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Available for over a year

This is a week of anniversaries. Anniversaries that may mark a new stage, as we gradually emerge from restrictions, anniversaries that enable us to grieve and ask how to move on. For some of us, it is a different anniversary altogether. This week marks exactly a year since I became ill with Covid. I was never ill enough to be admitted to hospital, despite pneumonia and agonising chest pain; a year on, I am still coughing, still slightly breathless, still losing my voice every few days. How many anniversaries will there be? As the world grieves and moves on, where does that leave those of us with long Covid? This of course is nothing new – chronic, long-term illness is often invisible: every day brings much the same symptoms as the one before, and friends and family can get weary of hearing the same answer to the question, how are you? However, Covid is a new illness; there is no basis for comparison, no benchmark. No stories to tell me what to expect, or what to fear. It is a journey into the complete unknown, scary and unsettling. So it is easier to push it aside, and make it invisible. Visibility matters. Seeing yourself as part of the statistics matters. It is easy, with a new illness, not fully understood by the public or indeed health professionals, to think that you are going mad. To attribute symptoms to something else, to explain things away, because that would make it somehow under control. To shine a light on long Covid is to say, this is real, we take it seriously, and you matter. It is about witness, and presence within our shared collective imagination. This, of course, is not a new thing. As I ponder my invisibility, the Gospel stories of Jesus’ healing somehow come into sharper focus. He consistently makes visible what was previously invisible. Forces the wider community to reintegrate someone they had forgotten, or bypassed. Bearing witness matters, and this is something, fortunately, we can all do – all we need is to be attentive to those around us, consciously seek to see the invisible, and reach out to them.