Life Interrupted
Covid invaded my family shortly into the new year. If anyone tells you that Covid is an inconsequential sniffle, let me assure you that its effects can be long-lasting and, in the case of some, fatal.
It no longer makes the headlines, but are we deluding ourselves that the virus - now endemic - is also somehow more benign than in the early, scary days of the pandemic?
In my case, it struck with a very high temperature, and took a week in bed and a further week to recover. For our young and healthy daughter, the initial infection was relatively mild, but the secondary - fatigue, acute sore throat and laryngitis - has lasted and additional three weeks. However, for my parents, with whom we live, things turned out very differently.
My father caught Covid first. He became very ill with a severe sore throat and heavy, chesty cough. Several weeks later he developed pneumonia. It was touch and go. He lost 17lb in weight and we thought we might lose him too. Six weeks on and he is making a slow recovery. His appetite is good and he can walk a little, although he has Covid-head (post-viral fog) and temporality has left the station. Hopefully it will return.
But for my mother things were very different. While I was incapacitated, she nursed my father for a week before she, too, became ill, and she died suddenly and unexpectedly one night in mid-January.
Like previous epidemics that litter the pages of history, it is not just the stricken who feel the burden of disease. Since that first week in January, my husband and our older daughter have taken on the workload of those of us too ill to protest. The combined effect on my family alone has been to lose 36 weeks, or 180 working days, from our normal work schedule. Multiply that across the country and the potential economic and social impact of this highly contagious disease upon productivity becomes clear. If only productivity was our greatest concern.
I am not relating this to elicit sympathy, nor to explain my recent absence from social media, but to raise awareness that Covid has not left us and nor is it a mild disease. My daughter had no health complications, but was hit badly by the infection. My father - although an elderly gentleman in his late 80s - was used to walking 10,000 steps a day to his favourite cafe overlooking the sea, or treading the boards in our village panto. No, the reason I am writing this is because people and the government have become complacent. Few people wear masks, little care is taken to avoid taking coughs into public. Far too often we hear ‘it’s only a tickle’, when it is blatantly obvious the individual is in the full throes of an infection. It might only be a tickle for them, but to someone else it might change their life. Or end it.
Like so many other families, my life, and that of my family, will never be the same. My bright, vibrant mother died before she needed to, one of the unnamed victims of a virus nobody wants to remember.