Post-COVID

I'm back to teaching full time. I'm not teaching every class as a live Zoom session because I don't want to push it. But I'm teaching, students are learning, I'm thinking, I'm writing in the morning and managing my job duties. I am walking every day. I am doing household stuff and breathing and doing errands. And I'm doing this without afternoon naps or crying jags or physical back-sliding or relapses. I am proud of how well I and my COVID friends as a team have pulled together guesswork and advocated to come up with protocols on the fly to take care of ourselves. I want to someday go to a COVID conference where I get to hug other survivors.

It's almost exactly six months since I got sick with COVID, half a year. I was not sure for a long time that I would get back to fully functional (for me), I was terrified of post-viral chronic fatigue, and many people who got sick when I did are not recovered. I am not yet willing to say I'm 100% recovered because I think I have changed my definition of working, and my body has changed and I do have things to deal with I did not have before. I am not going to be able to work the way I did before. At least for now, my world has shifted a little, and not everything will get done, and I will say no more, because my physical existence comes first. But being back here is a precious thing I don't take for granted.