Red recovery

Today’s one of those days I wake up to recovery in the red, according to my Whoop. It even asks me if I feel the same, and I appreciate that—what my tracker tells me and how I feel often need to be considered in tandem, to get a better sense of how I really am.

(An aside: for chronically ill people it’s often frustrating to hear, “You look well!” Partly because sometimes we feel anything but well, and partly because it is often said with an undertone of, “I don’t see what’s so sick about you.” So it might help to instead say something like, “You look well, but how do you feel today?”)

As far as red days go, this isn’t too bad. I managed to head into office and was fairly productive during the meeting, and even picked up some lunch before heading home and doing a bit more urgent work. My head feels hazy and I am moving slowly and I feel the drowsiness around my eyes, but at least I’m not too nauseated today, nor light-headed. While on my way back, I also thought about how there is so much to feeling “low energy” that people who are we’ll never have to ever think about. And as someone who dips in and out of being well, I’ve also not had the head space or energy to write it out, but here’s trying to jot down some of it, if only for myself.

I have found that Long Covid makes me a lot more sensitive to very “normal” stimuli, and my body’s reaction to them is sometimes a lot stronger than a regular person, and at times simply over the top. So in my worst months, I found I didn’t have confidence enough to drive, and today I recalled why. Driving requires attention to many things at once, and it’s basically a series of continuous multitasking: look out for traffic lights, vehicles, pedestrians. Know which pedal to step on and when. Turn on windshield wipers if it’s raining, but turn them off if the swiping motion becomes a distraction, more than the gathering raindrops are a distraction. Look out for speeding vehicles. Check blind spot. Slow down behind slow-moving vehicles.

In my case, being “low energy” means everything is slower—I find myself knocking into things at home more, bumping into corners, finding in an instance I can’t tell immediately where I am or what I was in the middle of. Every little daily activity feels more demanding, and I also feel it in my breath: it feels hard to catch my breath, even if I’m not actually doing much. I space out more easily, and my brain is cloudy. On low energy days, I feel like I’m jet-lagged and also have the flu, and it’s 11pm on a packed work day and I had dinner with friends in a crowded restaurant (despite my jet lag and flu cos that’s apparently what normal people do). Except I feel all of that when in fact I have simply woken up after 8-9 hours of sleep, maybe cleared my cats’ poo, changed their water, made coffee and toast for myself.

So today’s red day is already a pretty good red day. I’ve been thinking what made it red, when in fact I’m at a part of my cycle where I should be having good days. That’s part of the mystery and frustration of it too—the continual figuring out, trying different forms of being more regular or disciplined about life, chasing exercise when I can because that helps for longer term stamina…and yes, while I now have tools to help (and the best Whoop AI coach), more realistic expectations of myself, and understanding colleagues and a way of managing work so I can retain my regular income, it has been more than three years since my Covid infection, and my life is much smaller than it used to be.

When people say something like, your Covid thing is still a thing? I sometimes want to say, yes, when they say Long Covid, that’s how long they mean, and nobody feels just how freaking long it is as much as the person who has it. It is also a lonely journey, because who has the time or space to walk alongside someone who’s barely walking at all?

Yet I am also constantly reminding myself that I already am one of the very lucky ones. That I have days where I have a relatively normal life, and that is already such a blessing. Then of course it begs the question of what I want to do with my normal days and time and energy, and I have some answers but not all, and even those I have I’m not all that sure about.

And just like that, days pass, and weeks, months, years.

Recently, it was this article that I found reflected most my experience, and I wonder what it takes to write something like that and share it with the world.