On March 11th 2020, like 52 000 others, I went the Liverpool Atletico Madrid game. it was weird game because hanging over the fixture was the fear over this new virus Covid. So much so that the result, Athleti knocking us out the European Cup didn't seem to matter. There was this weird feeling of stumbling blindly into a crisis with no protection from a Government, who seemed to be making disinterest in the virus a virtue. Studies reckon 41 people died as a direct result of that game, it went ahead despite public health experts foreseeing the outcome before hand and calling for it's cancellation. Like Cheltenham that year it was foreseeable it was politicians who got it wrong.
I'm in the Main Stand surrounded by some older regulars who's faces I've known for years and as the match went on I'm looking around starting to wonder how many will survive, who'll be here next season and who won't. I wonder if the old moaner at the end will make it, he's never happy, don't know why he comes the match but he probably will, what about three seats down, the Hillsborough campaigner who lost his son who's strength and courage I've always admired. I stop myself from these worrying thoughts and concentrate on the game but they return because like others I was becoming more and more concerned about this virus. I'd been watching what was happening in Wuhan and around Milan in Italy. The pictures were shocking, rationing ventilators, medics crying deciding who got treatment and who didn't and most frighteningly, warning us that Italy only a few weeks ahead of the rest of Europe. `You need to prepare now, every day counts...' yet worryingly, rather than prepare Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson seemed to be ignoring the warnings and making light of the situation. Flights were still coming in from Milan, he didn't turn up for SAGE meetings and made a point of shaking everyones hand. He was revelling in being a typical right wing contrarian like Trump or Bolsonaro and belittling the science. It was becoming obvious that we needed to act to prevent a crisis. I'd started following a fella called John Campbell on YouTube who was a medical educator, and collecting scientific research and warning we needed to act now, I'd listened to John Ashton the ex Public Health Official for Merseyside, who had been at Hillsborough and got up officialdoms nose about that. The message was obvious we need to enacting some basics now to prevent a crisis, every day was vital. I thought about jibbing the match but on balance thought there'll be hardly any Covid around Liverpool yet but the game seemed less important than what was to come.
After the match, I went for a drink with my mates in The Stanley, or whatever it's called now, The Shankly Arms or The Paisley Palace whatever gets the tourists in eh fellas! I was warning my mates about this covid especially one who had elderly parents, but after a few drinks things were forgotten and we were trying to remember the name of the Scottish fella from Masterchef who was standing by the entrance to the toilets by where a few of the Anfield Wrap lads were sitting. A few Athleti fans walked in and looked around nervously. I could tell they were a bit frightened, we've all been there as away fans. The Stanley is a proper working class boozer and can have what could be described as a rough looking clientele but it is generally friendly place after the match, so I began talking to them, eased their worries, told them they were safe, they soon relaxed and were surprised at how friendly everyone was after a defeat they were telling us everyone they met had been great with them. We said why expect anything else this is a friendly city, we weren't bitter about the match and explained under Rafa we did exactly what you did to us, stopped teams playing and had many great adventures in Europe. We got it and we'd have won with Alison playing. We bought each other drinks and by the end of the night we were hugging like long lost friends, wishing each other teams glory for the rest of the season. I didn't realise how bad the Covid situation was in Madrid and that they would all be sharing recycled air on the plane over.
My wife and daughter both work in hospitals, I was worried for them and come to think of it for me. It would be hard to avoid the virus where they work, they had already run out of masks and bits of PPE. My brother who works in shipping had been sent a few hundred surgical masks by a business friend in the Far East, they ended up gratefully being used unofficially in a few departments in a Liverpool Hospital that had run out of masks. A week after the Atletico game, we were all sick. My wife had respiratory symptoms, crackles on her chest, I was worried, she never gets sick but I was fairly ok. I felt bit below weather and had a weird buzzing in my head, like band was tightly wrapped around it, and a bit of diarrhoea, but no chest symptoms or fever, although peculiarly both our taste and smell seemed to have gone. There were no tests at the time we had to wait for a few months till my wife tested positive for antibodies but we knew she had had it and I'd had a virus at the same time, it was unusual for me to be sick, I had a strong immunity but I'd had no chest complaints, I'd even tried to train through the virus, climbing a virtual Alp d'huez on my Zwift cycle trainer. I came to the conclusion I'd probably had had Covid and had escaped with the mildest form possible. We felt good we'd both got through it and had a laugh arguing wether it was the Athleti game or her hospital that had been responsible.
My wife partially recovered and went back to work too soon as she's knowledgable and her skills would be needed and she didn't want to let colleagues down in a crisis. I had little to recover from but I had noticed that if I exercised and burnt out muscle my body seemed to react, this got gradually worse. At 59 I could run a 22 minute 5k and could cycle 100 mile at around 16mph average, This was weird, I had a permanent buzzing in my head, exercise brought on a weeks sickness like the first bout was repeating but worse. I knew what to do I'd exercise through it! What a mistake. Every time I exercised it came back worse. I began forgetting words, getting sentences mixed up, I began to think this may be early onset dementia but it was so linked to exercise it couldn't be dementia.
