OLD ME

I’m not good at New Year’s Resolutions.  I make resolutions all the time, and I’m relatively disciplined at keeping them: you know, the usual things like eat healthy and exercise more; less screen time and more reading. Try to write. But this year is different.  This year I want to be healthier, but not in the sense of salad instead of chips, water instead of wine.  This year I want to be healthier because I’ve just had two-and-a-half months of being ill.

 

I haven’t explained it before, apart from to my doctor, family and closest friends (and my school Principal, obviously!) but in mid-October I caught covid.  I got the delta variant and then developed secondary bronchitis a few days later.  I ended up having to attend the Covid Centre at my local hospital, where I was prescribed both antibiotics and an aggressive (but, thankfully, fairly brief) course of steroids, and where I was told that, had I not been double-vaccinated, I’d almost certainly have ended up admitted to hospital.  A week passed after my days of isolation ended, and I returned to work.  This is how it went:  arrive at work, drag myself through my teaching day and any meetings, duties or anything extra, delighted to be there, joyful at being in the classroom, but utterly exhausted and, I’ve been told, deathly pale.  Then return home, do the requisite bit of exercise and dinner/packed lunch preparation, then lie in bed for an hour until dinner was ready, desperately trying to sleep but able only to read; have dinner, deal with any ironing or similar chores, watch some tv, and return to bed, then lie awake half the night.  The breathlessness and wheezing returned with the cold night air, and a massive flare-up of my everyday arthritis pain set in.  I simply couldn’t sleep, and I felt worse in school each day.  In the background, I was trying to make sure my elderly Dad was safe, well and catered for, while keeping from him how I was myself; I was travelling to Belfast to visit him every weekend as usual.  My car became a place I associated with tears.  I’d burst into tears of pain and a feeling of being overwhelmed every day after school ended, and each time I got into it during a Belfast visit.  

 

Lest all this sound very self-pitying: I was determined to get well, and just wanted to get on with my life.  I was doing daily exercise as always, trying to recover strength; I was eating really healthy food, even though I didn’t feel like eating anything; I was loving being back at work and determined to keep going.  But one Sunday afternoon, a few weeks into November, as I was getting everything ready for another busy Monday, it all just crumbled.

 

I’d been for a long walk: I’d enjoyed it, but, as always post-covid, I’d found it more difficult than before.  I was tired, and aching all over.  Then I started coughing and fighting for breath and I couldn’t stop.  The room went into some kind of blurred focus, and I sat on my desk chair, just holding onto the arms, not sure what on earth was going on.  It was terrifying.  There and then, I felt pretty sure that being in a classroom that Monday, with a full teaching day, seemed pretty much out of the question.  Maybe if I got a day’s complete rest, I rationalised, I’d be ok on Tuesday… my lateral flow was negative, surely I was all right…

 

Next day, something miraculous happened: I got an emergency phone appointment with the GP whose opinion I trust most in our local practice.  She ordered numerous tests and told me what I really didn’t want to hear: ‘I’m pretty certain you’ve got long covid.’  Tests after tests after tests were followed up by what currently feels like an impossibility: a face-to-face appointment.  My bloods were ok, she said, other than a bit of post-viral depletion.  But my blood pressure and heart rate were dangerously elevated, and I was on the point of collapse.  She was signing me off work for at least a fortnight and I was being given betablockers to settle things down, plus more antibiotics for a lingering chest infection.  A week passed.  No better. I had become deeply anxious, and my mood was rather low.  At my next, now weekly phone review, I was told I now had a sinus and ear infection. After that came a deep lung infection. Then I had a fortnight of shingles, and some anti-viral tablets which made me very nauseous. Christmas Day brought an ear infection, and I didn’t need much red wine to make the room spin during Christmas lunch… 

 

I’m writing this on the ‘New Year’s Day observed’ holiday Monday- it seems to have been New Year’s Day for ages, feeling like the clichéd ‘month of Sundays’.  I’m due back at work on Wednesday, and tomorrow I’ll find out from my GP whether I’m allowed to go.  It’s a new year, but it feels very much like the old me:  I am bored to tears of frustration with the amount of pain I’m in, the level of utterly crushing exhaustion I suffer after the least exertion, the fact that I still have a cough, the fact that my ears still hurt and the dreadful headaches I seem to get every evening.  Oh: and the insomnia.  The insomnia is so tiresome that I wish it would put me to sleep.  We have recently had some unusually mild Christmas weather: I went for some walks by the sea and took some photos of our beautiful coastline.  What the photos don’t show is that I had to lie on the sofa afterwards for over an hour, reading and longing to feel better, on an everlasting loop.

 

I want to be healthier in 2022.  That will be about salad instead of chips, water instead of wine: some of the time at least.  But it also needs to be about recovery, and I just don’t know how long that’s going to take.  I so desperately want to go back to work.  I miss my students and my colleagues, and I love being in my classroom- it’s my second home.  But I have to be honest and admit, probably most of all to myself, that ‘being healthy’ could just take a little longer.  That it might not be ‘New Year, New You’ just yet.  

 

I’m waiting to discover what’s going to happen, when the New Year finally gets past the three-day New Year’s Day, with quite a lot of anxiety.  It has taken a lot to get this far.  The month of Sundays of three New Year’s Days has given me time to notice just how dreadful I still feel.  If I’m given the all-clear to return to work this week, I’ll do so with an attitude of cautious optimism but with a strong undertow of self-preservation.  I might not just drive myself as hard as I customarily tend to do: if I do that, I might crash.  If I’m not allowed to return just yet, I’ll continue my enforced personal lockdown with some work from home, because I couldn’t abandon my students and my school responsibilities completely.  

 

Either way, I want to try to write more in this blog in 2022, and I thought that a painfully honest account of what’s been going on might be a good place to start.  Reading this, if you’ve messaged me, emailed me, talked to me, sent me a funny joke or recommended a book or something on tv: thank you.  My friends and my close family are the reason I’ve got this far.

 

Let’s see if 2022 brings a renewed version of the old me sometime soon.