The last time we all got stomach cramp from laughing so hard over a game of charades as we gave up on getting film titles exactly right and went for mildly similar-sounding syllables, until eventually the titles were so far off the real thing it was a hysterical shambles. It was agony to think I would never again be hugged by my mum or dad, feeling the love and support they have never stopped showing me, no matter how much of an infuriating teenager I could be.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Books
What Covid-19 Taught Me
- October 8 2020: 6 days contaminated
Among the ambulances, I slid into feverish delirium. Blurs of red and yellow paramedic action smeared across my vision. Entranced by the vivid colours, a change from my grey-stained bedroom walls, I slumped to the ground. Curled in a ball on the pavement, I watched a line of ants drag morsels of food back to their colony, carrying triple their weight, while I lay pummelled to the ground by the microscopic coronavirus.
A wave crashed in the depths of my mind. The echoing swell of the sea rang in my head like the song inside a shell. If these were my final moments, I wished to feel myself by the ocean’s edge, watching the ebb and flow of tides at my feet. Not on this pavement, limply slung among pellets of old chewing gum, spat on the ground.
Yet, the only wave was that of cold air blowing intermittently through the gaps of the many layers I had on. As my body shivered under its biting touch, the cold felt scathing as it seeped into my lungs amid rasping breaths. The beads of sweat I’d accumulated after walking a few exhausting steps from the car to the hospital were now rivers of icy water. My hands, clutched to my chest, were prickling with numbness. Looking at the yellow tinted digits, I could see the blood draining away from each fingertip.
Seeing the disturbance of air around the exhaust pipe of a nearby ambulance, I was tempted to hold my hands around it, grasping the warmth, but no part of me had the strength to crawl over there. Instead, I remained a corpse on the ground, feeling the stickiness of the exhaust fumes itch my throat, despite their scent sneaking past my defective nostrils.
Noises echoed in my head, although I couldn’t decipher what they were. I couldn’t tell if they were happening around me or in me, if they were the hums of bustling life outside, or the clatters of tumbling defeat within.
With each passing sound, I wondered if I would finally be called in. To the warmth. “Wait outside,” they had said, as I had stood in the October frost. “We’ll be with you shortly.”
Were the minutes, flickering off my lock screen, counting down to the moment I would finally see the doctor? The one I’d been urgently instructed to go to by the 111 service as gobs of blood had risen from my lungs? Or were the minutes falling away until I too simply ceased to exist?
In every thinkable sense, I felt depleted and believed I wouldn’t live to see my family again. At 19 years old, I thought I’d exhausted all the cards I’d been dealt.
- Before
I think many of us were told at some point to make the most of university because it was going to be ‘the best time of our lives’. For some of us, maybe it truly was. Swanning in the library once or twice a term to spend all night writing an essay due the next day. Going out mid-week; going out on the weekends. Turning into a walking bottle of Tesco’s finest vodka and 75p lemonade. De-briefing housemates on last night’s chaotic antics, while nursing a hangover. All while living in a mess of a home, entertaining an unspoken battle of ‘who’s going to cave first’ and take out the bins or clean the hob. Playing sports and joining niche societies for the socials because, why not?
Alongside all of these traditions, university was, for me, also a place where I could take up old and new interests. I wrote for the student newspaper and became a magazine’s column editor, kick-starting my interest in journalism. I helped in various volunteering projects, to try something different, and joined the college cheerleading society. As dance had been a passion of mine since I was four years old, I also signed up the college dance society. It was a place of experimentation, where I could trial and error what I enjoyed doing. There were times I will cherish forever and people I hope will stay in my life until I can no longer remember how they became my dearest friends.
Yet, a year into the famed best years of my life, I don’t recall really living at all.
