Long Haul Covid: Fatigue, It’s Not Being Tired
Fatigue is not being tired.
After writing about what I eat with Long Covid – the first bit of organized writing I’ve done in 5 months – I spiraled into a dark fatigue tunnel. I paid for the cognitive exertion of a 7 minute read with 96 hours of time and physical discomfort.
What does the discomfort feel like?
It’s something I’d never felt before covid. It’s a new experience where the heaviness of my limbs overpower and my mind no longer decides what I can do. There is no stepping out but rather only a trudging through the thick black dark tar – hopefully momentary – reality. Completely depleted, stripped of all energy, my body limp with flesh and bone exhaustion. There is nothing shallow or surface level. It is like the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean – pressurized and silent and still. Able to hear my heart beating against my chest with my burning eyes shut, there are glimpses of luminescence – momentary reminders that in stillness and pain there is discovery.
The fatigue experience starts at the top. My head feels like a bowling ball getting turkeys — my neck barely working, making necessary hydration feel like a task I’d rather push off til tomorrow. Communication is not an option, feeling delirious because of the pressurized full face aches. A feeling that thick lava and wet sand are slowly crawling through my skin. Simultaneously, pain travels aimlessly up and down my legs and arms — over stimulating my body with new levels of somatic unease every few moments, wiping sleep off the table.
There is only acceptance, no running or escaping. No distraction. It is my home — with unfamiliar revisiting company of over-sensory discomfort. I have no energy to speak or to cry — so in it that there is no way to express or to release (since that is a step out of presence and past observation) the overpowering sensations besides occasional deep breathes that leave me even more breathless.
There is a softness in the stripping away because there is nothing else but the moment of fatigue, mixed with the most honest feelings. No other options, must get through to the other end of the tunnel. Can only choose to follow it, be fully present in it – a channel to going in deeper. Laying with a feeling as if back at the first week of covid and not my 5th month. Time ceases and my body has no recollection of ever having energy.
It’s a sharp softness, I am learning slowly how to swim in it, no floating, it’s not passive. It’s like a broken wave-pool, a rough ocean, a wild river, with thick heavy walls that continuously hit my body over and over again crashing down, fully feeling the opaque weight of liquid.
This lapse was on a full moon – the tides of my body being pushed and pulled as I lay in fetal position holding myself for hours in the dark, secretly hoping this cemented stillness will offer relieve in some precious future moments. In the meantime doing what I can: filling the slow seconds by actively and simply loving myself as I patiently explore and wait for this wave of fatigue to eventually wash over.
Feel me? Sending a hug and a meditation