As we land on Christmas holiday at the end of year two of the pandemic, I’m thinking about how we’ve arrived in a new era of the Covid pandemic with the advent of Omicron. I think I like it even less than the previous eras. With Omicron, we’re teetering on the edge of the “everyone’s going to get Covid” line if we’re not there already. It’s an interesting place to be as someone who already has had Long Covid for almost two years. With frenzying predictions about millions more cases and high transmissibility, more people than ever are getting Covid. Even those who have been “doing it right” this whole time. Well-resourced viruses don’t care about who “did it right”, unfortunately.
Having the particular vantage point of 1) already having contracted asymptomatic Covid, 2) thinking it was no big deal, 3) working through it until my body quit on me, and then 4) becoming disabled by Long Covid and losing my job… here’s a starter list of 5 things I think you should know as you prepare to get Covid yourself.
- You need to rest. Do not fuck around with this one. You need to rest way way way more than you think you need to for longer than you think you need to- like months longer. You need to sit down. You need to be a loaf who sleeps late, takes naps, daydreams, lays down, sends the kids to the grandparents, lets the dishes pile up, and orders delivery food. You need to postpone your return to exercise for sure and maybe even your return to work or school. It might be true that you feel great and it might also be true that some of your most debilitating symptoms won’t show up for 4 to 8 weeks after acute infection. Some people in the ME/CFS community told me to focus on rest and recuperation for up to a year after viral illness to help ward off possible post-viral ME/CFS. The importance of rest cannot be overstated and capitalism will demand you dismiss this need- do not oblige it.
- Listen carefully to your body. Your body is your compass and being able to discern its messages will become critical should you start to notice lingering symptoms, onset of new symptoms, or persisting fatigue. At the start, it’ll seem vague, hard to pin down, ebbing and flowing. You’ll wonder if it’s actually happening or if you’re just being lazy (spoiler, Laziness Does Not Exist). You’ll feel tired and maybe achy or maybe your heart races when you lay down or maybe you can’t stop sweating or maybe you feel like your brain doesn’t work anymore. Maybe you’ll see your doctor about it, maybe not. Some people will tell you to start tracking your symptoms and that might help you but it’s also very exhausting. For me, after many different attempts to track my symptoms (I’ve tried the Bearable app, Dr. Alison Best’s activity log, and my own journaling method), I finally found that listening to my body gave me just as much insight as any patterns I spotted while manually tracking things. When my heart rate climbs or I get short of breath, I reduce exertion immediately. When my faces flushes and all my muscles start twitching, I know I’m way past my capacity. When my mind can’t attend to any single thing I try, I know I just need to resign to taking a nap. The more you can attune to your own somatic experiences and give your body what it needs in response, the more you and your body can trust each other. This will become especially true if and when you seek medical attention for your symptoms; not every doctor will believe your reports. You’ll need deep reciprocal trust with your body to steady against the doubts.
- Lean into feelings of pleasure, relief, and soothing where you can find them. Even so-called “mild” Covid can be really debilitating, especially if your symptoms linger. Loss of taste and smell strip all the pleasure associated with food and can create food aversions, nausea, or feeding difficulty. Aches, pain, and post-exertional malaise don’t have to be severe to wear you down. The fatigue is crushing. Plus there’s the disgusting night sweats, the swollen ankles and hands, tinnitus, internal tremors, and the random rancid smells. Long Covid is a slog of discomfort with very little relief so you have to snatch it up when you find it. Attuning to small experiences of pleasure, relief, and satisfaction in your body as a way to pendulate away from discomfort and back again will make everything a little more tolerable. Over my own long haul, this has included regular cannabis use, eating a LOT of Cheezits as well as a lot of veggies cooked in bacon (both of which I actually enjoy without taste or smell), sleeping a lot- at all times of the day, acupuncture, a lot of Diet Coke, regular masturbation, and a central line of comfort television like Supernatural. Prioritize some amount of pleasure, relief, or soothing for yourself daily.
- Don’t push it. This sort of circles back to number 1 but it’s also about learning your limitations and how they may be dynamic and change often. Whether or not you’ve recovered or are long-hauling, your body has been through something big and it’s not the time for pushing beyond your capacity. You’ll feel these moments. Moments where you feel like you could or should do just one more thing: a few more dishes, an extra stop on the way home, an extra push toward a goal. I recommend you ignore that urge as often as you can. Pushing yourself is exactly what will take you from the road to recovery straight to long-term disability. And this limit changes- what you could do yesterday is likely not what you can do today. It’s actually the hallmark of post-viral illness: post-exertional malaise is a delayed response to overexertion. This means walking your dog or vacuuming your house today could leave you knocked on your ass and stuck in bed tomorrow. Don’t push it; listen to what your body tells you. For myself, my health is worse now than it was a year ago even though many of my early symptoms have dissipated and I’m not the only one with that experience. Post-viral illnesses like Long Covid and ME/CFS can get progressively worse over time when we continue to over-exert ourselves- sometimes without even realizing it.
- Ask for what you need. Actively seek support from your community. Join a Long Covid support group (I’m in the huge one on Facebook but BodyPolitic also has one on Slack). Request medical leave from your job if you can. Have your partner do the grocery shopping. Ask a comrade to deliver you a meal. Crowdfund your rent. Maybe you only need that support for a couple weeks or maybe Long Covid becomes your long-term reality. Either way, the stark truth is that we are in the middle of a mass disabling event and, at least in the US, the government has historically done very little to support disabled people. It seems likely, as disabled people have been telling us, that we all will be left to care for each other.
We live in a new world in the era of Omicron. It’s a world that requires us to slow down, rest more, care for ourselves and each other deeply and robustly. Let’s greet this new world.
[…] is where community care work comes in. In my last post, I urged people with covid to ask for what they need so they can prioritize rest. But if […]