The Half Full Glass of Long Haul Covid

A big thing happened: I can read books again! I haven't tried philosophy yet, but I have started to read complex sci-fi novels. I finished Seth Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I had abandoned when I got sick, in thirty minute installments. Then, on Monday I started Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, which I read more or less normally without developing headache or fatigue. I say 'more or less' because I didn't read either with pen in hand and so without my more customary half an eye on a possible Digression. That is to say, despite many temptations,* I didn't have the intense interior dialogues with them I would ordinarily have. (Yes, I need to scribble in the margins of a book in order to have my best interior conversations!)+ But I was fully immersed in the narrative. 

So compared to my unfolding long haul baseline (here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here) the glass is definitely half full. In addition some other non-trivial symptoms have been reduced in severity. I average now one lost day to headache per week. I even had a ten day stretch that made me hope it was completely gone, but that was premature. On average I sleep better; the proportion of good nights vs bad nights has become favorable. (The effects of melatonin are finally noticeable when I awake in the middle of the night; I now mostly fall back asleep.) And I am physically much more active. But this also brings me face to face with my body's real limitations now.

My son's day-camp was moved to a new location. It is 1,2 miles in each direction. The route there is down, the return is uphill. I do this twice a day. It's pure joy because I get to engage with my son as his dad again, and not just as somebody to avoid bothering. At no point am I out of breath or do my legs feel tired. But it does predictably generate the characteristic 'head fatigue' I have tried to describe before. It also creates the kind of fatigue I associate with the aftermath of day-long hikes, but without any endorphins or sense of achievement. So, in effect I still spend most of the day in bed (but instead of watching kung fu, I am reading again). The good news is that he goes back to school on Monday, and that is a third of the distance. 

In the previous paragraph I also hinted at another symptom that has not disappeared. I am still highly irritable in conversations with more than one person, and I get exhausted by phone conversations. So, dinners with my whole family are challenging. 

I have disliked most confident optimistic responses by people who tried to wish me well and encourage me. I know they came from a good place. But even so, I dislike being offered hope that is not sensitive to my particular circumstances (and ungrounded in solid evidence). For all I know the previous sentence might be a sign of clinical depression or resolute anti-religious aesthetic sensibility.  But the fact that I can read books again, and manifestly enjoy doing so, does inspire hope that I may recover some cognitive skills whose absence were grounds for quiet despair. Either way, in virtue of reading the solitude of my days has been alleviated because I have good company, again. 

 

 

*The title of Martine's book echoes a passage -- duly quoted at the start of the novel -- that has fascinated me, too (recall here; here).

+Both books are second novels (in an unfolding series), and as it happens, they both cleverly thematize the complex relationship between interior dialogues and the reading of novels. (They also both involve strong female characters, who confront the nature of empire.)

Comments

[dmf]

" But even so, I dislike being offered hope that is not sensitive to my particular circumstances"
not likely a symptom of depression more likely an understandable anger at the denial of your suffering married with the irritability you mentioned which is common among ill and sleep-deprived folks.