#I’m so exhausted this Covid fatigue is so real

[justaboot]

Had to run an on-the-fly, one hour session for my DnD class, and only half the kids were there.

Gave those suckers new sci-fi character sheets, assigned them jobs (engineer, pilot, medic), slapped down a battlemap of the Spear of Selene’s crash site and made them “escape the moon” before the bell rang.

Bonus moon mite, of course, and they ended up escaping with the baby (voluntarily on a nat20) the SECOND the bell rang. Lots of cheering and screaming.

[pandemic-info]

At Yale’s Long COVID Clinic, Lisa Sanders Is Trying It All

excerpts:

Since the beginning of the pandemic, she — together with colleagues in the pulmonary and neurology departments — had been seeing long-COVID patients at Yale but often in an ad hoc way. Some of the doctors had become so flooded with people seeking help that they were having difficulty scheduling and treating their regular patients who came to them for everything else ...

Long-COVID patients, generally speaking, have been very miserable for a very long time, and because the illness attacks their brains, their hearts, their lungs, their guts, their joints — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently, and sometimes in a chain reaction — they bounce from specialist to specialist, none of whom has the bandwidth to hear their whole frustrating ordeal together with the expertise to address all of their complaints: the nonspecific pain, the perpetual exhaustion, the bewildering test results, the one-off treatments. “These are people who have not been able to tell their story to anybody but their spouse and their mom — for years sometimes,” Sanders tells me. “And they are, in some ways, every doctor’s worst nightmare.”

...

Long COVID has been pushing the limits of hospital systems everywhere, not just at Yale. As Americans emerged from the most acute phase of the pandemic, as mask and vaccine mandates lifted and life returned to a semblance of normal for the people who had contracted COVID and recovered, primary-care physicians started to say, “‘I’m not interested in long COVID,’ or ‘I don’t treat long COVID. Let me refer you to a specialist,’” said David Putrino, who runs the new chronic-illness recovery clinic at Mount Sinai. For their part, Putrino added, the specialists were saying, “This is not what my practice is. This is not an emergency anymore.” Patients all over the country reported monthslong waiting times for appointments at long-COVID clinics. All the while, scientists and pundits heaped skepticism on the very notion of long COVID, arguing that infection made people stronger, that new variants posed no threats, that the danger of long COVID was overblown — implying that what patients were suffering from was all in their heads.

Forgotten in this debate are the 65 million people worldwide for whom the pandemic remains a torturous everyday reality.

...

In the late 1990s, patients with a galaxy of unexplained chronic symptoms — including fatigue, sore throat, joint pain, insomnia, dizziness, brain fog, and depression — began to gather into activist and identity groups, calling themselves sufferers of “chronic Lyme.” They had something, they argued, related to a previous infection from the bite of a deer tick, but their doctors were dismissing them as whiners and neurotics. This was in an era when the medical Establishment was rolling its collective eyes at patients who were querying whether diagnoses of “chronic fatigue syndrome” or “fibromyalgia” might fit their symptoms — ones that looked very much like those linked to chronic Lyme.

Sanders joined the chorus of debunkers. These patients had real symptoms and real ailments, she asserted in Every Patient Tells a Story. But the collection of symptoms was “hopelessly broad and overinclusive,” she wrote. “These are some of the most common symptoms of patients presenting to a primary care office.” She concluded that chronic Lyme was a “phantom diagnosis.” 

“I completely regret that chapter,” she says now. “I would like to rewrite it.” Sanders explains that she was reacting to the doctors who were preying on suffering people by prescribing interminable courses of antibiotics that were not helping them: “But I completely misunderstood it. The patients were making the connection between their symptoms and Lyme disease.”

...

“We’re not paying enough attention,” she said. “We’re not. Doctors are still dismissing this disease as something that’s in your head. I have seen the exchanges on Twitter: ‘Long COVID is exaggerated, not real.’” Women are diagnosed with long COVID at roughly twice the rate of men, Iwasaki pointed out: “I think if the situation was reversed, we’d pay even more attention to this disease.” - Akiko Iwasaki, immunologist at Yale [also known for her work nasal vaccine & long covid research]

...

But even Sanders was not prepared for how little doctors and scientists know about long COVID. There is no blood test. Health officials can’t even agree on how to define it. The CDC describes long COVID as “signs, symptoms, and conditions that continue or develop after acute COVID-19 infection” — or, in Sanders’s paraphrase, “You got COVID and then something bad happened.” Under the CDC definition, patients have long COVID if they are symptomatic at least four weeks after initial infection. The WHO defines it similarly but with a different time frame: occurring or lasting at least three months after initial infection. This discrepancy matters to Sanders because, as much as possible, she wants to identify patients who have long COVID and not those who may take a little longer to recover from their original illness. In her clinic, she uses the WHO definition.

...

Sanders, more than ever before, is dependent on the patient’s account — on detailed specifics — to establish her diagnosis. It’s a process of elimination and deduction. So she has “learned just to shut the fuck up and listen.”

[a-room-of-my-own]

For screen time: I bought (the app? Software?) Freedom, and it is absolutely the best thing I have found. It will block the sites that you ask it at the times you ask it to and once it’s up and running that’s it, the site is blocked even if you reboot your computer, etc. Only thing is you can edit the times (when a session is not running). To get over that I blocked YouTube, for example, all day except for between 5 and 7am. If I REALLY need to watch something, I have to get up at dawn. My screen time on YouTube in April was a total for about 1 hour for the month, down from about 9 hours a day (an exaggeration but barely). My next purge will be Tumblr (I’m thinking of being off here for Pride Month lol, for my own sanity). What I have found more difficult however, is picking reading up again. I can do without (some) websites (still a work in progress!) but that hasn’t equates to having the patience, concentration or focus for reading. In comparison, books don’t give me the same dopamine hit, and that has been a real barrier :/ I am also trying to go down the route of organising more social activities (shorter but more regular) and atm I’m really busy with work, which has helped. However unfortunate, it is reassuring to see we all struggle with this, and it’s not just a gen z thing. I am not proud of my screen time and I’m a fully fledged adult! Please let us know how you get on, if you’re okay with that. I could use a support group!

Absolutely ok with that! When I got sick with long covid (so between 2020 and summer 2023) I couldn’t read more than a few lines at a time for literal months and I was so exhausted that I had to rest at home every time I was off if I wanted to be able to go to work.

So being in my bed / couch watching videos, playing games and reading articles (I could still read the news / short articles) became a habit, and now I’m better I’m trying to go back to healthier ways.

Also since a surge of activity could turn into a covid relapse I’m kind of hyper aware of my fatigue levels and tend to « freeze » when I feel tired now and immediately sit down / lie down / take a break. But it’s turned into « let’s lie down until I feel like I can get up again » which was fine when I was sick but now I think I’m tiring myself. Lying down with my phone just exhausts my brain.

My go to method would be « do something every time you want to use your phone » but the need to grab it is real especially when the things to do are random chores. I’ve just spent like 20 min researching random stuff 🤣

So I’m gonna try apps and training myself like a border collie (fun activities, snacks and walkies instead of phone time) and see if that works !

[nicejewishgirl]

fuck the last few months have been hell. I’ve had to worry about my survival and more so my mother as we both have had very serious hospitalizations but it just happened again in Thursday. Every day feels traumatizing. I’m in a nightmare that I can’t wake up from. There’s been so much stress, chaos, and turmoil. My family dynamics have me on edge.

Now my parents and I all have covid bc our local hospital sucks at covid protocols. I didn’t even go inside but got it from my parents (who were masked most of the time even in her hospital room) a couple days later. I’ve never had covid so this was the cherry on top. It’s too much. Like no fucking more!!!

I don’t even want to write out the things that have happened because it makes it feel so much more real and it just upsets me to write out such fatal shit. I still plan to operate jewsforpalestine but I’m literally trying to make it day by day whether that’s due to my own illness or taking care of my mother as if I was a trauma nurse. I haven’t eaten in a couple of days because of the stress and because of how bad my flareup is / possibly from covid.

I haven’t even told you all about how I need full reconstruction on both feet and how the surgeon said my deformity was a 10/10 😍 and that he’s never seen feet so bad (on the x-ray) as all my bones are crunched up and in the wrong spot which is why I have several stress fractures in both feet. I am seeing a few other surgeons as this guy was awful but I also have yo see colorectal surgery to fix my colectomy…. which is fucking frightening.

I’m also trying to manage my severe iron deficiency anemia while constantly worrying if my mom was/is going to make it. Seriously, this last scare really had me panicked. I don’t even feel comfortable saying what it is because it’s her life but what happened was serious… being covid positive complicates her recovery even further. I barely leave her alone and constantly hovering over her. I’m so scared…. I rarely show it though.