Five months into my first year at Durham University, whispers of Covid-19 began to sweep through the college. They came reverberating through the corridors while some students noticed that their faces had begun to swell, their throats were hurting and their temperatures rising. Their puffy-cheeked faces would pop out of bedroom windows at mealtimes, asking for something to be brought back for them from the canteen. It turned out there was a mumps outbreak in the college, and, for me at least, I didn’t know what to be more concerned about – the outbreak of mumps happening on my doorstep, or this new unknown virus starting to spread across the country.
Then, the whispers turned into breaking news and instructions about the first lockdown were starting to be announced. The college had already been emptying as students went home to their families. I noticed the numbers fall, as more and more bedroom windows stayed dark through the night. The rows of orange tinted glows coming from the switched-on ceiling lights had gone, and instead only a handful of illuminations shone around the college buildings. The site grew eerie, not only darker, but it became so quiet that the sound of a pebble knocked forward by the toe of a shoe would echo around Van Mildert’s swamp-like lake.
On my floor, there were only four of us left by the end. We would pile into one of our rooms and watch films in the evenings, while packing up our rooms during the day. At the time, I lived overseas and so, as I wasn’t able to go home, I gathered my belongings together, took pictures off walls and left possessions in piles on the floor, not knowing when I’d be coming back to collect it all. I only took the essentials I could carry on a train up to my grandparents in Scotland, where I stayed on route to St Andrews, where my brother and his university housemates took me in for the lockdown period.
I spent first lockdown largely protected from the horrors that were happening across the country in a quiet seaside town in Fife. My brother and I befriended a seagull that would always come to the balcony that jutted out from one of the top floor bedrooms – the room I was staying in. It could have easily been a different seagull each time, but we liked to think it was the same seagull so we named him Jez, short for Jerry. I would feed him the core of my apple while I read a book in the sun. Although, as a scavenging creature, there were a number of times he would peck at the apple before I was finished, often nipping my hand in the process. I never managed to train Jez to learn the concept of sharing, but I couldn’t fault his impatience. It was mating season, which I knew from the night-long racket outside my window, so I figured he probably had his eye on some cute bird nearby and just needed a quick snack for the road.
In what became a lockdown tradition, one day we cut my brother’s hair. He was sat in the shower on a living room chair, as one of his friends used a razor to fade the hair away. We were all crowded around squealing as the chunks of hair fell to the shower floor, trying to convince him he was losing huge pieces of his precious golden curls and that it looked terrible from the back.
Meanwhile, my parents were unable to fly to the UK and were packing up my childhood home in the Middle East as they had planned to move house before the pandemic started.
My childhood home was situated in the old part of Abu Dhabi’s city centre. You could climb up a ladder to sit on the flat roof that overlooked the other smooth-topped villas around it and the network of roads that remained busy throughout the night. Scattered stars in the sky would blend into the lights flashing on the tops of the skyscrapers. The big red letter ‘M’ of the Marriot hotel would cast a red glimmer over the adjacent buildings. Al Wahda Mall and the Grand Millennium Hotel were diagonally opposite at the junction, away from the red spotlight. The strip of sea on the horizon would disappear in the dusty fog of the city.
I admit, I’m romanticising the view from my old roof. In reality, it was incredibly dusty up there and you couldn’t touch anything or sit down without sand-coloured stains immediately giving your escapade away. But, despite all the dust, dirt and pigeon poo, it was my place of tranquillity, and the only home I knew or really remembered. I was born in Oman, but as we left when I was only five, I have few memories of what our home there was like.
It wasn’t until June that my brother and I could finally make the journey down from Scotland to be reunited with them and see the new house for the first time.
The summer after first lockdown, when the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ deals enticed us to frequent our local pubs and restaurants, I continued to feel largely protected from what was really happening around me, never quite having to confront nor process what was truly going on.
That 19-year-old university student in her college mascot’s duck costume welcoming freshers at the start of the academic year post lockdown had no idea. She danced like a lunatic in blinded joy, where all that existed in her mind was the beat of the 2000s bangers blasting through the speaker at the front of the college building. She was utterly oblivious to the dramatic change in tune her life was about to undertake.
