A Failure to Convalesce

The first UK lockdown was announced six years ago yesterday, and for most people the dark days of COVID are an increasingly distant memory. But millions of lives are still dominated by the virus and its after-effects, and today’s story is an angry and eloquent account of what it means to be left coping with Long COVID.

In his story, ‘Don’t Blame Anyone’, Julio Cortázar depicts one man’s interminable struggle to put on a jumper. The man is supposed to be meeting his wife at a store, and it is cold outside, so he reaches for a jumper before leaving his flat. The ensuing tangle suspends him in a permanent state of paralysis. Any gains he makes, as when his right hand comes out into the open, are soon undone – it turns out that freeing this hand comes at the cost of trapping his head, for his head is stuck up a sleeve and his right hand is in fact where his head should be. His right hand frequently disobeys, even, at times, attacks him, so that cause and effect are drastically off kilter. The man spends the story contemplating whether he should take off the jumper and start again or go on forcing himself through. He opts for the latter. By the end he has not freed himself.

When I’m asked what Long COVID is like, it’s tempting to tell people to read Cortázar’s parable, because it is close to articulating the experience of living with this illness. Like Cortázar’s deeply unheroic hero, the Long COVID patient is condemned to a sudden upheaval that traps him in the home and locks him in perpetual combat with an oddly intimate enemy that engulfs and incapacitates him. Any improvements are quickly subverted by complications that become more entrenched the more he attempts to alleviate them, and, crucially, his body has turned against itself. All the while baffled family members wait offstage, wondering what on earth is taking so long.