There’s soooo much more that I still haven’t mentioned from these past few months but I just wanted to say that I’m still alive 👋… barely lol but I just need to vent. Covid just pushed me over the edge. I’m still free Palestine and still really want to create a collective of like minded folks but I have been in full on crisis, fight or flight mode and haven’t been able to do one thing other than trying to get by.

As I’m typing this, I’ve fallen asleep multiple times creating a variety of typos. I’m not having fun or even doom rolling, watching tiktok, or whatever, etc. I’m taking care of my mom, my dogs, the house, cooking, cleaning, making all of our appointments, dealing with insurance etc. and then fall asleep by 8pm because of my fatigue. My exhaustion (largely due to my anemia & still’s) prevents me from doing soooo much and the lack of oxygen to my brain has definitely effected my cognitive ability, concentration, and executive functioning.

I can’t wait for things to calm down so I can start this project along with answer some of my latest messages that require a detailed response! I also just want to be able to breathe and know that things will be ok. I just wish someone could wrap their arms around me and tell me that but I’m on my own in that regard… hence why my pathetic ass is posting here. 💗

[translucentenvelope]

Fatigue Can Shatter a Person

Everyday tiredness is nothing like the depleting symptom that people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience.

By Ed Yong

Alexis Misko’s health has improved enough that, once a month, she can leave her house for a few hours. First, she needs to build up her energy by lying in a dark room for the better part of two days, doing little more than listening to audiobooks. Then she needs a driver, a quiet destination where she can lie down, and days of rest to recover afterward. The brief outdoor joy “never quite feels like enough,” she told me, but it’s so much more than what she managed in her first year of long COVID, when she couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour or stand for more than 10 minutes. Now, at least, she can watch TV on the same day she takes a shower.

In her previous life, she pulled all-nighters in graduate school and rough shifts at her hospital as an occupational therapist; she went for long runs and sagged after long flights. None of that compares with what she has endured since getting COVID-19 almost three years ago. The fatigue she now feels is “like a complete depletion of the essence of who you are, of your life force,” she told me in an email.

Fatigue is among the most common and most disabling of long COVID’s symptoms, and a signature of similar chronic illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS). But in these diseases, fatigue is so distinct from everyday weariness that most of the people I have talked with were unprepared for how severe, multifaceted, and persistent it can be.

For a start, this fatigue isn’t really a single symptom; it has many faces. It can weigh the body down: Lisa Geiszler likens it to “wearing a lead exoskeleton on a planet with extremely high gravity, while being riddled with severe arthritis.” It can rev the body up: Many fatigued people feel “wired and tired,” paradoxically in fight-or-flight mode despite being utterly depleted. It can be cognitive: Thoughts become sluggish, incoherent, and sometimes painful—like “there’s steel wool stuck in my frontal lobe,” Gwynn Dujardin, a literary historian with ME, told me.

Fatigue turns the most mundane of tasks into an “agonizing cost-benefit analysis,” Misko said. If you do laundry, how long will you need to rest to later make a meal? If you drink water, will you be able to reach the toilet? Only a quarter of long-haulers have symptoms that severely limit their daily activities, but even those with “moderate” cases are profoundly limited. Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, still works, but washing her hair, she told me, leaves her as exhausted as the long-distance runs she used to do.

And though normal fatigue is temporary and amenable to agency—even after a marathon, you can will yourself into a shower, and you’ll feel better after sleeping—rest often fails to cure the fatigue of long COVID or ME/CFS. “I wake up fatigued,” Letícia Soares, who has long COVID, told me.

Between long COVID, ME/CFS, and other energy-limiting chronic illnesses, millions of people in the U.S. alone experience debilitating fatigue. But American society tends to equate inactivity with immorality, and productivity with worth. Faced with a condition that simply doesn’t allow people to move—even one whose deficits can be measured and explained—many doctors and loved ones default to disbelief. When Soares tells others about her illness, they usually say, “Oh, yeah, I’m tired too.” When she was bedbound for days, people told her, “I need a weekend like that.” Soares’s problems are very real, and although researchers have started to figure out why so many people like her are suffering, they don’t yet know how to stop it.

•

Fatigue creates a background hum of disability, but it can be punctuated by worse percussive episodes that strip long-haulers of even the small amounts of energy they normally have.

Daria Oller is a physiotherapist and athletic trainer, so when she got COVID in March 2020, she naturally tried exercising her way to better health. And she couldn’t understand why, after just short runs, her fatigue, brain fog, chest pain, and other symptoms would flare up dramatically—to the point where she could barely move or speak. These crashes contradicted everything she had learned during her training. Only after talking with physiotherapists with ME/CFS did she realize that this phenomenon has a name: post-exertional malaise.

Post-exertional malaise, or PEM, is the defining trait of ME/CFS and a common feature of long COVID. It is often portrayed as an extreme form of fatigue, but it is more correctly understood as a physiological state in which all existing symptoms burn more fiercely and new ones ignite. Beyond fatigue, people who get PEM might also feel intense radiant pain, an inflammatory burning feeling, or gastrointestinal and cognitive problems: “You feel poisoned, flu-ish, concussed,” Misko said. And where fatigue usually sets in right after exertion, PEM might strike hours or days later, and with disproportionate ferocity. Even gentle physical or mental effort might lay people out for days, weeks, months. Visiting a doctor can precipitate a crash, and so can filling out applications for disability benefits—or sensing bright lights and loud sounds, regulating body temperature on hot days, or coping with stress. And if in fatigue your batteries feel drained, in PEM they’re missing entirely. It’s the annihilation of possibility: Most people experience the desperation of being unable to move only in nightmares, Dujardin told me. “PEM is like that, but much more painful.”

Medical professionals generally don’t learn about PEM during their training. Many people doubt its existence because it is so unlike anything that healthy people endure. Mary Dimmock told me that she understood what it meant only when she saw her son, Matthew, who has ME/CFS, crash in front of her eyes. “He just melted,” Dimmock said. But most people never see such damage because PEM hides those in the midst of it from public view. And because it usually occurs after a delay, people who experience PEM might appear well to friends and colleagues who then don’t witness the exorbitant price they later pay.

That price is both real and measurable. In cardiopulmonary exercise tests, or CPETs, patients use treadmills or exercise bikes while doctors record their oxygen consumption, blood pressure, and heart rate. Betsy Keller, an exercise physiologist at Ithaca College, told me that most people can repeat their performance if retested one day later, even if they have heart disease or are deconditioned by inactivity. People who get PEM cannot. Their results are so different the second time around that when Keller first tested someone with ME/CFS in 2003, “I told my colleagues that our equipment was out of calibration,” she said. But she and others have seen the same pattern in hundreds of ME/CFS and long-COVID patients—“objective findings that can’t be explained by anything psychological,” David Systrom, a pulmonologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told me. “Many patients are told it’s all in their head, but this belies that in spades.” Still, many insurers refuse to pay for a second test, and many patients cannot do two CPETs (or even one) without seriously risking their health. And “20 years later, I still have physicians who refute and ignore the objective data,” Keller said. (Some long-COVID studies have ignored PEM entirely or bundled it together with fatigue.)

Oller thinks this dismissal arises because PEM inverts the dogma that exercise is good for you—an adage that, for most other illnesses, is correct. “It’s not easy to change what you’ve been doing your whole career, even when I tell someone that they might be harming their patients,” she said. Indeed, many long-haulers get worse because they don’t get enough rest in their first weeks of illness, or try to exercise through their symptoms on doctors’ orders.

People with PEM are also frequently misdiagnosed. They’re told that they’re deconditioned from being too sedentary, when their inactivity is the result of frequent crashes, not the cause. They’re told that they’re depressed and unmotivated, when they are usually desperate to move and either physically incapable of doing so or using restraint to avoid crashing. Oller is part of a support group of 1,500 endurance athletes with long COVID who are well used to running, swimming, and biking through pain and tiredness. “Why would we all just stop?” she asked.

•

Some patients with energy-limiting illnesses argue that the names of their diseases and symptoms make them easier to discredit. Fatigue invites people to minimize severe depletion as everyday tiredness. Chronic fatigue syndromecollapses a wide-ranging disabling condition into a single symptom that is easy to trivialize. These complaints are valid, but the problem runs deeper than any name.

Dujardin, the English professor who is (very slowly) writing a cultural history of fatigue, thinks that our concept of it has been impoverished by centuries of reductionism. As the study of medicine slowly fractured into anatomical specialties, it lost an overarching sense of the systems that contribute to human energy, or its absence. The concept of energy was (and still is) central to animistic philosophies, and though once core to the Western world too, it is now culturally associated with quackery and pseudoscience. “There are vials of ‘energy boosters’ by every cash register in the U.S.,” Dujardin said, but when the NIH convened a conference on the biology of fatigue in 2021, “specialists kept observing that no standard definition exists for fatigue, and everyone was working from different ideas of human energy.” These terms have become so unhelpfully unspecific that our concept of “fatigue” can encompass a wide array of states including PEM and idleness, and can be heavily influenced by social forces—in particular the desire to exploit the energy of others.

