I don’t have long covid, but I am chronically ill and this article really spoke to me.
“Every day we hear the story of how long COVID is affecting the way people can connect with others,” says David Putrino, who runs a long COVID clinic as director of rehabilitation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “This is a known phenomenon in chronic illness and disability [communities]: that when you first become disabled or experience a chronic illness, your world changes — it becomes smaller. And suddenly, friends and family members who can’t easily interact with you stop interacting with you.”
Protect yourselves when you can, comrades. It’s not a fun life.
Yes. People tend to be sympathetic toward me in the abstract, but once they have to make any kind of accommodation they decide I should fuck off and just deal with it. (Chronic migraines, not long COVID.) And a cancer-stricken relative and I just got COVID after one of their friends decided not to mention their symptoms because it “wasn’t that bad.”
Yeah, I feel that. I’ve got autoimmune disorders. Everything’s hard, but people can look at me and think nothing’s going on. Everyone slowly drifts out of your life, often because they think you’re being unreasonable when you say things like, “I’m not feeling well today, I think I have to cancel.”
Same here. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept my oldest friends, but it’s very difficult to cultivate new relationships when every plan has to be written in pencil. I haven’t made a single new friendship since before the pandemic.