In December 2021, I got covid. It was just before my birthday and before Christmas, and we were coming off the back of having no food in the house because our fridge freezer had had a major gas leak.

I was fine for a bit, and thought it maybe wouldn’t affect me too badly. Then it floored me. I couldn’t get out of bed. I struggled to get upstairs. I was worse than I remember my gran in her 80s (a lifetime chronic smoker with asthma).

I wasn’t hospitalised, but I couldn’t breathe properly. Whether it was that or the virus infecting my brain I don’t know, but after weeks of lung/heart pain/breathing problems had passed, the next stage of symptoms were neurological.

I’d thought the first bit was bad (and frustrating – lying in bed doing nothing is not fun for me). The next round of symptoms was something else. For a long time I struggled to get more than halfway through a sentence. People stopped waiting patiently for words that were never going to happen and started finishing sentences for me.

It wasn’t like when a word is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t think of it. It was a complete blank, like opening a drawer to get something and it’s not there. Worse still, when my brain forgot a word – which was nearly every sentence – it wiped everything I’d just been thinking, like an Etch-A-Sketch. So not only did I not have the word at all, I literally couldn’t remember what I’d just said, what the other person had said, or even the topic of conversation.

For normal people it would be frustrating. For me it was the end of my world, because words are everything to me. My whole life has always been based around them.

I couldn’t read, write, or think properly. I was a shell. There were many, many days I didn’t want to be around any more in case it was forever. In case I was never myself again and couldn’t achieve my dreams, like going on an African safari or developing the next stage of my business.

Talking or typing took forever. Tasks that took an hour now took six. They were more difficult and weren’t done as well. (Assuming I was well enough to try; fatigue was robbing me of at least two days a week). On top of that, I was trying to run a business and manage a million other things including refugee tasks, house reno, managing employees, and planning a company trip to Portugal. If it sounds like a lot, it was – even then I was letting things go, such as going to see a potential dream house – because I knew I couldn’t take on any more.

At the same time, having a lot on made me feel more me. I like my life to have meaning, and I like to be able to make progress on things. I’m not the kind of person that wants to lie in bed watching Netflix for days, so on days where my health wouldn’t even let me do that (I couldn’t follow two sentences), it was unbelievably frustrating.

It was a lot of time, effort and energy to even pretend to carry on as normal. At the same time, the people who did know, didn’t really recognise or care much about what I was going through. I didn’t have genuine support from people other than Joe, who thankfully was there to ask me what I needed and could help with basic things like carrying stuff for me.

I tried Sudoku and made silly mistakes, often duplicating numbers in the same grid because my brain and eyes weren’t always communicating info to each other. My brain was often genuinely amazed to suddenly “see” a second number “1” (or whatever) already in the square, having determined it wasn’t there minutes ago. I continuously lost against the AI in an app game I used to win easily. When Tanya moved in and I saw my words in the translator app, it was new heartbreak. I still couldn’t string a sentence together. God only knows how it sounded in auto translated Ukrainian.

But by the six month mark, I was improving. I would still type/say wrong words – “apple” instead of “apply,” “stairs” instead of “lift,” but I was often self-correcting rather than not realising. I laughed with people when they laughed at me because I said entirely the wrong word mid-conversation, even though I just wanted to cry.

My words still aren’t fully back to normal, but I’m getting there. Mostly I’m just writing for myself to practise (I half-wrote a draft of this a few months ago; reading back now it’s a mess).

In May/June we went to Portugal. At that point I was suffering with what I affectionately call “fizzy arm” – a kind of extreme pins and needles that left me unable to carry things or use my right arm much at all (luckily I’m left handed). At its worst, it was coupled with nerve pain in my leg that left me unable to use the entire right side of my body. I couldn’t even lift my arm.

Being in the (unheated) pool in Portugal triggered fizzy arm pretty badly in the first couple of days. But the sunshine, fresh valley air, exercise and relaxation did my physical symptoms the world of good and they improved dramatically. I even wanted to write again. I could hold a camera.

When I got back to England, the change in climate saw a minor relapse of some of my symptoms, and I definitely didn’t feel as good, but it was still far better than before.

Just a few weeks later, we went to Ireland & Northern Ireland. By that point I was able to easily walk ten miles a day. I didn’t need naps. Everything was a lot easier.

We got back home, I had a day of feeling wonderful – and then I found out I had covid. Again.

Thankfully, the second round really was just “like a cold.” This variant affected my nose and throat rather than my lungs, so it was much, much easier for my body to recover from. I did have neurological symptoms of losing my sense of smell and taste, but that only lasted as long as the virus. Within a week I was able to walk around normally – it couldn’t have been more different to my first experience where attempting to get upstairs was a major task even several weeks on.

I hate covid for how much time of my life it’s robbed, and how much stress and frustration it’s caused me. At the same time, I dread to think what it would have been like for me if I hadn’t been vaccinated – I can’t see a situation where I wouldn’t have ended up in hospital, and all the extra stress and trauma that would have caused. It’s also hard not to think that if all human beings were vegan, covid would probably never have happened, because people wouldn’t be keeping diseased animals in cages at markets. It’s really made me think about how I can cut more meat out of my life moving forward, and what needs to happen to take steps toward that.

Despite everything, I know I am still one of the lucky ones. Every day I have an enormous sense of relief that I’m not in that dark, painful place that I was any more, and that I can still keep getting better.

Have you had covid? How was it for you?