As the historian Emily K. Abel notes in Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, many studies of everyday fatigue at the turn of the 20th century focused on the weariness of manual laborers, and were done to find ways to make those workers more productive. During this period, fatigue was recast from a physiological limit that employers must work around into a psychological failure that individuals must work against. “Present-day society stigmatizes those who don’t Push through; keep at it; show grit,” Dujardin said, and for the sin of subverting those norms, long-haulers “are not just disbelieved but treated openly with contempt.” Fatigue is “profoundly anti-capitalistic,” Jaime Seltzer, the director of scientific and medical outreach at the advocacy group MEAction, told me.

Energy-limiting illnesses also disproportionately affect women, who have long been portrayed as prone to idleness. Dujardin notes that in Western epics, women such as Circe and Dido were perceived harshly for averting questing heroes such as Odysseus and Aeneas with the temptation of rest. Later, the onset of industrialization turned women instead into emblems of homebound idleness while men labored in public. As shirking work became a moral failure, it also remained a feminine one.

These attitudes were evident in the ways in which two successive U.S. presidents dealt with COVID. Donald Trump, who always evinced a caricature of masculine strength and chastised rivals for being “low energy,” framed his recovery from the coronavirus as an act of domination. Joe Biden was less bombastic, but he still conspicuously assured the public that he was working through his COVID infection while his administration prioritized policies that got people back to work. Neither man spoke of the possibility of disabling fatigue or the need for rest.

Medicine, too, absorbs society’s stigmas around fatigue, even in selecting those who get to join its ranks. Its famously grueling training programs exclude (among others) most people with energy-limiting illnesses, while valorizing the ability to function when severely depleted. This, together with the tendency to psychologize women’s pain, helps to explain why so many long-haulers—even those with medical qualifications, like Misko and Oller—are treated so badly by the professionals they see for care. When Dujardin first sought medical help for her ME/CFS symptoms, the same doctor who had treated her well for a decade suddenly became stiff and suspicious, she told me, reduced all of her detailed descriptions to “tiredness,” and left the room without offering diagnosis or treatment. There is so much cultural pressure to never stop that many people can’t accept that their patients or peers might be biologically forced to do so.

•

No grand unified theory explains everything about long COVID and ME/CFS, but neither are these diseases total mysteries. In fact, plenty of evidence exists for at least two pathways that explain why people with these conditions could be so limited in energy.

First, most people with energy-limiting chronic illnesses have problems with their autonomic nervous system, which governs heartbeat, breathing, sleep, hormone release, and other bodily functions that we don’t consciously control. When this system is disrupted—a condition called “dysautonomia”—hormones such as adrenaline might be released at inappropriate moments, leading to the wired-but-tired feeling. People might suddenly feel sleepy, as if they’re shutting down. Blood vessels might not expand in moments of need, depriving active muscles and organs of oxygen and fuel; those organs might include the brain, leading to cognitive dysfunction such as brain fog.

Second, many people with long COVID and ME/CFS have problems generating energy. When viruses invade the body, the immune system counterattacks, triggering a state of inflammation. Both infection and inflammation can damage the mitochondria—the bean-shaped batteries that power our cells. Malfunctioning mitochondria produce violent chemicals called “reactive oxygen species” (ROS) that inflict even more cellular damage. Inflammation also triggers a metabolic switch toward fast but inefficient ways of making energy, depleting cells of fuel and riddling them with lactic acid. These changes collectively explain the pervasive, dead-battery flavor of fatigue, as “the body struggles to generate energy,” Bindu Paul, a pharmacologist and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, told me. They might also explain the burning, poisoned feelings that patients experience as their cells fill with lactic acid and ROS.

These two pathways—autonomic and metabolic—might also account for PEM. Normally, the autonomic nervous system smoothly dials up to an intense fight-and-flight mode and down to a calmer rest-and-digest one. But “in dysautonomia, the dial becomes a switch,” David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation specialist at Mount Sinai, told me. “You go from sitting to standing, and your body thinks, Oh, are we going hunting? You stop, and your body shuts down.” The exhaustion of these dramatic, unstable flip-flops is made worse by the ongoing metabolic maelstrom. Damaged mitochondria, destructive ROS, inefficient metabolism, and chronic inflammation all compound one another in a vicious cycle that, if it becomes sufficiently intense, could manifest as a PEM crash. “No one is absolutely certain about what causes PEM,” Seltzer told me, but it makes sense that “you have this big metabolic shift and your nervous system can’t get back on an even keel.” And if people push through, deepening the metabolic demands on a body that already can’t meet them, the cycle can spin even faster, “leading to progressive disability,” Putrino said.

Other factors might also be at play. Compared with healthy people, those with long COVID and ME/CFS have differences in the size, structure, or function of brain regions including the thalamus, which relays motor signals and regulates consciousness, and the basal ganglia, which controls movement and has been implicated in fatigue. Long-haulers also have problems with blood vessels, red blood cells, and clotting, all of which might further stanch their flows of blood, oxygen, and nutrients. “I’ve tested so many of these people over the years, and we see over and over again that when the systems start to fail, they all fail in the same way,” Keller said. Together, these woes explain why long COVID and ME/CFS have such bewilderingly varied symptoms. That diversity fuels disbelief—how could one disease cause all of this?—but it’s exactly what you’d expect if things as fundamental as metabolism go awry.

Long-haulers might not know the biochemical specifics of their symptoms, but they are uncannily good at capturing those underpinnings through metaphor. People experiencing autonomic blood-flow problems might complain about feeling “drained,” and that’s literally happening: In POTS, a form of dysautonomia, blood pools in the lower body when people stand. People experiencing metabolic problems often use dead-battery analogies, and indeed, their cellular batteries—the mitochondria—are being damaged: “It really feels like something is going wrong at the cellular level,” Oller told me. Attentive doctors can find important clues about the basis of their patients’ illness hiding amid descriptions that are often billed as “exaggerated or melodramatic,” Dujardin said.

•

Some COVID long-haulers do recover. But several studies have found that, so far, most don’t fully return to their previous baseline, and many who become severely ill stay that way. This pool of persistently sick people is now mired in the same neglect that has long plagued those who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS. Research into such conditions is grossly underfunded, so no cures exist. Very few doctors in the U.S. know how to treat these conditions, and many are nearing retirement, so patients struggle to find care. Long-COVID clinics exist but vary in quality: Some know nothing about other energy-limiting illnesses, and still prescribe potentially harmful and officially discouraged treatments such as exercise. Clinicians who better understand these illnesses know that caution is crucial. When Putrino works with long-haulers to recondition their autonomic nervous system, he always starts as gently as possible to avoid triggering PEM. Such work “isn’t easy and isn’t fast,” he said, and it usually means stabilizing people instead of curing them.

Stability can be life-changing, especially when it involves changes that patients can keep up at home. Over-the-counter supplements such as coenzyme Q10, which is used by mitochondria to generate energy and is depleted in ME/CFS patients, can reduce fatigue. Anti-inflammatory medications such as low-dose naltrexone may have some promise. Sleep hygiene may not cure fatigue, but it certainly makes it less debilitating. Dietary changes can help, but the right ones might be counterintuitive: High-fiber foods take more energy to digest, and some long-haulers get PEM episodes after eating meals that seem healthy. And the most important part of this portfolio is “pacing”—a strategy for carefully keeping your activity levels beneath the threshold that causes debilitating crashes.

Pacing is more challenging than it sounds. Practitioners can’t rely on fixed routines; instead, they must learn to gauge their fluctuating energy levels in real time while becoming acutely aware of their PEM triggers. Some turn to wearable technology such as heart-rate monitors, and more than 30,000 are testing a patient-designed app called Visible to help spot patterns in their illness. Such data are useful, but the difference between rest and PEM might be just 10 or 20 extra heartbeats a minute—a narrow crevice into which long-haulers must squeeze their life. Doing so can be frustrating, because pacing isn’t a recovery tactic; it’s mostly a way of not getting worse, which makes its value harder to appreciate. Its physical benefits come at mental costs: Walks, workouts, socializing, and “all the things I’d do for mental health before were huge energy sinks,” Vogel told me. And without financial stability or social support, many long-haulers must work, parent, and care for themselves even knowing that they’ll suffer later. “It’s impossible not to overdo it, because life is life,” Vogel said.

“Our society is not set up for pacing,” Oller added. Long-haulers must resist the enormous cultural pressure to prove their worth by pushing as hard as they can. They must tolerate being chastised for trying to avert a crash, and being disbelieved if they fail. “One of the most insulting things people can say is ‘Fight your illness,’” Misko said. That would be much easier for her: “It takes so much self-control and strength to do less, to be less, to shrink your life down to one or two small things from which you try to extract joy in order to survive.” For her and many others, rest has become both a medical necessity and a radical act of defiance—one that, in itself, is exhausting.

