There is a fundamental problem with our understanding of illness. It’s something the pandemic has highlighted. One of the things we never learn about the human body, until we have to, is that wellness and illness are not binary constructs. What we are seeing with Covid-19, as we have seen with viruses before, is the possibility of illness that has no cure or treatment: the kind of illness that doesn’t just go away. This is the illness that takes you to a new world: a world of chronic illness, and of living ‘with’.
I live with an energy limiting chronic illness. I still don’t know what led to it for sure, nearly ten years after first getting sick, but it’s likely it was post-viral. In 2011 I was signed off work. My body had almost stopped entirely. My GP took bloods and everything was proclaimed well. I was fine. I was healthy. Except I really wasn’t. He thought I had post-viral fatigue, told me to rest, which is fortunate. Days, weeks and months were spent: sleeping, dozing, napping. Gradually, and often only looking backwards, I could see some improvement. I’d make it out of bed, be able to wash, stand up for long enough to have a shower. I’d notice I had made it out of bed before it got dark and it was time to go back to bed again. I also noticed that none of this was linear progress. I couldn’t expect to be able to do tomorrow what I could do yesterday. I could not rely on my body in the way I had been able to before. I’d have to fumble in the dark each day to find out where the gaps were between what I could ask of my body and what it could offer. Each time I asked too much it withdrew further from me and I would have to wait for it to recover from being demanded too much of before enquiring again if, perhaps, I might make a telephone call, for example.
