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Long Covid Sucks. No, Really, it Does, and if You haven’t got it by Now, You Probably Will.

Saturday, 28 October 2023  |  Halla Rempt

Long Covid. If you are at all conversant with C20 twenties and thirties detective novels, you’ll know all about the invalids, the incapabables, the chronically ill. That was the flu. Though it never is the protagonist who is suffereing, it’s always someone else.


Well, this time it’s me. The protagonist of my own life.

I got covid when I got jabbed, early 2022. In the vaccination centre. Not because of the vaccine, but because, for some reason, everyone was expected to sit down, in a perspex cubicle for fifteen minutes, unmasked.

Of course, as you know, the covid virus remains infectuous for six hours and airborne, no droplets needed, in any area an infected person has been breathing for about ten minutes.

And no vaccine is immediately effective.

These were incubation incubators.

So I got sick. Really sick. For two weeks I had a horrible fever and was completely bed-ridden.

The aftermath is worse though.

I noticed my cognition was going down: I was (and am) getting dumber. Concentration powers going down. Getting pukey, and after that, shitty, regularly. Heart rates getting up into realms no blood pressure measurement machine could manage to measure. Having to lie down for days.

People wished me well. Wished me to get better soon.

Sorry people, that doesn’t work: this is like M.E., and you don’t get better from that. (In fact, Long Covid might, after all, have provided a pathology that explains M.E.)

Better soon? Bad days are getting increasingly frequent, and while I’l very good on good days, I cannot predict when good days will happen.

There you have it… Puke. Runny shit. Lying down all day in a darkened room. Brain Fog. Every little thing you manage to do is an achievement. Heart palpiations. Doctors telling you you’re malingering. Good days when you’re doubting you are actually sick getting outnumbered by days you cannot even eat, only drink water.

(And don’t ask me about how it’s when your nose if full of the smell of bin liner filled with the intestines of two-weeks dead animals.)

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Hey… Masks are the one thing that work.