Ed Yong is a former staff writer at The Atlantic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[goodlives-mitansh]

Is Zoom Fatigue Real? 4 Helpful Tips to Follow

WHAT IS ZOOM FATIGUE?

“Ouch! My back hurts!” “I’m so done for the day!” “Oh, I can’t sit and stare anymore!”Have you experienced this on a daily basis while attending various online meetings for a prolonged period?  Most of you are going to say, YES!

Zoom fatigue refers to the feeling of getting drained and exhausted after attending meetings every day. We might think that sitting for long meetings does not have any impact on us, as we just have to sit and not do anything physically, but, it affects us, both physically and mentally, and has strong implications on our psychological well-being.

So, yes! Zoom Fatigue is real!

Going to school, college and work were normal, until, covid-19 hit us. We, as humans, tried to find an alternative, and with the technological developments, came to the conclusion of shifting to an online mode of functioning. The first 3-4 months were absolute bliss as most people got the time to relax and gather their thoughts by staying home.

Time passed and the pandemic did not come to an end. That’s when small changes started taking place due to the time spent attending meetings. That is where zoom fatigue comes in.

Zoom fatigue affects us in several negative ways and there is a possibility that we don’t even notice it or blame it for some other reason. 80% of U.S. workers experience ‘Zoom Fatigue.

What does Zoom Fatigue do to us?

Long working hours and high dependence on technology have an undeniable impact on our physical and mental well-being. Constantly spending time looking at screens and attending various kinds of meetings drains us too much.

Zoom fatigue results in us feeling exhausted and burnt out to the core, which further results in distraction and boredom after a certain period. At the end of the day, we feel so restless which contributes to us being unproductive.

The physical impact on health because of Zoom fatigue is rather subtle. Our back might get stiffer which can result in chronic back pain, as we tend to sit for long hours in one place.

Zoom fatigue results in a feeling of being stuck. It can also make a person feel very helpless and hopeless. We might feel like our head is getting heavier or lighter. We might feel irritation and pain in our eyes which results in excessive tearing, blurriness, increased blinking, and double vision.

Humans are social creatures. We always look up to something which acts as a driving force. That particular event motivates us to do things that we like, or may not like. We need human interactions but by evolution, we are not designed to look at screens for these interactions.

With the advancement of technology, there is a significant growth in zoom fatigue. But this doesn’t mean that there are no ways to manage Zoom fatigue.

Here are quick tips in which we can reduce the impact of zoom fatigue and that will help us remain fit.

4 Tips to Reduce Zoom Fatigue

1. Take a Break

Taking a break in between online meetings is very important. The break may not be long. It can be just a short 5-10 minutes break, but it should be a quality break. The break can include resting, lying on the bed for some time, going to the balcony and having a look outside, taking a short walk, etc.

You can also read self-help books. Check out our blog on Self-Help Books.

2. 5-4-3-2-1 Coping Technique

Focus on the “here and now”. Sit down, relax and observe.

(i) Observe 5 things that you can see.

(ii) Observe 4 things you can touch.

(iii) Observe 3 things you can hear.

(iv) Observe 2 things you can smell

(v) Observe 1 thing you can taste.

This technique is very helpful when it comes to calming and relaxing our running thoughts. It also helps us feel relaxed physically which results in mental relaxation.

3. Let's Disconnect to Connect

Attending meetings is inevitable. Therefore, try to distance and disconnect yourself from technology at other times. Most of us use social media, watch movies, or play video games during our free time.

Disconnect from technology and connect with yourself by taking out time for things that you love to do to enjoy and feel good about yourself and your day. Connecting with ourselves is as important as connecting with others through zoom. Zoom fatigue results in us being restless and tired, which does not allow us to take care of ourselves.

Therefore, try to engage with activities that you love, to connect with your true self, which would help you to reduce the effects of zoom fatigue.

4. Optimize Your Meetings

Invite only those on call who are required to be present. The aim should be to keep the calls smaller. We at GoodLives follow this technique to reduce video call fatigue. In our meetings, we try to talk to our employees as and when required. When the required conversation with one is complete, people can leave the meeting. This reduces zoom exhaustion and lessens screen time.

Zoom fatigue might feel inescapable, but what we need to believe is that we have the power to make a difference in how we think, and following the above 5 tips would help us reduce zoom fatigue.

If zoom fatigue is affecting you too much then try talking to a professional about it. Book your session here.

LET’S WIN AGAINST ZOOM FATIGUE!

For more visit Goodlives

[mednerds]

For Decades, He Had Strange Episodes of Utter Exhaustion

What was causing these spells, and why were they now more frequent?

The 51-year-old man sat at his desk preparing for his next online meeting when he suddenly became aware of a familiar stiffness and exhaustion. Had he slept badly? Or was this the beginning of one of his strange episodes? As the symptoms worsened, he had his answer. He knew that when he started to feel this way, the only recourse was to get into bed before he got any weaker. As he made his way slowly down the hall, his legs felt heavy, as if he were wearing ankle weights. Just lifting them was real work. He passed his wife’s home office without a word. She knew just from looking at him that he would probably have to spend the rest of the day in bed.

For much of their 30-year marriage, he had these strange spells; he would suddenly feel exhausted and weak and have to lie down. He couldn’t work. He was a software engineer, and any mental exertion was too much for him. Once the fatigue fully set in — maybe after the first hour or so — he couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, couldn’t even sit up. It was as if his body was totally out of gas, worse than how it felt when he ran a marathon. He would lie in a dark room, too weak to even hold up a book and too tired to think. But by the next morning, he would usually be fine, brimming with energy and enthusiasm, like normal. It was so strange.

After more than 20 years, they both had come to expect these episodes. For most of that time, the spells were infrequent, maybe once a month. But recently they became more frequent. The monthly episodes became weekly, then a couple of times a week. They often came, as they did that morning, out of nowhere. Just before leaving his office, he sent an email to the woman he was to meet online. Sorry, he wrote, I’m not feeling well. Could we reschedule?

Seeing a Psychiatrist

Over the years the man saw many doctors. They had their theories, but so far none panned out. A few were convinced that he had periodic paralysis, a disorder sometimes linked to thyroid disease, where patients become temporarily paralyzed by too much or too little potassium in the bloodstream. But his potassium was always normal, even during these episodes.

He had EMGs, looking for problems in the way his nerves communicated with his muscles: normal. He had EEGs, looking for problems in his brain. Those scans were normal too; he wasn’t having seizures. Out of desperation, he went to the Mayo Clinic. Doctors there repeated all the tests and added a few more. They had no answers, though they did suggest that he exercise more. He did, and that did help. Indeed, he came to suspect that the reason these periodic exhaustions became more frequent was that once Covid hit, his gym closed down and so did his trainer.

Time after time, he was asked if he was depressed. He didn’t feel depressed. But he started going to a psychiatrist just in case he was wrong. It didn’t take long for the psychiatrist, Dr. Sanjay Patel, to determine that the man was not at all depressed. Even after that diagnosis was ruled out, he continued to see Patel. It made him feel like a real New Yorker, he joked. At the very least, the doctor could listen as his patient tried to understand why he had these strange spells.

If not exercising could affect the frequency of these spells, so could exercising too hard. After a really long run, there was a good chance he would end up in bed the next day. Because of that, he thought for a while that he might have chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as systemic exertion intolerance disease (S.E.I.D.). But he usually recovered within 24 hours, and that wasn’t true for those with S.E.I.D.

At his rescheduled meeting, he apologized for the sudden change in plan. No problem, his colleague told him; she said that she had migraines that could come on suddenly and forced her to cancel meetings every now and then. The comment resonated with the patient. A few months earlier he saw a neurologist who said that these transient episodes of weakness sounded like migraines, but thought it unlikely because his exhaustion didn’t come with a headache. The man used to have migraine headaches — the pain in his head was throbbing and intense and was often accompanied by nausea and vomiting. These episodes of debilitating tiredness seemed nothing like those. Still, could these be related to migraines?

One Benefit of Online Meetings

At their next online therapy session, he mentioned the comments about migraines to Patel. The psychiatrist was intrigued. Could you have a migraine without the headache? Patel typed “migraine without headache” into a search engine and clicked enter. Reference after reference appeared for what was referred to variously as silent migraines or acephalgic migraines (literally migraines without head pain), usually describing a migraine that starts with preceding symptoms called an aura but then never becomes a headache.

Four out of five migraineurs may have symptoms that herald the onset of the migraine before the headache itself. The first signs often arrive with a change in mood, food cravings, light sensitivity or fatigue. One in five can have additional symptoms that are more localized and last anywhere from five minutes to an hour. The most common are visual, often with shapes that appear before the eyes and enlarge — but aura can also manifest as ringing in the ears or difficulty speaking.