I thought I was untouchable, I thought I was safe, I thought I was going to be fine. I was young. I was fit. I was healthy.
Was. Was. Was.
I didn’t know a thing.
- October 2 2020: Contaminated
In my second year at university, I was living in a house with six friends and started the first term working as a freshers’ representative for my college. We were trying to navigate organising freshers’ week, attending to the needs of around 500 first-years, while a deadly pandemic was sweeping across the globe. In the mayhem, I confronted the inevitable.
One of the events we’d organised was a socially-distant formal dinner, where the hall was decked out with streamers and banners, themed ‘Great Gatsby’. In the middle of the event, as we ensured the three courses reached their hungry destinations as efficiently as possible, an itch prickled in my throat. I quietly coughed under my mask, trying not to draw attention to myself. The itch persisted. I coughed again, desperate to shift it. The itch hit back, this time scathing my throat, prompting a splutter I battled to stifle behind the blue cloth.
Was this the beginning of the feared itchy throat and persistent cough?
Was it my turn to vanish for two weeks?
Following the routine procedure at the time for when the dreaded duo reared their ugly head, I went to do a PCR test. The closest place to me was a pop-up site in Josephine Butler, a college a little further up the hill, where tests were done in the back of a white van. I knew what the result would be before I rammed the cotton bud up my nose. As I sneezed and my eyes began to stream, I knew my chances were futile. I’d been surrounded by freshers, and a few days prior, I’d helped a practically comatose and maskless fresher into the shower to clean up their vomit before getting them into bed. I had an absolutely minuscule chance of escape.
- October 3 2020: 1 day contaminated
The text pinged in. The ‘positive’ news lit up my phone, adding: “Try not to worry. You can often ease symptoms at home until you recover.”
My stomach lurched as news headlines I’d previously read flooded my mind; all the stories about the thousands of people dying because of the virus, how fast it was spreading and the terrifying uncertainty of how many more victims it would claim before a cure or vaccine was available.
Was I going to become part of the fast-growing tally of fatalities? Or would it be “like a flu”, as some younger people had described it after testing positive?
My brother actually tested positive the week before I did. His survivor story consisted of an awkward text from a Tinder date and a bad cold. I’d have welcomed this slight embarrassment and social sanction, but instead, I suffocated in solitude with the crippling belief I was going to die, as the onset of a cough turned into a host of desolating symptoms.
October 3rd 2020 was imprinted in my memory as the day I began to share my body with something else. Something intangible. Something that latched onto every facet of my being, taking control of how each part functions. I felt its presence in every throb of pain that intermittently grasped hold. In my leg, my stomach, my head, my chest, my heart. I felt its grip squeezing the energy out of my muscles and brain like a lemon, as its other hand suffocated my every breath as I hiked up a flight of stairs. Stripped of my youth over the subsequent years of battling on, my typically brown hair began to shimmer grey. At the age of 22.
If I look back on my 14 days of isolation, there are so many blurred expanses of time where I have no idea whether I was sleeping the hours away, staring at the grey walls of my room or just watching the rise and fall of my heaving chest. I don’t know what each day separated into or how those 20,160 minutes ticked by. I can only remember a few snippets before my brain went on standby until it could handle being in the world again.
After I told my housemates the outcome of my test, it was decided that I would isolate in my bedroom, which was on the top floor, and use one of two bathrooms in the house to myself, while they all used the other. I would use the kitchen once or twice a day as needed, but would let the house know when I intended on using it so they could vacate the space. I’d wear a mask whenever I left my room and, when in the kitchen, I’d spray down all the surfaces and clean all the pans or crockery in the kitchen I’d used before leaving. I moved any snacks I had that didn’t need to be in the fridge into my room to limit the amount of time I walked through the house. Amazingly, none of them ended up getting Covid-19 during that fortnight, or at least if they did after their initial tests, they showed no symptoms.
