Six Years

A piece landed in my inbox this morning from epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina -- Your Local Epidemiologist on Substack -- marking six years since the pandemic began. She started writing it with a baby strapped to her chest at her dining room table. I read it thinking about where I was six years ago.

I remember those days with a baby on my chest, walking around town, after my son was born back in the late 80s.

Then decades later, February 9, 2020, before most people had heard the word "coronavirus," I got sick. Very sick. One of the earliest cases in Washington State and in America.

Nobody called it Covid, or later Long Covid yet because nobody had a name for it. There was just the illness, and then the not-getting-better, and then the slow terrible realization that something had changed in ways that were hard to explain and harder to prove.

I kept telling family and friends that first time that I was sick with a virus, but it was bizarre. Like nothing I had ever experienced. They told me, “it’s just the flu, hang in there!”

But I almost died. My later research pointed out that my doctor having me on a daily dose of 80mg aspirin (something now not suggested without actual medical reasons so he had me stop), may have saved my life.

More than once I almost died, when I caught it again, 2 years later. Four times overall. Lessening in intensity with each new occurrence.

Jetelina notes that six years in, Long Covid remains poorly understood, that millions are still living with it, and that there are still no proven treatments. That lands differently when you've been one of those millions. Not with bitterness -- more with a kind of tired recognition. The science caught up enough to name it. It hasn't caught up enough to fix it.

What I remember most from those early months, those first 18 months of Long Covid, wasn't the physical symptoms, though those were real and relentless. It was the cognitive fog of long covid.

Before that the exhaustion from a low level of oxygen in my blood with the initial infection.

The sense that the person doing the thinking wasn't quite the same person who'd been doing it before. That's a hard thing to write about and a harder thing to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. I tried anyway.

I brought everything I had to that book -- my background as a technical writer and researcher, my psychology training, my determination to be accurate when so much of what was circulating wasn't.

The pandemic created an information environment so polluted that several distribution platforms recently blocked Covid-related ebooks entirely, including mine, on sight. Blanket policy. Didn't matter what was actually in them. My ebook is still available on Amazon however.

What mattered to me was a note from a reader who spent eighteen years working in epidemiology. She called it an excellent resource. That meant more than any algorithm's judgment.

Six years is a long time. Long enough to gain some perspective, not long enough to fully close the door. If any of this resonates with where you've been -- or where someone you love still is -- I wrote a book about it, about my experiences and about the research I came across. All this after time I spent in a long covid Facebook group where I discovered, regardless the nightmare I had lived through, there were others out there who put my experiences to shame. They gave me perspective and I wish them well, hoping they made it through at least as well as I somehow had.

Suffering "Long Covid" is available on Amazon.