Am I Done Yet? International Long Covid Awareness Day

Middle-aged white woman with blue hair wearing a teal-blue tshirt which has the text "Long COVID Awareness, March 15." She is outdoors with a blue sky behind her, some bare tree branches and a street-crossing sign.

Today is International Long COVID Awareness Day (see also the info at Solve/ME). I am literally wearing the t-shirt.

Wednesday was the 4 year anniversary of when I developed COVID. We in the Long COVID community sometimes call this our COVIDversary. Having never fully recovered, you could say I’ve been sick for 1,463 days now. That’s a lot. That’s also why I don’t post here much anymore. It’s not because I don’t have info to share, it’s because I always used to write posts in the evening after work, and I no longer have the energy to just chug along like an Energizer Bunny with poor boundaries, working non-stop because work is FUN! Something had to give, a LOT of somethings, and one of them was regular posts on this blog.

A little over a year ago I started making diary comics about my Long COVID experiences. I usually make these late at night laying in bed while I’m either trying to settle down to sleep or I’ve woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Here’s the one I made for my COVIDversary.

Day 1,461, Panel One: B/W stylized image shows a computer screen. Text in upper left corner says "Trigger Troubles." Search bar says "how many days since march 13 2020." A black text bar covers most of the image, "Today is one thousand four hundred and sixty-one days since I caught COVID." A word bubble in the lower right corner contains, "1,461. Wow."

Day 1,461, Panel Two: B/W stylized image shows a computer screen. Text in upper left corner says "Covid, 4 years on, a quick update." A black text bar covers the upper right corner, "That's four years. Exactly." Two word bubbles cover most of the rest of the image, "Global excess mortality has reached about thirty million. Wow." In the lower left corner, another black bar: "Eric Topol wrote about it today."

Day 1,461, Panel Three: B/W stylized image shows a pile of beads on a flat surface. Black text bars stutter across the image: "Today ..." "...it feels as it..." "...each day is a tiny bead formed of lead."

Day 1,461, Panel Four: B/W stylized image shows a surreal sky formed of squiggles and lines, blurred out around a bright spot in the center. I hint of branches appears in the lower left corner. A black square in the upper left corner contains, "They're so heavy." Three other black text bars stack alongside the far right: "I'm ..." "...so..." "...tired."

A few links — where my story started, someone else’s story who got sick about the same time as me, Ed Yong on what it feels like to actually listen to folk with Long COVID, and Eric Topol’s post highlighted in the comic. He does a really lovely job of staying on top of the Long COVID research and pulling out the highlights that seem to be most important.

PF Anderson/ETechLib: Undiagnosed, Days 1-2

Heather Hogan/Cattywampus: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better)

Eric Topol/Ground Truths: Covid, 4 years On

Ed Yong/NYTimes: Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist

AHRQ’s Unique Effort to Advance Care for People Living with Long COVID