Could the man’s day of exhaustion be the precursor for a migraine headache that never arrives? The more the duo read, the more convinced they were that this is what he had. Patel did a little more searching and referred the patient to a headache clinic in Boston.

Part of a Bigger Picture

The patient was able to have his first video visit with a headache specialist two weeks later. He described his symptoms and the timeline. It starts off with a feeling of malaise, he said — as if he were coming down with something. Then after half an hour, stiffness arrives in his neck and shoulders, sometimes even his jaw. Another half-hour later, the weakness kicks in and he has trouble even sitting up. But he didn’t get headaches and hadn’t for decades.

The specialist had been seeing migraine patients for more than 30 years and knew that migraines came in many shapes and sizes. What the patient described wasn’t an aura: It lasted far too long. It was as if he had a long episode of the preliminary symptoms but never quite got the headache. Moreover, he had a history of migraine headaches and, over time, a patient’s migraines can change so that they have many of the symptoms but not the headache. Indeed, experts in the field no longer call the disorder migraine headaches but rather migraine disease, because the headache is only a part of the bigger picture. And the way these debilitating symptoms came out of nowhere and then resolved completely was consistent with migraine disease.

There are no tests for migraine — it is a diagnosis made based on the patient’s story. The story this patient was telling didn’t make the diagnosis certain, but it was possible. To test the diagnosis, the headache specialist suggested that they try treating the episodes with medications that can stop a migraine from progressing. A new medication, approved by the F.D.A. just over a year earlier, called ubrogepant or Ubrelvy, had been effective for many. The drug blocks a protein that promotes the inflammation in the brain that is thought to initiate the process that produces migraines. When taken at the very start of the symptoms, it can stop the episode in its tracks. The patient needed no persuading. Anything that might free him from the unpredictable tyranny of these spells was worth trying.

The medication was life changing, the patient told the specialist at their next appointment. He took it when the stiffness was first starting to set in, and within a couple of hours, it was gone completely.

For decades the presence of the typical headache was the defining quality of migraines. Experts like the one who saw this patient now recognize that migraines can change over time so that sometimes they aren’t even headaches anymore.

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. (The New York Times). Image by Ina Jang.

[tisthenightofthewitch]

GHOST's TOBIAS FORGE Talks Impera, Return To Touring, Old School Death Metal & "Wet Dreams About Working In Cinema"

Ghost vocalist and mastermind Tobias Forge has done nothing short of absolutely nail it with the new record Impera. Forge been more than upfront about his desire to grab the brass ring and become the next legitimate headlining stadium attraction in all of metal-dom, and Impera could very well be the final push that does it.

Filled to brim with '70s and '80s inspired pop-rock hooks and melodies ("Spillways" is going to be nestled deeply into your brain whether you like it or not), and with enough of the macabre doom twinge to satisfy early fans of the band, and this could realistically be the record to push Papa and his Ghouls to superstar status.

Forge, on the closing days of Ghost's U.S. trek with fellow lightning-rod rockabilly metallers Volbeat, caught up with Metal Injection for a deep-dive in the altogether much more hopeful album, his involvement in Halloween Kills that included a wild set visit, his love of old school death metal (and his hatred of nü-metal), and much more!

Now that you're coming up on the end of it, how exhausting is a Ghost tour? Your tours are very theatrical, there are large set pieces, and there very little breaks for six weeks. Is there kind of a fatigue near the end? Is there excitement? Especially after all the pandemic downtime and no shows for two years.

I feel fatigued, not that I want to go to bed. The same way that Lionel Messi would feel even if he's playing a Champions League final. Even if it's your dream, and even if you're made for it, it's still exhausting and your brain is sort of filled. The one thing that's been a little strange on this tour I must say, is all the COVID protocol and the premise within which we decided to do this tour – especially five weeks ago and before that in the planning stages where this was going to be a tour happening in the midst of a very raging pandemic.

Now as all of that sort of plummeted down to being very controllable – and I'm not saying that people aren't suffering, but I'm just saying that it's not as raging – there's still been a real halt to a lot of the little perks of touring. We were never really a hardcore party band. And we're all pretty down with keeping somewhat fit and eating somewhat right and not partying too much. But when it comes down to nothing, you're not even allowed to go outside the venue. You're not allowed to go outside of your hotel room. It becomes very repetitive.

So on this tour we have done extremely little of the things that you usually would do on a tour. It doesn't hurt if you go out and maybe you go to a vacated little dive bar on a Tuesday night off. You play a little bit of pinball. You listen a little bit to The Cramps, you know? Just having fun with your favorite crew guys just to sort of do something and on a night off maybe go to see a hockey game and all that. We actually went to one hockey game on this one, but that was because they rolled out the red carpet. We didn't have to interact with anyone. It was very much like still within the zone, you know? The bubble. But you can count the moments when we did anything on this tour on one hand. I've been outside two times on this tour. The rest of the time I've been indoors.

But this is what we signed up for, and I feel that overall now when we have actually done this tour that was undoable five weeks ago, I think that we've really made a lot of people happy. And that includes all of the people in the crew and in the band that are so happy to be out working. And I think that overall, my impression of it was that is was fucking fantastic. Whatever the sacrifices I had to make or we had to make were totally worth it because it made such a difference to people and people seemed genuinely happy that they came to the show. I know a lot of people who haven't even been out for two years, and they came to our show and they were happy about it. And I see that as a victory. That's phenomenal. That's what people need. We need to get back to normal now. Go. Enjoy life.

The last time you spoke with us, you brought up that there's this void in the heavy rock and metal space in terms of the next big stadium act. When I listen to Impera front to back, I think this is one of the definitive stadium rock or stadium metal records in decades in that it begs for audience participation. Especially if you watch videos of people from the recent tour – they get into it. And I'm just curious if you had that in mind at all when you wrote the record?

Oh yeah. I mean, ever since we made our second record basically, I've been aware of that. Because the first was written in a total void when there was no one expecting anything off of the record. I composed it on my own. The first record was such a figment of my imagination. But then all of a sudden writing the second one it was like a hardcore fact that we were going to be a live band, we were going to be touring. Already at that point we were opening up for Iron Maiden, Metallica, Foo Fighters and all these big bands. When you go out and play in front of people you start to alter your show. I mean, unless either you're supernaturally already doing the right thing or you are completely emotionless and don't want to play there.

It's the same as being like a comedian or a chef. If people don't like your food, maybe you need to add salt or something, or you should start making pancakes. If people like your pancakes you might do pancakes instead. The same thing if you're a comedian and you want people to laugh. You quickly sort of weed out the jokes that people aren't laughing at. And it's the same thing when you're a rock band and you're playing in front of 30,000 people waiting for someone else's band, the other band. You know that song went down really well and that song did not… that's what you do if you're an entertainer, because you're up against your crowd and you're trying to make love to it. So you're doing what you can in order to make the other person's motor hum.

If you look at the cycle around Opus Eponymous when you guys were playing at Hellfest, you have very subdued movements. The ghouls are all in robes and it's much more doomy and sinister. But the live show now, Papa Emeritus and the Nameless Ghouls are infused with so much more energy. How far into the process did you look at that and realize you were going to pivot away from the original vibe?

As soon as we started touring really heavily, the show is scripted to a certain degree, but then a lot of that script has been thrown out the window for improv and habit. So we have a way to sort of do the show, and every night we do it more or less the same way. It's kind of like an improvisational theater, but you still have a script. Like, at some point your part needs to end with a certain line because when I hear you say that, I know I'm going to say this, and then you'll segue into you saying that, and so on. But how you're saying it that can differ a little every night.

But still we like to have a pretty scripted show in the sense of the set list, because it's still theatrical enough that we can't really do the Springsteen thing where you just have requests like, "oh say whichever song you want." Obviously he's not really doing that because he's looking at the crowd and he's like "I really want to play 'Because The Night.' Somebody here want to hear 'Because The Night.' Oh you over there want to hear 'Because the Night' [shouts excitedly]" … he can't go on stage and the first thing be like "what do you want to hear?" It needs to be scripted in a certain way, and we're just not making a secret out of that. And a lot of our fans seem to like the repetitive nature of it. It's kind of like watching Titanic. You still know the boat is going to sink. It's not going to be like "oh surprise, it came up again this time."

If we look thematically at your two most recent records, there's kind of an odd reversal of things. In Prequelle we're talking about this black plague, but to me Impera is a much more hopeful and optimistic record. I'm just curious on your end did this feel like a more hopeful, entertaining type record in comparison?

I think it's because the overall "rise and fall of empires" imperial theme of the record, the hope is for the bad empire to finally fucking fall apart. So, yes, I appreciate that people tend to hear the hopeful part in the record, because as doomy and gloomy as the journey is supposed to be, I want to shine a light on the hope factor, that empires have fallen and have been replaced throughout all time. And I think that there are a lot of things to hope for today with the current events of the world and how things are.