When I took the PCR test, my throat was merely uncomfortable, provoking the occasional cough. I was fatigued, but not crushed by exhaustion. By the time the result pinged in, the cough was rattling through my chest in uncontrollable splutters. My body collapsed, needing to be horizontal rather than wasting energy holding my spine upright.
The day after my positive result, my university lectures began, all of which were running on Zoom, enabling me to attend from the comfort of my bed. With my camera turned off, I could conceal the lifelessness of my gaze and the weakness etched onto my face, although I would’ve retained the same amount of information had I not even logged on at all. With my eyes open or closed, I slept through every single one, only being thrust awake as my body convulsed under the conviction of a cough.
In a crescendo of symptoms, the virus ventured into every nook and cranny of my body and mind. Bedridden for ten days, my fever burned so violently I broke out in inflamed rashes. I wanted to shed my skin. To climb out of my body for a respite from the relentless pain. To scream at the invader feasting on my organs. I couldn’t lie on my side because it strained my heart and lungs too much. Forced to lie on my back, I’d watch my heart beating out my chest in agony.
When the fatigue firmly grasped hold of every system in my body, I began setting multiple alarms each morning in fear I wouldn’t wake up the next day, hoping they’d entice the life back to me by encouraging fragments of my soul to regain some momentum purely to snooze them all.
Running on adrenaline, I willed myself to survive another day.
- October 6 2020: 4 days contaminated
Struggling to sleep in suffocated discomfort, I ran my eyes over the vague shapes in the room: the assortment of drawings blue-tacked above my wooden desk at the foot of my bed; the small wardrobe beside it, nestled in so closely it was a jigsaw trying to navigate space to pull out the chair and tuck your legs under the table; and the door that led out to the landing I shared with two of my housemates. Then, in the narrow space between my bed and the wall to the left, a dark hooded shadow stood, staring at me. Unmoving. In the lightless hour of 10 p.m., I could only see its outline – a vacant silhouette. I dared not, could not, move.
My gaze locked into the space where its eyes would have been. Even though it had no face, I could feel the presence of a stare scrutinising the depths of my mind, detecting everything I thought and felt, while it remained a statue. As if summoned by the softening stumbles of my heart rate, I thought the grim reaper arrived for those final moments before I would be taken away. To that unknown place, where no one returns. The terror-fuelled adrenaline in my body subsided and my determination faded. It was time to let go, submit and drift away.
As the figure patiently waited for me, the last person’s voice I decided I wanted to hear was my brother’s. His contagious laugh wields such power in cheering people up no matter what issue is at hand. I couldn’t hold back the chokes of tears as I realised how much I’d miss him if I never saw him again. I slowly eased my right arm in the direction of my bedside table, feeling an ache spread down it. Trying to grasp hold of my phone, the lump of metal felt heavy in my hand.
After unlocking it, the light from the screen burning my eyes, I went to my contacts. I skimmed over my parents’ number, feeling a throb pull at my chest. I so badly wanted to call them, but didn’t know how to find the words to explain what was happening. I didn’t think my brother would ask as many questions, so I tapped on his number. The screen went dark, I let my hand drop to the pillow in exhaustion, as I waited for the beeps to subside.
“Hey Jas, is everything alright?”
Just like that, another wave of tears flooded from my eyes, as pain washed through my body. I wasn’t ready to never see my family again.
Hearing me cry through the phone, he asked, “What’s wrong, is everything okay?”
“I… I… just… really… don’t feel… well Benj,” I said, desperately trying to settle my stunted, sobbing breaths. Crying only made it even harder to get the air into my lungs.
I wanted to say ‘I’m scared,’ but the closest thing I could say was, “I… can’t sleep.”
I didn’t want to admit out loud how gut-wrenchingly terrified I was, how much I just wanted to hug him and say that I loved him more than anything.
He asked what I was feeling, and I said vaguely I was “just a little out of breath.”
