Recovery and Remembering

Reminiscing about my Long Covid journey

One of the most wonderful things about healing from chronic illness is that you forget. You forget how horrific it all was. You forget how much you wanted to be dead. You forget how excruciatingly difficult the smallest tasks used to be. You forget how sick you looked every time you saw yourself in the mirror.

Today, scrolling through photos from 2022-2024, I remembered.

There are no words to adequately describe how torturous those years were. I navigated anxiety and depression more intense than I even knew was possible to endure, horrific smell and taste distortions (parosmia) that led to a rapid 70 lb weight loss, nausea, migraines, mild POTS symptoms, exercise intolerance, insomnia, hair loss, bizarre bruising, sores, and other symptoms I can’t even remember.

But I am still here. I am still here.

Three and a half years have passed since my first Covid infection, and there are still some lingering symptoms that come and go. I am not 100% recovered, and I may never be. Can you imagine how deeply it hurts me when I see people dismiss the Covid-19 pandemic as some kind of pointless overreaction to a "common cold." Covid destroyed my life for nearly three years and nearly destroyed me entirely. I will never be the person I was before that nightmare. It changed me forever. How in the hell did I survive it?

In November of 2023, my children were performing “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” with our theatre group. At the time, I was thick in the darkest, most difficult part of my long Covid journey. It was a miracle I could even show up to my kids’ performances at all. After a Friday evening show, one of the moms I hadn’t yet become acquainted with (due to my illness) walked up to me with a smile. She introduced herself. She confessed she had been Facebook stalking me and that she had determined that we needed to be friends. We talked for a while, and I told her a bit about my health challenges. I confessed that I couldn’t be much of a friend at that point in my life because of how unpredictable my illness was. But she didn’t care about that. She stepped into my life when I was at my absolute worst, and she saw that I was a human worth investing in. She saw that a friendship with me was something worth reaching into the abyss of chronic illness to bring to life. I cannot even begin to tell you how healing that was for me. I was two years deep into Long Covid, and I felt like absolute shit. I felt like a useless burden to the people around me. I felt like I would never be able to do anything for anyone else ever again. But SHE saw that inside of me was a beautiful soul worth fighting for. She helped me stay alive at a time when staying alive was the absolute hardest thing I had ever done. And now she’s one of my closest friends.

When I think back at my Long Covid experience, and I wonder to myself how in the hell I survived it, the answer comes easily. My people. It was the love of my people that anchored me to life.

I am still here. To be completely honest, sometimes I still wish I wasn't. I still have some really dark days. But all I can do is push forward with gratitude that those waves of darkness only come a few times a month now instead of every day.

I can once again experience love, joy, excitement, peace, hope, fulfillment, contentment, creativity, the deliciousness of good food, and beautiful smells. These are things I feared I would never be capable of experiencing again.

Today, the world is is full of brokenness and pain. But it is also full of breathtaking beauty and joy. Thank you for standing with me through both.