as suffering that seemed to be unending – it's just semantics, and "suffering" is associated with pain of some sort to me.I have constant pain, I guess, but it's 3-4 out of 10 pain. It's more of a constant ache and soreness, like I've been moving heavy furniture all day. I don't suffer as much as I endure and cope, maybe?

God knows I'm not minimizing any of this. It's impossible to pretend for any length of time that I'm OK. It's just that the worst thing for me has never been about being too whiny; it's fear of being boring. It's hard to edit in realtime for more than a few minutes, so conversations tend to scramble my brain and I say whatever. It makes me a little uncomfortable. Like verbal incontinence. I sometimes just want to keep my mouth shut rather than embarrass myself. I'd prefer to backspace over most of my conversations and fix everything.

I'm in a dark place at the moment, no getting around it. It's not the bleak kind of darkness --it's the pissed off kind. It's easy for me in this country at this moment – we are in a war with incredibly stupid people and we're going to lose. There are too many of them.

But I can keep the news at arm's length for my sanity and health. I can't avoid the day-to-day awareness that ultimately I'm alone in this. I'm grateful for the people who have walked with me this entire time. There are many of them, and they sustain me. But as the lyric goes, Sometimes people leave you/Halfway through the wood. Lives get busy. My face isn't exactly on a bus. People forget.

So if you have a close friend or family member with a chronic illness that keeps them homebound and alone, don't be like that. There's my take-away.

Otherwise I'll keep my bullshit to myself until I'm cheerier.