‘I COULD INTENSELY SMELL SOIL FOR MONTHS’

In March, myself, my wife and my children, as well as my sister and her husband all developed the typical Covid symptoms. There were the fevers, the lack of taste and smell, black eyes like you had been punched in the face, coughing and, as my wife put it: “It’s like you forget how to breathe.”

Numerous 111 calls, dashes to Covid units, X-rays and paramedics later, we all crawled our way through to the other side.

Or so we had hoped. My sister has been left intense lung pains and now has asthma, often going for a walk and later collapsing in bed from the overwhelming fatigue. My son has heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I have developed cluster headaches, one of which the A&E doctor I had been rushed to first presumed was a ministroke.

We are learning that Covid lurks and rattles around. For months “after” the illness I could intensely smell earth in my sinuses, like I was breathing in soil. But I was comparatively lucky, I felt, compared to my wife and sister, who were rushed to hospital.

The earthy smell has finally gone but I still have phases where I don’t feel quite right: deep muscular pains, strange smells that don’t make sense and overwhelming fatigue. Maybe these little sufferings have nothing to do with that battering by Covid, but it feels instinctively like they are all part of its toll.