I think that there is hope and there is definitely a way out, that I hope for us to see not only in our lifetime, but hopefully within not too long. So I'm actually a believer.

I have to ask how cool it was as a horror fan  to be asked to be involved in the Halloween Kills soundtrack with "Hunter's Moon", to be in the end credits of this iconic horror franchise. As an admitted horror fan that must have been something you could never have anticipated.

Of course, yeah. I think that the biggest moment for me in terms of feeling like a connection to the film was when I went down to Wilmington to see the set. I met the director and hung out for a day and just went to the studio and saw the street. The street where the Michael Myers house is, that's all in the studio. That's all on set, like a built set inside of a studio. So walking around in the house … and that was the '60s version of the house as well, which is kind of cool. Of course, I am very, very drawn to the cinematic world. Not only horror, I'm a big fan of cinema in general. In an alternative life where I put my eggs in another basket, I wish I would have gone into cinema instead, because for me that's almost even more all-encompassing as far as media for total control. It's vision, the music, story and get to control the narrative.

I have a few very good friends of mine who are directors and they work in film and they work in television and Netflix and cinema and all that. I know now also that I probably wouldn't be cut out for it because the person whose career I envy would be the Stanley Kubrick types of the world, but they are so rare and most directors don't get to do what they want. They don't get to do their full vision. It's always like a ton of compromise in a way that I would be annoyed by everything, but I'm always like that anyway. I mean, anything that I'm presenting to the world is always like a lesser version of what I imagined it to be. But it's nowhere near what my director friends are doing because they're saying like, everything that we're doing is always like a fraction of what we intended it because of producers and fucking investors and people having low points, stuff like that.

Speaking about Titanic, had that not been a real story you bet your ass it would be like a producer saying like "hmm, the ending is so depressing, is their any way the boat could miraculously rise like a fucking corpse and just come up again?! Because that would be a nicer ending!" But that's the shit you're up against if you're in cinema. I have wet dreams about working in cinema, so I guess that having that little dip in was fun. It was very very cool.

In our last chat we touched on this very, very briefly when we talked about some of your influences. You mentioned a couple of names like Necrophagia and Morbid Angel. Are there some prominent or lesser known heavy bands you loved or you've come to love in recent years that fans might be surprised by?

A band that I don't think gets mentioned a lot that's definitely up my sleeve in terms of what I like would be Negative Plane. Obviously an old band that sort of went a little bit through a resurgence a few years ago was Gorguts. Their Colored Sands record was really cool.

My taste is very old school. Ever since like '94 when nü-metal started to really show its face, I've been allergic to anything that suggests nü-metal and unfortunately that has been like the everlasting genre from like '94 to today. The bands that I like are usually bands that sound like an '87 sort of death metal band. Unfortunately. I hate to be negative. But I like a lot of other music. I like a lot of different rock. I'm more open when it comes to that. But when it comes to extreme metal I sort of cap it at '93 and '94. After that, everything else is just shit.

Metal Injection

[strictomiles]

It’s my munday, and i’ve chosen to get things off my chest. I’ll probably delete this but, sometimes you need a place to rant. To get things out and become free.

I’m tired, you’re tired. We. Are all tired. But when did fatigue begin to become a place of giving up? Of saying, yes. I’ve done the right things but, now i’m bored. So, to hell with rules? To hell with helping people and staying safe. I’m bored. So i’m done. 

Canada’s covid climate has gotten worse. So many people I’ve work with have gotten it. And they brag about how it’s validated them in their quest to say it’s all bullshit. All the while spreading it around to everyone else without a care. People scream peace! All the while berating, scaring and harming others.

And you can’t get away from it. Everywhere you turn, things are getting worse and still. Selfishness reigns supreme. To the point where I question if i’m going crazy. Am I the one who’s wrong for being conscious, for still not gathering but–- going about my day to day life safely. For not booking trips or saying to hell with it all. For trying to stay well? So many people have given up. It’s hard to not feel like you’re alone in trying to keep being safe.

And then there comes the internet. A quick 180 of my thoughts. Another rant. Another reason to go off. Why my creativity feels empty and I shy away from a lot right now.

Everything seems so hollow. Watching the world implode whilst emojis reign supreme to mask real emotions or to put at the end of passive aggressiveness. I think to these two posts. both, rather funny in my opinion and one that just really exemplifies how i’m feeling as an exhausted person in my late 20′s.

Now, these, just make me laugh i’ve been meaning to post them on Gladio for ages. And as a purveyor of the ‘xD’ still in 2022, It’s well and fine. But damn, Does my head hurt some days with all of it. As if an sentence can’t just be what it is anymore after the 17th emoji when do we stop? That’s just some salty crust mind you. People are allowed to have fun and if that’s your vibe. That’s your vibe.

I’m trying to cultivate my internet and tumblr experience as a whole into things that I enjoy rather than people pleasing. That will only get you so far and then, the creativity does suffer. The bottom line is. I am so tired. And it feels like everything when, really. I’m sure it’s a few large scale issues just beating at my brain until it’s whittled down into nothing but, unimpressed nothingness.

My selectivity comes in putting myself first finally but, there are just some things (ships, interactions) that I just don’t care to see which i’d formerly just turn my head away from. But, I think it’s now time that I start using the removal feature.

I don’t know dudes. I’m sure none of this makes sense. I’m just feeling old and tired. And these past few weeks have been the brunt of feeling bad. Maybe it’s the new year blues. Maybe its a lot of things.

[blindingechoes]

I am once again asking for help.

Due to this stupid pandemic as well mine and my mother’s never seemingly ending bout of long Covid; for real, this never ending squeaking cough, heavy chest, fatigue and shivering is driving us both insane. Due to this stuff, we’re once again short this month. My mother needs her medication, my dogs need food, my father’s cats need food, it’s just exhausting and terrible. Plus this month is the 19th anniversary of my little sister’s death, which just makes it even harder to get up and go through your day, especially when fighting off the long Covid effects. I need to raise about 50-ish dollars to cover most things, I wanna aim on the lower end because I know that this pandemic has everyone scrounging through these hard time. The dream amount would be a hundred dollars raised, but I’m not putting that on my followers and friends. I think 50 is more reasonable, so if you’re able to help, consider donating using my PayPal link below.

https://www.paypal.me/BlindingEchoes

If you can’t donate, that’s perfectly fine, just consider reblogging this post to help get it around and hopefully my family will be able to make it to the end of the month with your help :)

[fandomfluffandfuck]

💞 anon again! But like with Covid stuff, so if u don’t wanna respond that’s cool lol

Oh don’t even get me STARTED on the mask mandates coming down. Both my parents are immunocompromised and I have asthma so it’s hard for us to do anything. The only person that kinda has a life is my sister, but she’s still pretty safe and I’m glad she can hang out with some people. But it’s ridiculous because if/when another variant takes over the US, people are gonna be sooooo surprised as to how it happened (as if lack of masks and testing and distancing aren’t exactly why). I’m still in shock when I see people in public without a mask! Ever since March 2020, I either have dreams that I’m in a public place without a mask and I know somethings off, or I’m the only one with a mask and I’m getting yelled at. I’m in grad school and I literally had a dream last night that I was back in high school getting made fun of at lunch for being the only one wearing a mask in class, and then I spent the rest of the dream wondering how I’m gonna go home to my parents who are at risk 🙃 idk how to explain to people that no, I’m not insane, and that maybe trying not to get a deadly and/or disabling disease considering how our country handles healthcare and disabilities actually makes ME the smart person, and not Jake and Chad over there “living their lives” aka being human incubators for disease! (And obviously there are ppl who have to go into work and be exposed, but no one over those companies are trying to protect their workers either!) Maybe, just maybe, I would like to not get it at all and losing a little bit of my freedom to protect myself and others is cool with me. Anyways, here’s to hoping if I got to bed early I DONT have another high school mask dream lol

- 💞 anon

related to this

Answering under the cut because god knows pandemic fatigue is real... we gotta keep fighting it, but if you don't feel like consuming content with it, you don't have to.

Oof, anon, I feel you with the immunocompromised feels and fears. I myself am not, nor am I asthmatic, but I have friends/family that are and yeah... it's fucking scary. Like, yes, if you're vaccinated/boosted you'll likely be so-so okay but that doesn't warrant getting sick in the first place if you can stop it from happening. I wish people would be more aware of others, we're all exhausted. I know. But if we all buckled down one last time together. Literally. All. Together. It would be HUGE. It would change tides for good.

Yeah, though the good, safe fun you can have- take as much as you can so you don't burn out.

Right?! Like, I've already seen the dropped mandates lead to spikes and then people scratching their heads as a result. As if it's not Obvious as hell.

