Long Covid Probably Happened To Someone And Maybe It Happened To Me But Who Really Knows

Did you know that your body can forget when it should exhale? If you cough long enough, hard enough and often enough, your diaphragm gets twitchy and exhales upon the slightest notice that you might be about to cough. Unfortunately, a lot of things look like that: when you’re about to breathe, when you’re breathing, when you’ve finished breathing, when you’re talking, when you’re sitting down, when you’re standing up. So your diaphragm keeps on relaxing and no air can make its way into your lungs and it feels like air’s squeezing out of you and you can’t breathe and you’re suffocating and it happens every minute of every day for months, perhaps years before you finally recover.

Unfortunately for me, that’s what happened after I fell ill four years ago during the height of COVID. I never found out if it was COVID or not. The symptoms didn’t seem right, and the crummy tests I took were negative, but maybe they were wrong.

Regardless, I was laid low by this mystery disease for a month. I couldn’t talk, because I was hacking my lungs out. I couldn’t sleep because I was hacking my lungs out. I couldn’t breathe because I was hacking my lungs out. Finally, I recovered. Then one week later, I promptly fell ill again for another two weeks. For months afterwards, I couldn’t breathe right.

On top of that, for years afterwards I found myself guaranteed to fall ill again for a few days if I go out in the wind and rain in anything less than a waterproof cocoon. How ill? Well, about as bad as a normal flu the first couple of times. Lately, it’s nothing more than a sniffle and what feels like a light hangover. Or what I imagine a hangover would be like, since I don’t drink. Somehow I wound up with a demon but no bottle.

Anyway.

The doctors, naturally, couldn’t do anything. “Oh yeah, that lung thing. It happens, just wait for it to go away in a couple of weeks. Oh, it’s been months? Eh, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Or “Oh, it seems you have a flu. You’re getting them a lot? Bad luck buddy. Take some pain-killers.” “Perhaps it’s your weight?”. One doctor suggested I wasn't getting a new illness every time I went out. Instead, it was the same illness, or perhaps a learned response.

Apparently these sorts of symptoms, if not quite so intense, are common for post-viral syndromes, including Long Covid. Which makes sense. It’s a virus like any other. Why wouldn’t there be some poor folks who get a post-viral syndrome and suffer from air hunger, and get flu-like symptoms after minor physical stress.

Admittedly I’ve heard people say long covid has sapped their intelligence or agency. Which doesn’t match my experience. But chronic fatigue is another common symptom of post-viral syndromes. So I’m inclined to think Covid did cast a long shadow, maybe even on me, but who really knows on how many.