STAT News: Long Covid feels like a gun to my head

[SNT Gatchaman]

Long Covid feels like a gun to my head
Rachel Hall-Clifford, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of global health, human health, and sociology at Emory University in Atlanta

This all resonates.

As a medical anthropologist working in global health, I thought I understood the despair of poor health. I didn’t.

Like many of my global health colleagues, I love a good adventure and don’t mind flirting with danger a little. I’ll go anywhere and talk to anyone. I once talked a Guatemalan street gang out of harming my small research team as they held a Kalashnikov to our heads during a robbery. It was scary, but I didn’t fear for my life. I knew it wasn’t the end of my story. But I have thought that long Covid might be: At its worst, I wrote letters to my children in fear that I wouldn’t survive the night.

Though my world has gotten small, and I’m not able to travel for my work as I once did, most days I feel like I just got off a long-haul flight and live in a permanent state of jet lag. I have one of those pill organizers stuffed full of medications and supplements that I hope will help at least a little. (I still struggle to reconcile my self-identity with this new reality.)

I admit I am scared. This is not a funny story I will tell colleagues over drinks later. There’s no gangland drug lord to negotiate with this time. Instead, I spend a lot of my time lying in the dark (I’m here now, even as I type this) negotiating with god and science to make me — and all of us suffering with long Covid and other post-viral illnesses — better. It’s surprisingly been the short periods when I have felt better that are the most upsetting, as they highlight how terrible I feel most of the time.

So I fake it. I need the pretense of being my old, fearless self. I need to discuss interesting things with colleagues and teach and run my lab. I need to take the snacks to soccer and help my kids with homework. That’s what makes me who I am, even as I playact a poor facsimile of my healthy self that requires hours (sometimes days) of recovery time afterwards.

I will continue to bargain with the universe to get to live the life I have worked to build for myself. I want that for everyone. My work in global health has shown me both the fragility of life but also the value of fighting for everyone’s right to a full and healthy life.