Same same same, I am always shocked too. I've also noticed that it makes me uneasy to see. I don't feel safe around people I don't know when they don't have a mask on or its clearly a sub-par mask (like the fucking see-through/ mesh ones that are Awful and don't do shit). Huh, I haven't experienced dreams about it though. Although, I'm sure there are people out there who had stress dreams over it.

Yeah, yeah, all of that last part I totally agree with you. Like, I will continue to wear a mask for the people around me. And I will continue to get stabbed in the arm as many times as I'm told to (with scientific evidence backing it up y’know). Because I'm exhausted with the pandemic, 1,000,000%, however, that doesn't mean I'm giving up with safety.

But, yeah, all of that [derogatory] aside, hopefully you had/have sweet dreams

[laineystein]

I think we may have to cancel our trip to Hungary in March. Which is a total bummer for many reasons.

Beyond being fatigued and exhausted from dealing with COVID in the ER, I’m just angry and over it in the real world. I’m sick of life being put on hold. I also hate wearing masks and limiting my social interactions. I know a lot of the reason I haven’t been able to do much healing in regards to my PTSD is because I am still living in the world that caused the trauma in the first place. So when I remind people to get vaccinated and wear a mask, it’s not because I’m enjoying this world. It’s because I hate the current state of things and I’m over this pandemic. 

Quote me.

[aeroknot]

kinda riffing off the exhausting thought about 2019 only being 2 years ago...

like. every hour i feel guilty for “not doing more.” some of that guilt and shame i think is... more suited to me just needing to take some personal responsibility for procrastination and laziness. but a lot of it is... truly, what i suspect to be undiagnosed ADD that i haven’t learned how to manage yet. and fatigue.

i have to let myself remember the fatigue. to remember - spurred by my flippant comment - that 2020 knocked me on my ass. i know it was truly horrific for the whole world, so i think i downplay my own struggles because of that. i’m alive, i have a home, and i’m not in a depressive spiral— that’s the win, right? i should be grateful. i should be thriving.

but, like... my dad’s cancer came back and hasn’t really budged. my brother was almost stuck in russia— his flights kept getting canceled (not even because of covid— because of bomb threats); he just barely squeaked through the travel bans. my car was repossessed because of an error in renewal and payment instructions given to us by the dealership. so we bought it— just paid off what was left of the lease. 3 months later that car was rear-ended and totaled— when i already barely left the house bc of covid and especially bc of my immunocompromised father. so in the like 10 times i’d left the house in 6 months, i suffered a year-long insurance runaround over a crash that was 0% my fault. a few weeks after the car being totaled, i had to flee my home when raging wildfires encircled it on all four directions of the compass. i cried every day in the hotel room. the fires got within 2 miles of my home, with every sentimental item and art piece of mine inside. my mother was attacked in her own home— broken ribs, broken knee, the psychological trauma. covid closed our family restaurant multiple times— and continues to; we are pouring personal loans from our savings / investments and federal loans into the business to keep afloat. meanwhile all of the election distress and pain of our polarized society was buzzing in the background. and oh, the isolation: i haven’t seen a friend in real life in over a year, and i’m already a very majorly introverted homebody with rejection sensitive dysphoria so i self-isolate. and at christmas i found out my cousin was admitted into long-term rehab for her eating disorders, which i didn’t even know she was struggling with.

and after all that... i am sitting here, beating myself up for art block— and for struggling to re-organize my life— and for being reluctant to go fight the mental health system that wants to tell me i’m overreacting to diagnose myself with adult ADD— and for being afraid to hope for success— and having trouble believing in myself— and overall just berating myself for worrying about my most basic pyramid levels of security needs being met.

it was a hard year. can i let that sink in? can i allow myself some grace?

[giriduck]

Adventuring within the Safety of Home

Huh. Just realized that Breath of the Wild actually serving as therapy for me right now. It is exactly what I need at this time of my life, 2 years into a global pandemic. Much like The Great Animal Crossing of 2020, where 80% of my friends a co-workers all met up and tended each other’s islands, I’m steadily realizing that BotW is helping me cope with the stresses of the pandemic on a perhaps therapeutic level.

Pre-pandemic, I used to travel. My husband and I live pretty frugally; we don’t spend much on material things. If there are any big expenditures, it’s going to be associated with adventures: learning new skills, exploring, seeing new places, etc. Travel is hugely important to both of us. We save money and vacation time so we can see more of the world together; our biggest checklist in this life is a list of countries and places we want to see someday.

Then the pandemic happened. My husband and I have taken the pandemic very seriously, so we hunkered down in March of 2020 as the first cases in the US were showing up, and—aside from one idyllic June when vaccines had fully rolled out before the delta variant rolled in, and a small handful of blissfully isolated Air BnB long weekends within driving distance of our house—we never came out. Everything ground to a halt. I stopped doing all my old hobbies. We stopped seeing friends in person. We stopped thinking about travel because it wasn’t a option. We both started working from home, we watched a LOT of TV, he played a bunch video games that I vicariously experienced, and we’d frequently go for long walks in the neighborhood.

I spent 2020 devoid of motivation to do much of anything except throw myself at work projects, do yard work while listening to podcasts, and exercise a lot as a way to burn off the rampant anxiety of that dumpster fire of a year. Then I spent 2021 in my head; I started listening to music again, re-acquainted myself with the current Zelda fandom zeitgeist, and for the first time in 15 years, I wrote a ton of fic in search of escapism on a very unusual wave of creativity as I just waited the pandemic out.

Here we are, 2 years since the pandemic began, and the omicron numbers across the globe are staggering. With this recent tsunami of new Covid cases, though the policies in our household hadn’t changed much since 2020, it somehow feels like we’re extra locked down. Maybe it all just hits different now, because it’s been 2 years and I’m exhausted and emotionally drained. Or maybe it’s because there is less general alignment on how dangerous things are right now.

Much to my dismay—and envy—I’m hearing about how friends and friends-of-friends are shouting, “Damn the torpedoes!” as they hop on planes to resume their international tourism.

I so wish I could do that, but there is no way right now; in my head, it’s like setting sail into a storm that probably won’t kill you, but would be super anxious and uncomfortable and could seriously damage your boat. Nah. I would rather wait for a better weather window. I don’t care if the symptoms of omicron are minimal for those up-to-date on their vaccines, I’d just rather not. I wouldn’t want to get sick out of town, I’d be worried about spreading it, and I don’t know what the long term effects to my body may be decades from now. No thanks.

So my only goal for 2022 is to take it one day at a time, because the cognitive dissonance and the constant risk assessment for what feels like absolutely everything is just too exhausting to do much else. The fog of war is only out about six feet ahead of us in every direction, so of course I’m not going to try to plan for anything beyond that right now. But that also hurts in its own way, because I thought for sure that we’d be back to normal by now. And for many of my friends, they’re resuming normal non-essential activities as though the pandemic was over (I get it, pandemic fatigue is real and everyone has their thresholds for risk), which I hear about and triggers serious nostalgia and the dreaded fear of missing out (I stepped away from Facebook mid 2020 for this among many other reasons). Every day I’m finding myself mourning the life we all had before the pandemic began.

Of course, while locking down helps ensure safety and minimizes pandemic anxiety, the trade-off is serious cabin fever. I’m more fidgety and irritable recently, and my patience is so much less than it used to be. I’m just tired and frayed.

While running around Hyrule after work last night, I found that I’m more distracted by climbing and roaming and seeing what’s over the next hill than I am actually progressing the campaign. There were a handful of places in Ocarina of Time that captured my imagination that I just loved to hang out in and study, but I typically keep to the golden path and try to get through games quickly. That means unresolved side quests, fewer heart containers, lower level weapons, and repeatedly getting my ass handed to me by Ganon until I get back out there and grind some more.

But this game… I just want to explore. I want to sightsee. I want to soak in the environmental storytelling, take in the architecture, relax by a pond, watch the weather change, see what’s around the next corner, and get completely turned around and lost.

Hyrule has become a destination. Stuck at home for 2 years, that sense of discovery and adventure was missing in my pandemic life, and I am astonished at how well this game is filling that void.

I’m so glad I waited 5 years to play this game, at a time when I genuinely need it. 😂

[of-another-broken-heart]

I guess it’s time for another pointless update about the worsening state of my life.

I’ll get the rosy stuff out of the way first.

I finally got in the shower today. 

It took 2 days of chilly autumn-like rain for me to be able to rest enough, and then not be overheated into useless exhaustion and nausea, to do it. But I got in the shower. I shampooed my hair, several times, to get through the summer heat sweat and oil. I did conditioner, twice, because I am losing hair and what’s left is thinning pretty badly. I rubbed a bunch of soaked dead skin off my body with just my hands. I tried to finish off a bottle of body soap that I got... years ago. I unloaded an unreasonable amount of soap onto my loofa and made suds and scrubbed for a while. I’ll never feel fully clean until I can actually soak and rub everything off, but it’s better. 

