I’m back, and the world is still a mess

Three and a half million Canadians have long COVID symptoms, but you hardly hear from them or about them, mainly because they work from home, if they work at all

Star readers are the best and my Star readers are even better, a finer grind of bean. While I was off work recently recovering from long COVID, plus a medication error, I heard from many concerned subscribers.

Was I ill? On a lavish vacation? Was I returning? In the nicest possible way, I suspect they were checking if I were deceased, their emails being that little kick you give to possible roadkill. Is that inert coyote going to make it? Well, it looks pretty squished. Has anyone phoned her house?

Readers suggested cures, mainly vitamins and turmeric, but one recommended a device, electric copper rods that look like curling irons. I’m supposed to hold them in my hands, usually after dinner, the reader said. You can sit and watch the news, gently self-electrocuting.

Three and a half million Canadians have long COVID symptoms, but you hardly hear from them or about them, mainly because they work from home, if they work at all. Some symptoms are non-stop exhaustion, breathing difficulty, pain, headaches, insomnia, dizziness. Medical science offers no treatment yet.

Long-haulers rarely go out or earn. They don’t demonstrate because they look perfectly healthy, which is jarring for onlookers. Their conversation can be more like selective mutism than chat. We’re not a fun crowd. Or maybe that’s just me.

Still, I try to reach them out there. They’re a big part of the reason employers can’t fill jobs. Until there’s treatment, they’re in a holding pattern and so are the rest of Canadians yearning for economic recovery and a return to normality.

Every long-hauler is different, their body attacked by the virus from different angles and to various degrees. It’s a game of Snakes and Ladders. We get better, we worsen. We lack the words. It’s wrong to say we get “tired” and “sleep.” We crash and disappear. Within a minute or two, it’s as if we’ve been chloroformed or roofied.

At one point, I woke up unable to move and harangued my own legs. “C’mon, we can do this, bend, slide off the couch, do it for me, your head office,” but had to wait for my husband to come home and rearrange me.

Long COVID is melodramatic, a moody creature difficult to placate, “a horse loose in a hospital” as the comedian John Mulaney said so long ago of Donald Trump’s first term.

We long-haulers breathe hard and fast, hungry for oxygen. Food palls. I really only enjoy white food — a creepy sign of pallor and insufficiency — which means rice, pasta, cheese and bread, dressed with fruit and sugar.

I’d tell you about the medication mistake — Toronto Health assiduously tracks such side-effects — but that would be amateur health advice, the kind that brought us conmen like RFK Jr. and the return of measles.

Back at work, I worried that the world had recovered after the alarums and excursions of 2023. There would be a topic shortage, I thought, bigger cereal boxes containing fewer column ideas, mostly broken and thesis dust at the bottom of the bag.

Got that wrong. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put Gaza through a “human meat grinder whose only goal is to reduce the population so that Israel can control it more easily,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it.

The jittery Russian President Vladimir Putin finally disposed of Alexei Navalny. Trump advanced like a Florida Mussolini, a gas station tableau in his future.

Canada’s winter was nasty, brownish and short. Fire season has already begun. The journalist Cory Doctorow’s apt word, “enshittification,” reached platforms, supply chains, politics, the human mind and more. I won’t lack material, not at all.