Journal: Fuel for the Pyre
Author’s note: consisting primarily of my personal writing, Journal features are published irregularly here on NIDC. Want more? Click here to subscribe to Nina Illingworth Dot Com today.
My Secret Unlife
My first, and by far my worst experience with catching Covid occurred very early on in the pandemic. One night in early 2020 I went to sleep feeling “a bit feverish and unwell”, and the next morning I got out of bed feeling dizzy, then completely collapsed on my way to the bathroom. To this day, I simply cannot remember how I got up from the floor, got to the bathroom, and then got back into bed; the entire experience is a hazy blur. What I do remember is that I remained sick for roughly ten full days and nights with an absolutely dreadful illness nobody understood, and society around me was only beginning to acknowledge.
The situation was terrifying, but not as terrifying as the eighteen or so months that came afterwards. Long after I’d shaken off the immediate effects of the virus, I was still plagued by mysterious symptoms of an illness that in some ways felt like a milder version of Covid, and in others bore no similarity to the actual virus at all. No matter how much I slept or rested, I felt exhausted all the time. I would experience sudden and long lasting bouts of dizziness. My breath was short, and even brief periods of physical activity would leave me winded for far longer than normal afterwards. Muscles I didn’t even know I was using would ache for days at a time. Periodically my heart would race for no particular reason, and this would be accompanied by a buzzing feeling in my chest, shoulders, and neck. I developed headaches featuring wildly variable degrees of pain; sometimes mild, sometimes so awful I would have to lie in the dark and physically close my eyes for hours.
Worse still, however, were the mental symptoms; I lost the ability to focus my mind. I couldn’t read and I couldn’t write, which meant I couldn’t work. I experienced a noticeable decline in both my short and long term memory, leaving me regularly unable to finish sentences and converse with friends and loved ones as I grasped for things I knew but could not recall, even as I felt the knowledge was sitting on the forward edge of my mind. At times I became withdrawn and sullen, frustrated because my brain – the organ I consider most central to my personality – simply wasn’t always working in the ways I was used to it functioning. I also experienced prolonged periods of depression and paranoia, but whether these were symptoms of a lingering virus, or psychological responses to losing my ability to think properly, I cannot be certain. Overall, I became as one professional sportswriter suffering from what we now call Long Covid described, “a dumber, angrier version of myself.”
This went on for so long that I began to lose hope of ever recovering; indeed to this very day, some of these symptoms remain with me, coming and going as my overall health improves and declines. I was unable to receive consistent medical care, and what care I could access provided few assurances, because no medical professional could tell me what was wrong with me, and some of them seemed to believe I was merely profoundly depressed. As someone who does battle depression every day of her life, I knew that they were wrong, because while whatever I was suffering from didn’t help my mental state, it was most definitely not the depression I already knew like the back of my hand. Yet with no doctor able to tell me what was wrong with me, over time I began to doubt myself, and engage in an unhealthy amount of self-loathing. I asked myself over and over why I couldn’t just “be better” and “get over it” even though I knew that I wasn’t choosing to be a shell of myself, and something was medically wrong with me.
My first actual breakthrough ultimately came from knowledge provided by other sufferers of Long Covid. I was posting about my symptoms and how long they’d lasted on social media, when one of the people who follows my account said “it sounds like you might be a long hauler.” I didn’t know what that meant, but a few internet searches exposed me to testimony from multiple people whose lived experiences resembled mine, and who had also “recovered from Covid” only to find themselves in the grip of something that seemed far worse than Covid for a very long time afterwards. I was, suddenly, to put it succinctly, no longer alone and in the dark.
Eventually, news of this “Long Covid” illness even started being printed in mainstream publications, featuring medical professionals providing actual evidence of the same lingering, debilitating condition I was suffering from. For a few achingly short moments, my heart soared; finally someone besides my loved ones was acknowledging that this was real, and if it’s real that means society was going to work towards fixing it! I didn’t know when or how, but for the first time in months I felt as though there would soon enough be a road back for me to become the person I was before Long Covid took the best parts of myself away from me. Briefly, ever so briefly, I had hope.