A couple days ago, I asked mom if we could go to the beach for a little bit. It had been hot. Unbearably hot. It was evening by the time I asked - still before sunset, though. So we went for a little while, an hour maybe? I waded into the water up to my knees. It was cold. Tide was going out, nearly at low. I don’t love the beaches here. The sand is coarse. There are loads of rocks and shells - plenty with brutal sharp edges. And I didn’t bring water shoes with me. But I hobbled across the rocks and shells, and slimy low-tide seaweed, and the muddy silt in the shallows, to stand up to my knees and just... enjoy the cold water.  My mom went in a little deeper than I did. She brought water shoes and a clam rake, so she went clamming. I started feeling some vertigo and retreated back to the towel mom had laid down on the sand. I had brought a book - one of the thyroid books I checked out months ago, and still haven’t finished a single one - but instead I took out my phone and checked some messages, and took a few pictures.  Mom brought up 14 good clams. We didn’t linger much after that. The sun dipped below the trees, evening flies and gnats started to come out. We headed home.  Mom made some linguini with clam sauce tonight. And some baked clams. 

And that ends the rosy stuff.

I’m still plagued with uncontrollable preoccupation with a manipulative, abusive, probably narcissist who took my years of recovery from the last person who fucked me up, and threw it all in the trash, and doesn’t give a single shit about any of it. Someone who knows the language of the damaged and abuses it to get what he wants out of people, and throws them away the instant they don’t fit his desires, or prove to have morals more durable than his lies. 

I still miss the biggest lie. The fake person. It will never not hurt, that I fell for a falsehood. That I was so easy to trick and trap and use and abuse and discard. I hate how happy I was, just briefly, and how I’m going to pay for it, for years now. 

My heart is failing. There’s no way around it. I’m in bed half of every day. I am taking every possible measure within my grasp to “manage my stress” and none of it has had any real impact on my blood pressure. I try to avoid things that stress me out. Socio-economic struggle is not some scratchy sweater you can choose to remove, though - it’s the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins and I am stuck with that. I “avoid salt” in the way that I always have - by barely eating, because of guilt and shame and poverty and, now, relentless nausea. I “cut back on alcohol” the same way I always have - poverty makes it very easy to be unable to afford it, and if you don’t have it, you can’t drink it. I am “managing my weight” the same way I always have - which is to say, alternating between rolling my eyes at the baseless suggestion, and starving myself in the ways I already mentioned. 

My systolic pressure is always high. Always. Even at my lowest readings, it falls in the “Elevated” category. Diastolic varies. It’s usually the high end of normal, but creeps over the threshold sometimes. Pulse has been... weird. Most of my readings were in the 70s, perfectly normal. Recently, with the heat and humidity and relentless stress, I’ve had irregular and elevated heart beat. Still hasn’t crossed 100 bpm (the limit for “normal”) but it’s gotten close. 

I have my next doctor’s appointment in a few days. Tuesday. It’s giving me anxiety. I never phoned in to update about the trazodone or lisinopril like I meant to. I want my fatigue taken seriously, and I know it won’t be. I have some tests I’d like to know the results of, and I feel like my requests will get denied, just like my requests for COVID tests were. 

I just want a real answer. I’m tired of trial after trial after trial, wasting literal years of my life, and costing what remains of my health, because doctors and western medicine in general would rather I remain undiagnosed and unhelped than concede to an incurable condition that can’t be “exercised” away. 

CFS. I meet every criteria. I have met every criteria for years. Even the “loophole” part about symptoms being chalked up to other conditions - even that doesn’t actually stand up any more. Because I have been in treatment for those conditions, and the symptoms persisted, which means there is something else going on and it’s CFS. 

It’s summer. We’re poor. We’re trapped here. It’s hot. Unbearably hot. We don’t have A/C. I don’t, anyway. I am a living stereotype, I am stuck in an unfinished cement block basement, surrounded by dust and dirt and cobwebs and moths and beetles and spiders and assorted flying biting things, always. We have humidity here. High humidity. Wet-bulb temperature is low here, the humidity is so high. Human thermoregulation relies on sweat evaporation, and high humidity means evaporation doesn’t happen, which means lower temperatures in high humidity are just as dangerous, even fatal, as higher temperatures in dry air. 

I’m alone. I’m so fucking alone. I’m trying, like a crazed person, to reach out to people, every single day, to feel less alone. But the instant the conversation is gone, I’m crying. Because I’m still in this basement, a thousand miles from anyone who cares about me, lit by a single shitty bulb

 - not even in the ceiling any more, no! The switch jammed, the pull cable doesn’t toggle into the “on” position any more, so the ceiling light is just an outlet now. At least it didn’t die outright, or I wouldn’t even have my computer, or chargers, or tablet, or phone. It’s my only outlet. But I went nearly a week in total darkness, because we’re poor. This isn’t our house. None of us are electricians. We can’t fix the thing. So my mom, on a day off, when i managed to be awake while the sun was barely still up, snaked an extension chord through the house’s foundation, to plug in an old heat lamp (with a normal bulb, not a heat bulb) and that’s what I have now. 

Everything gets worse. Never better. I’m going to die here. And sooner than later. Because my health is getting worse, rapidly, too.

[daisylincs]

I kinda want to know what this Angsty Post-Hive Pregnancy for staticquake is about now...

Grace 😍😍😍 Hello, sweetheart, and, first of all, I am so sorry for letting this sit so long 🙈 But you know how things can get sometimes (s o c r a z y, right???) Anyway, yeah, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m also on break now (and very happy about it!!) so here I am to answer this question at long last.

And, my, what a question!

The (angsty) Post-Hive Pregnancy fic, which can currently be found at number 140 on my WIPs list, is actually one of my fondest and closest-to-home ideas - closest to home because, funnily enough, it was actually inspired by real-life events. 

To illuminate: as you know, I started watching AoS in the beginning of this year, during the lockdown, and joined the AoS fandom (and started to write fic, too, for the first time!!) in May. Now, right about in this time, one of my cousins got pregnant - and, yes, she’s going to be teased for all eternity about having a lockdown baby, lmao. But the thing is - she didn’t realise she was pregnant at first!!

I know it sounds ridiculously like a movie (or a fanfic, lmao) where they always think oh no, it’s just a bug - but in my cousin’s case, that really is what everyone thought. She had caught a pretty nasty case of flu, but, because it was the middle of lockdown and COVID highs, our doctor advised her not to go to the hospital unless absolutely necessary. So she didn’t - but she was on some pretty strong antibiotics at home, and those made her not only nauseous, but also exhausted all the time. 

Now, I don’t know how well you know your pregnancy symptoms, but those two things - nausea and fatigue - are pretty big indicators. However, none of us, my cousin least of all, clicked this, because we’d literally been warned that the drugs could have those exact side effects. So even when her symptoms continued a little longer than they should have, we remained clueless.

When we did finally realise, this got me thinking. Some withdrawal symptoms - especially the fatigue, dizziness and nausea thing - look a lot like pregnancy symptoms, and mistaking them, as my family had proved, was a very easy thing. So I thought: what if we put a recovering Daisy in a situation where she won’t be paying her own health much mind, and would anyway dismiss these symptoms as post-Hive?

Well, there’s an easy enough solve for that: figure out a way for Lincoln to not die, but still be in mortal danger when they got him back. Daisy, of course, would sit by his hospital bed for as long as needed - and, in her post-Hive state of mind, probably think she deserved the nausea/fatigue/dizziness etc. 

So that’s what the Post-Hive Pregnancy Fic is, basically! It follows a Daisy who isn’t taking care of herself at all, sitting by Lincoln’s bed day in and day out till he recovers - then, one day, when he does wake up, she can’t ignore the symptoms anymore... and also has the cold-shock realisation of “omg, when last did I have a period??” 

Yeah, so after that, the fic chronicles Daisy’s recovery after Hive just as much as it does her pregnancy - I drew on a lot of material from my post-Hive angst fic for that part, and I  have also badgered my poor cousin with endless pregnancy questions throughout the run of the year. 

And when I get the time, that’s exactly what I’m going to write: Daisy, post-Hive and full of angst, recovering slowly, and she and Lincoln both trying to improve themselves as much as possible to be the best parents they can for this baby. Which, of course, they’re keeping. Daisy, I believe, would never agree to give up her baby in any way, regardless of whether the pregnancy was an accident or not.

I even chanced upon the most perfect title for this thing the other day!! In one of those, light-bulb, oh-my-gosh-why-didn’t-I-see-this-before moments, I chanced to think that you can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight (you’ll be alright), which is from Ed Sheeran’s Small Bump, just describes everything I want absolutely perfectly. 

And there we are!! I hoped you liked this answer, Grace, and that it was at least a little bit worth the long wait 🙈🥰 Feel free to ask me more about my WIPs, or badger me for snippets/to actually write them, anytime you like!! Love you <333