I’d always been the kind of person who downplayed any struggle or suffering. I’d feel embarrassed at the thought of making a scene because I’d tell myself the pain or problem wasn’t anything I couldn’t just deal with – there was no need to make a fuss. That was why I couldn’t tell my parents, or even my housemates, just how bad things were getting. A part of me refused to give-in and accept things were really as bad as I feared they were getting. I also wanted to protect everyone I cared about, not only from worrying about me, but also from the virus, particularly now that I knew what it was really like.
Trying to change the direction of the conversation, I said, “How are you? Are you out right now?” I could hear the sounds of laughter and clatter in the background of the call.
“Yeah, I’m at a friend’s house, we’ve just had dinner, but don’t worry Jas, I can chat for a bit. Everything will be okay, try to relax,” he replied.
He then began to distract me with funny commentary from the dinner party, of the drunken chaos that had started to unfold in his friend’s living room.
“You should try listening to one of Bob Ross’ painting videos, his voice is really soothing, it always helps me fall asleep,” he went on to say.
He explained how to find the videos online to watch, and I thanked him and told him to get back to his friends, as I could still hear all the merriment in the background.
He asked, “You going to be okay though Jas?”
“Yeah, thanks Benj, I’ll be all good, thanks for being here,” I responded, as tears creeped back into my eyes.
“Anytime, Jas, and call me if you need to again yeah, I’m here,” he said.
“Thanks Benj, will do, have fun tonight, love you.”
“Will do, lots of love Jas, bye.”
“Bye.”
Hanging up the phone, I knew I had to drown myself in fear to ensure I’d have the adrenaline to keep on battling. I had to fight with everything left inside of me, because I couldn’t accept that as the final conversation I’d ever have with my brother.
I turned despairing thoughts that I’d experienced all the last-times with my family into a rage that screamed at me to fight back. My heart, on the brink of shattering, throbbed as I thought of the last time we played a game of cards, having to re-explain the rules to my dad even though it was the same version of gin rummy we always played. The last time we sat down for dinner and my brother told my mum the vegetables were too bland with a cheeky smile on his face, knowing that was exactly how he could wind her up. The last time we all got stomach cramp from laughing so hard over a game of charades as we gave up on getting film titles exactly right and went for mildly similar-sounding syllables, until eventually the titles were so far off the real thing it was a hysterical shambles. It was agony to think I would never again be hugged by my mum or dad, feeling the love and support they have never stopped showing me, no matter how much of an infuriating teenager I could be.
The last time I’d seen my parents had been in Durham in September. They’d come up with me to get settled in. We’d gone to see Barnard Castle and walked to the High Force waterfalls nearby. It was a tranquil walk along the water’s edge, over a wooden bridge and up a little further to the cascading water throwing itself from the cliff above. There, we took a family selfie with the waterfall behind. I looked at that photo throughout my isolation. My dad on the left, me in the middle, my mum on the right. The sun streaking over their faces and big smiles – smiles which extended into my parent’s eyes and were contagious.
I thought of all these last-times as I wondered if each breath I took could be my last. As I felt the waves of exhaustion gripping hold, all I could do was force the air in and out of my lungs. Elongating each breath to fill my chest with oxygen, even though no amount of counting my inhales and exhales reduced the feeling of suffocation in my lungs.
As I played one of Bob Ross’ painting tutorials, my mind wandered from what he was saying to imagine myself lying against the armrest of the sofa with my mum, dad and brother sat along the rest of it, as if we were all watching a film and I was just falling asleep. I clung to the mental image, willing myself in mind and body to be transported to that moment in time. If I was to die, I’d want my final breaths to be filled with the warmth and love of my family even though they were at the far ends of the country from me: my parents now a six-hour train journey south, my brother a four-hour train journey north.
I listened to the sound of ambulances shrieking down the road outside my window, wondering if one would arrive for me.
