What I hate about long COVID is the bouts of fatigue, brain
fog, the feeling that I’m out of step with the universe. I get momentary bursts
of energy that allow me to get some writing done but damn, when the fatigue
kicks in, all I can do is sleep. That’s all I did yesterday, getting up only to
pee, smoke, eat, and drink half a beer.
Vivid dreams—snuggling with college-age baristas, arguing
with the robot driving my car—dumped me into a morning that had no internet.
Great, first time in days that the fog feels lifted and I have to deal with my
ISP. Once I got my internet back up, I laid back down again, hoping for more
baristas. I was back up by noon and it was then that I felt like I could
finally step up and be alive again.
It was my sixty-first birthday when I got hit with COVID and
it was the first two weeks of my life, and next month, and next year. Thirteen
months later, I got hit again, worse, there were several times during that
episode where those around me said I needed to go to the hospital. After
sweating and shivering, coughing until I puked, sleeping twenty hours straight,
I emerged from nearly two weeks of that with barely enough energy to sit up at
my desk and work. Every day was spent awaiting clocking out and going back to
bed.
As I said, with some exceptions, it has been that way for almost
three years. It’s almost impossible to get motivated for anything. Part
of my morning was spent looking for places to camp that didn’t involve two hours
of driving, until I considered that I used to drive three and four hours to get
to trees and no desert.
Since COVID, everything feels like a monumental effort, as though gravity has doubled and I’ve passed the event horizon.
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