Of course as other people suffering from Long Covid will already know, my hope was misguided and didn’t last very long. There would be no medical breakthroughs, Pig Empire governments would not ride to the rescue, and Long Covid sufferers would be largely ignored as an “inconvenient reality” that must be kept on the margins of the important discussions about how fast we can get people vaccinated so everyone can go back to work. Despite all the medical evidence, and thousands of testimonials from people just like myself, society at large decided to continue pretending Long Covid wasn’t real. Which isn’t necessarily to say that the world actively denied the existence of Long Covid, but rather that the larger establishment simply refused to talk about it, or recognize it as an important problem that must be addressed. Many doctors would not diagnose it, employers refused to recognize it as a disability, and discussion of the problem in the media was reduced to a trickling afterthought, typified by a throwaway line or two in articles about the Covid pandemic itself – “oh yes, and there’s Long Covid too, but what’s really important here is knowing when we can all go back to movie theaters!”
At first, I could not understand this effective conspiracy of silence. How could society and its ruling class establishment acknowledge both the medical evidence, and the lived experience of perhaps millions of people suffering from Long Covid, only to decide to stop talking about it while effectively pretending it didn’t exist? If we know that the virus could also inflict crippling disabilities on even those who had recovered from it, why wasn’t Long Covid an important part of the discussion about Covid in our society? Where was this cognitive dissonance coming from, and how was it being tolerated?
Over time, as the monstrous reality of the Pig Empire’s long term response to an ongoing Covid pandemic became clear, I came to understand that when the rich sociopaths that truly own our society decided that capitalism itself was too important to be interrupted by a silly little thing like the lives of workers and consumers, the very existence of Long Covid became the elephant in the room that could not be acknowledged. After all, if your plan is to “let ‘er rip” while telling folks a deadly virus is no different from a common cold, the very existence of people who did not and could not recover from the after effects of that virus would represent a highly inconvenient counter to your propaganda. You might be able to convince workers to harm themselves in the short term for your profit, but that deal gets decidedly worse if they know they could become disabled for months, years, or even permanently. Thus the price of pretending everything could go “back to normal”, even as the Covid virus raged around the world countless times, required ignoring the existence of Long Covid and Long Covid sufferers. We now know that this is a price our governments and the rich people who own them are happy to make society at large pay while the billionaires benefitting from this capitalist death cult take every precaution they deny us to protect themselves from Covid and the possibility of developing Long Covid.
At this point some of you reading this essay about my personal experiences with Long Covid might be tempted to start thinking I’ve gone off the deep end, and what I’m describing is a conspiracy theory. Your mind might cry out, “that can’t be true, they would never get away with something that evil!” and I can’t blame you. If I hadn’t lived it and watched this entire shitshow unfold in real time, I might not believe it were possible either, so I’d just like you to ask yourself “is it really a conspiracy theory if our ruling class establishment is conducting all of this in right out in the open?” After all, we’re all adults here and most of us recognize that the purpose of any system is not always what it claims, but rather what it does. Can anyone credibly deny that telling people we’re “back to normal” and sending the labor class to work in the middle of an ongoing Covid pandemic hasn’t exposed countless more people to the risk of Long Covid while making capitalists literal fucktons of money?
On the subject of intent, has this ruling establishment not already risked the very lives of immunocompromised people and the elderly in the face of the still existent Covid virus itself by ending mask mandates and forcing us all back to work for the profit of the few? Does that same ruling class establishment not insist that you must send your still-vulnerable children, whether they’re sick or not, to schools that behave like gigantic petri dishes for the virus, so that you and your fellow parents can labor to make other people, particularly wealthy people, even richer amid an ongoing pandemic? On a tangentially related subject, are these not the same politicians and billionaires currently burning fossil fuels and boiling the planet for profit even though we know continuing to do so will likely kill billions of people? Are you at all sure that their “intent” in ignoring the virus and allowing it to rage across the globe for capitalism is benevolent? Because I’m certainly not. Clearly, their careless napkin math showed extra profit over extended time if a certain percentage of surplus-to-capital population were to perish prematurely, and that was the end of the discussion as far as the ruling class was concerned.