My brother didn’t know that was why I called for over four years. I cherished my family’s blissful ignorance of how utterly traumatising that time was for me for a long time. When I finally shared truth with them, inevitably many tears were shed and they understandably asked why I didn’t say anything at the time. There was little answer I could give them other than I didn’t want to worry them.
It is often the smallest of acts that carry the greatest impact. The sound of a voice or a laugh. The showing of love. The warmth of an embrace. Over the years, I took more medication, vitamins and antibiotics than I could ever count, underwent more treatments than I care to remember, including surgeries, but nothing was more healing than that phone call with my brother or the first hug I had from my mum and dad when I got home that Christmas.
- October 7 2020: 5 days contaminated
I must have drifted off to the sound of Bob Ross’s painting tutorial, because a streak of light was piercing through my makeshift blind. As the ray shone a cutting beam through my room, it accentuated all the particles of dust floating and swaying in the air. I felt momentarily star-struck, in that brain haze and unbalance you might feel after waking from an afternoon nap. My phone was still lying next to me. I limply tapped the screen to see what time it was. 7:34am. The first of the ten alarms I set for the morning was at 8, ensuring I’d be awake for a lecture at 9.
There was a numbness, a stillness, where all the panic and noise of my body and mind had silenced to a depleted murmur. I wondered if it had been real – what I remembered of the night. Had I really been on the brink of death? Had a hooded figure really watched the life fade away from me?
I unlocked my phone and checked my recent calls, seeing the last one was to my brother at 10:03 p.m. for 11 minutes. Recognising the horrors of the night had indeed been real, I wondered why I didn’t feel a wave of relief; I survived and made it to another day so there was a new lease of hope I’d make it home – surely?
Yet, in a strangely calm, but foretelling awareness, I knew it was only the beginning of something, and now was not the time to celebrate. In my head I still had to survive another 67 days before I’d see my brother again for the Christmas holiday, and another 7 days after that before I’d see my parents. I can’t tell you exactly why I didn’t just go home after my isolation, and make my life infinitely easier, but I think it was largely because I was so caught up in simply trying to survive each day, my normal ability to problem-solve, to think of a solution like that, was gone.
Trying to console myself the figure had just been a hallucination, a projection of the fear in my own mind, I attempted to wipe the memory of it from my consciousness, with little success. I couldn’t shake off the fact I’d felt like the life was being sapped from me, with each breath weakening, each heart beat faltering, and my sense of reality wavering. There were a number of nights when the hooded figure returned, although none quite so vivid. None quite so real. Its silhouette crept into various rooms as a mirage, a reminder of our first interaction and perhaps the final encounter to come.
As the days of my isolation fell away, my emotions grew more erratically in juxtaposition: one moment I felt great peace in being so utterly alone, not having the capacity to speak to anyone, but the next minute I felt the sharp pain of heart-break as I longed for my family. One moment death was terrifying, the next peaceful, the next amusing. When I didn’t have the energy to be afraid anymore, I found the thought that this could be my denouement absurd and slightly laughable, despite nothing being remotely comical.
If it’s possible to will yourself hard enough to keep on living, then I believe that’s what kept me alive in those 14 days. Call me delusional, but it really felt like my survival was hanging by a thread and my complete refusal to be parted with my family was the sole driver in my body’s fight to keep going.
Author Biography: I’ve been working as a journalist for past few years, covering a wide range of topics for both U.S. and U.K. news outlets, as well as a local London radio station. Currently, I work as a U.S. News Reporter for Newsweek, focusing mostly on American health policy, health insurance, and health more broadly – looking at new scientific studies, issues relating to different chronic conditions, drinking water contamination and many other matters.
Outside of journalism, I’ve loved story-telling ever since I was a child. From writing short stories and making comic strips, my childhood was filled with creativity and the written word; both of which continue to reside in many aspects of my young adult life. Writing has been a massive part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I hope to continue writing books in the years to come.