Emily caught Covid in December 2021. Initially she was okay, although her sense of taste and smell disappeared within a few hours. Despite having asthma, she didn’t have a cough or a high temperature, but she was breathless. She spent a week in bed and felt wiped out for the whole month. By January, she thought she would be okay to go back to work but needed to ask for a phased return.

Emily still has difficulty filtering noise, finding words sometimes, managing cognitive challenges, multi-tasking, and her memory is not the same as it was. She can remember and think well in the moment, but often forgets details afterwards and finds solving problems difficult. She forgets things she has known how to do for years, like playing the piano. Her sense of taste and smell is still affected. Some foods she used to love taste terrible or have a horrible smell, but some tastes and smells are back to normal.

When she does too much, Emily ‘feels different’ the next day. She experiences aching legs and breathlessness, with overwhelming fatigue that feels like it is in her ‘core.’ She said it felt like ‘nothing else.’ She felt that some cognitive challenges, such as doing a jigsaw, were impossible and made her head hurt at the back of her brain. Although Emily is still experiencing symptoms, she feels in a better place now, both in terms of Long Covid and her outlook on life.

Before Emily got Covid, she used to play sport which she can no longer do. She walked and enjoyed socialising. Life was at ‘full speed.’ In retrospect she thinks she was probably also working too hard and she now recognises the physical and emotional demands of her work as a teacher.

When Emily first tried to return to her work as a teacher, she struggled immediately. She was losing her voice and getting breathless. She built up her hours in a gradual return to work but, for a whole term, she needed to come home at lunchtime to sleep. She also needed to spend her whole weekends recovering. Her fatigue was overwhelming. Her doctor advised her to stop work to focus on her health. She has not yet been able to return to work.

Now that Emily has reduced her activities, other people say that they are able to see improvements, but she still has to limit her activities each day. For the last two months, Emily has kept a daily journal of her symptoms so she can map out the activities that affect her. She is returning to work in the next school term with a reduced workload. She is anxious about how her absence might be understood by children and parents, and what children and parents that she has not had contact with before will think about her abilities. She wonders whether she will be frustrated by the cognitive changes that she is experiencing, particularly her inability to filter noises in a noisy classroom.

Emily has stopped most activities and spends more time at home with her daughter. She has noticed a change in the pace of life and needs to plan how she uses her energy carefully. Long Covid prompted her to re-evaluate what is important in how she spends her time.

Emily has had asthma since she was a teenager and was very used to managing it. With all the stresses of Covid, and online teaching and mask-wearing when she was in the classroom, she felt that her asthma got worse.

Although she was a teacher with asthma, she didn’t have any priority for Covid vaccination beyond her age eligibility. Since having Covid she has had to learn about breathing properly again. She also uses a phone app to help with this. Other people had noticed that the quality of her breathing had changed and she was ‘gasping a lot.’ The asthma nurse at the GP surgery gave her a new inhaler and a booklet to help with breathing.

Early on in her Covid journey, Emily had had to call 111 because she felt so unwell. As well as the advice from the asthma nurse, she was seen by a GP about six weeks later. The GP listened but she found doctors just didn’t know how to help. She had a range of tests that all came back normal. One of the GPs she saw was worried about her mood. Emily accessed counselling via work and found this helpful.

Perhaps the most helpful thing a GP did for her was to put her in contact with someone nearby with Long Covid. She said this was a ‘game-changer.’ This helped her to feel less alone with her experience. She came across a book on Long Covid in the media which she said was another game-changer. She could relate to the case studies and they helped her feel that she wasn’t the only one going through this. She struggled with the lack of support in her area and that no one could tell her what was happening and when she would get better.

Emily uses social media for gathering information but finds it can ‘bring her down’ when she hears how long other people with Long Covid have struggled with their symptoms. She has been in touch with someone with access to a Long Covid clinic who passes on advice that she gets to her. She is frustrated that these clinics are not available where she lives and that, despite political promises, there is so little available to help people like her.

Emily has noticed the changes that Covid has brought about amongst the children in the school. She also talks about the demands on teachers during and after lockdown, and the expectations put on teachers during the pandemic.

Emily’s advice to others is to stop and take time to understand what’s happening to them, although she recognises that it might not be possible for some people to take time off work. She thinks it’s important that health professionals have time to listen and investigate the whole picture. The complexity of people’s symptoms mean this can’t be done in a 10-minute appointment. She also thinks that it would be useful to have one point of contact at a GP surgery with Long Covid expertise who can guide people through the different stages of their illness. She suggests there needs to be greater recognition of Long Covid as a ‘hidden disability.’