By now you might be entertaining the idea that our ruling class establishment would never get away with such a thing. To this I must regrettably reply that the capitalists running our society have already gotten away with it. Full-throttle capitalism has resumed; society has already moved on from caring about Covid or even acknowledging the existence of Long Covid. We’ve already gone back to work, we’ve already sent our kids back to school, and our new normal is already risking all of our health and lives. There are of course some complications; a sick politician here, some permanently disabled athletes or entertainers there, and yes, billionaires now have to protect themselves from exposure to Covid by means they will not allow the rest of us, but, more or less, the capitalists have already won. You may quibble with this observation by reminding me that eventually someone is going to have to pay for the care of the millions of people affected by Covid and Long Covid, but I would simply counter by asking you who it is that will pay that cost? It’s certainly not looking to be the billionaires and capitalists running this death cult. It might be our governments, eventually, but those costs will be paid by taxing the very labor class that’s already being forced to risk their lives and wellbeing for capitalism and capitalists in a pandemic. The beauty of the “back to normal” strategy of not dealing with Covid at all, for rich capitalists, is that it works by privatizing the benefits (their profits), and socializing the costs (our suffering and the recovery from it.) And of course that assumes that Pig Empire governments are even going to bear some of the cost at all; in a place like America, where socialized healthcare is functionally non-existent, the vast majority of the fallout from exposure to Covid and Long Covid will be born directly by the workers and their families and communities.
And now we’ve reached the portion of the essay where I’m supposed to provide you with hope and a course of action; perhaps by telling you my own inspiring tale of recovery from Long Covid. The awful truth however is that my supposed recovery is neither inspiring, nor complete. I still intermittently suffer from numerous symptoms of Long Covid, and I suspect it’s my tenacious desire to carry on in spite of the monstrous society and culture I exist in that allows me to cope with my diminished capacity. Like many folks suffering from Long Covid, I take regular doses of Zinc and Vitamin D, but that only eases the symptoms slightly. After years of struggle, I believe I’ve mostly retrained my brain to work around the damage caused to it by Long Covid, and at the same time adapted to the regular bouts of physical pain, diminished breathing capacity, and declining health. Given how difficult this has been for me, I struggle to imagine how much harder my method of “recovery” would be for those whose Long Covid symptoms and complications are worse than mine, and I suspect that for many people in that situation, recovery born of spiteful tenacity and lowered expectations is simply not possible.
All of which is to say that what my experiences with Long Covid have primarily taught me is that the best cure for Long Covid is never catching the Covid virus that sometimes causes it. Not at all, ever. This in turn implies that people should be taking precautions to protect themselves from exposure to Covid, but that is becoming increasingly more difficult in a capitalist society that’s “returned to normal” and seems hell bent on forcing you to assume the maximum amount of risk in the face of an ongoing pandemic, for the benefit of capitalists and the billionaire class. The coercive methods of by which exposure is forced on us take myriad forms, including social ostracization, forcing you to work in unsafe environments so you don’t starve, legally compelling you to send your kids to schools taking no precautions against the virus, and even the ongoing criminalization of wearing masks to protect yourself from exposure. We can all keep advising each other to “keep safe” until we’re blue in the face, but that’s not going to change the fact that a society run for the benefit of monstrous billionaires who keep themselves safe, but are happy to risk your life for profit, is actively working on making it impossible for us to do so without facing extreme coercion and repercussions. To truly keep ourselves safe from Covid, and Long Covid, will require us to change Pig Empire society itself, against the will of the people who own and operate it at the moment, and I’m not at all certain the people around me have the appetite for the degree of struggle against the capitalist order that will take. As far as I can tell, most folks are quite happy to pretend everything is “back to normal”, while ignoring the fact that they’re rolling the dice with their own quality of life every time they leave the house, just like they ignore the existence of Long Covid, and folks suffering from it, to facilitate that fantasy.
I guess ignorance truly is bliss, unless of course you die from it.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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