My partner and I both recently got Covid. We were both ill by mid-April, and we are both still exhausted. This week, they seemed to relapse, and yesterday, so did I. Getting out of bed in the morning was not even an option.
It’s easy to forget that even a mild case of this is serious. Certainly, based on the public conversation and health guidelines, I did not expect to be sick this long. So we are both feeling a bit frightened right now to still be sick.
It turns out, it’s not really abnormal. I was digging around for information about long covid this morning, and found this NPR article about “medium” covid. It made me feel a lot better about what’s happening with me and my partner.
I guess the other thing I want to call out here is the connection to American work culture and our deeply Puritan roots. I felt terrible yesterday, but I kept feeling like I should be over this by now and was just being lazy. I even tried to work from bed for a little while, but it was just impossible.
As if I have any control over what an illness does to me. I’ve no doubt that this is part of why we’re not talking about what a “mild” form of this disease is really like. Thanks, Puritans, for breaking us.