Long Covid and Learning to Recalibrate

Originally published on 22 May 2022

The world is returning to ‘normal’ even though the pandemic hasn’t ended. South Africa is in its fifth wave and the US has now recorded one million deaths from Covid. Companies want employees to return to the office even though the world of work has fundamentally shifted during the pandemic – certainly from the perspective of the employee. Many organisations don’t seem to have recalibrated properly for that future. This should have been an opportunity to rethink how we work but it seems, particularly in South Africa, that we are going to be stuck in the past for now.

However, I want to write about the other impact of Covid that isn’t widely mentioned, but personal to me, when we talk about ‘return to work’ – Long Covid. Like the pandemic, it hasn’t disappeared and will continue to impact how people work and if they can work.

Long Covid

Last year I got Covid during the big Delta wave. It was just as I had taken on my new role managing the strategic planning process at Wits. Worst timing. Did I stop? Yes, probably for about five days out of the three weeks of my infection. I didn’t have an option but that’s a story for another day. Just as I thought I had fully recovered, I woke up one morning with a full day of meetings scheduled and felt awful again. It was the start of Long Covid. Around the same time, I was starting to work with two of my favourite academics who are both medical doctors and would later become my first clients in the consultancy. They kept telling me “You need to recalibrate”. For someone who was used to going a hundred kilometres an hour at work, I was not about to change my settings.

It is now ten months later. I have still not recalibrated.

I thought the Long Covid was subsiding so over the past six weeks, I have been pushing myself to do more, physically and mentally. For those that follow me on Instagram, you’ll see all the strong yoga poses but those can’t happen every day. I now write every week and fill my days with coursework and research or job applications but some days the brain fog is real and I’m not fully taking in what I’m doing. I’m trying to go out more often but driving and grocery shopping are exhausting. Seeing friends or family takes up energy that some days I just don’t have. I do my own housework too and the tachycardia while cleaning my house the other day was not fun. I am dreading winter (usually my favourite season) because now I have such poor circulation in my hands that I won’t be able to use them properly. There are some days now that I just collapse wherever I land up in the house – bedroom floor, staircase, kitchen floor – and wait until I have enough energy to get to a more comfortable spot. I am not sharing this for pity but to share the reality of what is an arguably mild case of Long Covid. How would I work this out with a prospective employer that only views productivity as being at the office? Or I could spend all day at the office, but would I be able to make dinner when I got home?

My younger sister has several chronic illnesses and so I have watched her grow up and manage these somehow and live a relatively normal life (from the outside). A new chronic illness gets added to the list regularly, but she keeps going and recalibrating. I know it isn’t easy for her, she has lived like this for a long time, and we always knew a traditional 9-5 job was not on the cards for her. Good thing she is an extremely talented composer, so it has worked out for her in some ways. She also now has a beautiful daughter, stepson, and partner. Big sister is now learning from little sister that you have to recalibrate and just get on with it. She introduced me to the Spoon Theory which you can read about here as a way to explain how to manage your energy supply when you have a chronic illness. I never thought that I might have a chronic illness now.

My fear was never about getting Covid (I was extremely vigilant though). I’m young and healthy so I knew I probably wouldn’t die from it. My fear was that I would get Long Covid and what would happen to me then. It had always been my argument at the time that sure, I get the case that people are bound to get infected and there’s a need to build up immunity, but you never know who is going to get Long Covid and then must live with the after-effects. Those after-effects are not pleasant and will keep many people out of the workforce for some time – unless we become more adaptive in how we view productivity and ways of working.

Returning to Work

When the pandemic was raging and my workplace was insisting that some of us should be at the office every day, I won’t lie, I was pretty angry – both for safety and productivity reasons. We were sitting there twiddling our thumbs to show that we were at the office, sitting on virtual meetings with colleagues that were also in the office, and then going home to get real work done. I used to quip as I left the office around midday (we were allowed to do half days at the office) that I was now going home to start working. It was like a double workday. All in the idea of productivity = seeing bums on seats in the office. Some of my friends have only just started returning to the office regularly over the past few months and so they are only experiencing this frustration now. The conversation is always the same though, they were far more productive at home.

The thing that faces me now is having to recalibrate – all aspects of my life. Learning when I can use energy and on what. I have also had to recalibrate my thinking over the past two weeks or so about whether I will be able to return to a full-time job in the near future, or ever. It’s me though so there’s a backup plan coming…

My friend had a job interview recently and asked the interviewers a pertinent question which I think we should all be asking (Long Covid or not): how has your company changed its ways of working since Covid? A lack of innovation or flexibility in the work environment should show you that the organisation has not used the past two years to think about the future of work or considered the differing needs of its employees. Below is a good illustration of how the future employee looks:

Source: Antonio Grasso, LinkedIn

As someone with Long Covid and just as a person interested in the future of work, this is the recalibrated future I want to see (preferably not only in male form though!).

Alex the Generalist