I have been lucky enough to never have suffered form of depression but a few hours after exercise I'd get a feeling in my stomach which would slowly work itself up to my head. The only way I describe it is like taking an ecstasy tablet in reverse, you'd feel it coming up but instead of joy it was complete despair. It would feel like every bit of serotonin was being stripped out of my body for two hours, it never lasted longer. I would be in a fight with my own mind, to the point I couldn't speak, as I told myself this was a chemical imbalance and not to give in to the horrible thoughts. I described it to my wife that for the first time I could understand why Peter one of my Evertonian mate killed himself. You couldn't put up with that for days never mind weeks. I asked her if it ever lasted more than a few hours to get me medical help as I'd be suicidal although the last thing I'd want to do is kill myself. I love life. But thankfully it never went on for more than two hours, like coming down with ecstasy , I'd begin to feel myself coming back up, as the beauty of normality hit me after about two hours. Was this depression, was it all in my mind, I entertained the thoughts, I was open anything, I just wanted it to stop but if I thought about it logically and systematically, it was acute, totally repeatable and always triggered after too much exercise. I was losing conditioning and trying to balance a little exercise that produced no lactic acid in my muscles to find a sweet spot but the serotonin drops were too awful to put up with if I got the balance wrong. I stopped exercising. I wasn't going through that hell for anything. There were lots of changes to my immune system, I felt weak and infirm, I used to like cold showers, now I was permanently cold, my spine felt vulnerable and I was wearing two or three layers around the house, I stopped drinking alcohol after our league win. The headaches were extreme and normality was so good why alter it. I avoided sugar, it seemed to make the symptoms worse, likewise not eating made them feel better. I know it sounds totally mad, I've seen that look on many peoples faces when explaining things that I soon learnt to stop talking about it with anyone but family. Long covid wasn't a thing until I came across a former marathon runner and filmmaker and his YouTube site who was experiencing the same thing. If by any chance Gez Medinger reads this, thank you mate, you got me through some dark days with your Run DMC channel. Here was a man taking a totally scientific approach calling for more research on a thing called long covid. At last I knew what I had and others were in the same boat.
If the depression was acute, that didn't mean I wasn't getting down, those of you who have suffered depression know the profound difference and having visited your club I will always have an empathy for what you go through. It felt like my life was over, I'd look jealously at people running through the lockdown, I used to be able to do that, I was in a cycling club, The Kirkdale Wheelers, I could hardly go on our what's app group, I was never climbing an alpine mountain again, should I get rid of my weights, I've no use for them, that's a past life. Many of the symptoms are like Chronic fatigue and reading about that I realised it could last for years, there were times where I thought this is for life. I'd been to a sympathetic doctor who'd checked out my heart and referred me to a neurologist at The Walton Centre. This set me back, she wouldn't accept I had Covid as I didn't have a test despite there being non when I had it, when I described the feeling of being drained of serotonin, she intervened, who told you about that. Where have you read it, she said haughtily I felt totally patronised, not believed and worthless, I decided straight afterwards, no more medical interventions until the research has improved. She sent me for a MMR to rule out brain tumour because she'd read in my notes I'd had skin cancer on the neck, it was a basal cell carcinoma that doesn't spread to other areas but the subtext was clear, I'd been reading too much nonsense because I said seretonin with a working class Scouse accent I should have told her basal cell carcinomas don't metastasis.
During all this my wife and daughter had been through the second wave in Merseyside, pre-December and were into the third wave post Christmas, after Boris and his public school cronies , ever the unthinking populist, thought it would be a wicked wheeze to ignore the scientific advice and open up for Christmas. The consequences were grave. I used to drop off my daughter, guiltily knowing what she had to face, then pick her up after work with a thousand yard stare like a Vietnam vet straight off the battlefield. She watched so many people like her Mum and Dad and Grandparents die inevitable deaths and here was little they could do. She offloaded stories of old Dockers like her grandparents, finding in her an ally, helping them fight in their time of need, one of their own looking after them when they were literally all alone facing their fears, then inevitably losing their battles and being made comfortable with drugs as they pass away. She saw things and felt emotions no human should see. At one point she said she stopped wanting to know their names, their kids names, where they worked, their families, who they supported because a few days later she'd be palliating them. She never kept to that, it just destroyed a little more of her soul, bit by bit, day by day. But I guarantee if I was in their position, full of fear and often knowing they were facing death, I'd want my last relationship to be with someone as kind and sympathetic as her.
After over thirty years in the NHS, my wife was coming home crying everynight. She knew she had to get it out, she knew she was giving every ounce of herself to her patients, she knew the consequences and toll this was taking and yet she carried on. Knowing that every statistic is a human being, with real families that she was talking to, that needed updating. With end stage covid you go down down so quickly, talking one minute dying the next, she was encouraging people to have their last conversations over iPads. These were just numbers on the telly but they were people and lives that are part of our shared History in the city, union reps and shop stewards, strong mothers and fathers, people who fought to make the world a better place, and people who didn't, those who fought for the NHS and countless other causes, people who'd brought up kids and fought to make their lives better, and people who had suffered they are all there lying in the beds waiting to die, not physically able to be vented but deserving love and respect and the right palliative drugs in their final days and hours. Explaining to the juniors, we might not be able to do anything medically but we can give them dignity and love while they're facing this fate alone, we can be there for them and that's as important as any medical intervention because non of medical knowledge is working with these patients. That takes it's toll. We pass the bridge on the M57 that used to have The Pies on it, my daughter still hasn't talked, I look up and see Plandemic painted across the bridge, My daughter speaks, we really should paint that out, it makes me angry. I nod apart from the idiocy that Pies graffiti was iconic, after every away or any trip you knew you were home. I'd love these people to spend an hour in my daughters shoes.
It's true there are always those worse off, but that's a small consolation to me. I keep trying to put it into context, I've been dealt a good hand in this covid crisis, I'm not dying and it's been made plain to me how bad it is by my families experience, I know what's going on in the hospitals, I'm in the death zone in terms of age, I'm lucky even, but it doesn't work like that, I'm still in mourning for my past life, all the things I can't do are outweighing what I can do, there's no acceptance. I talk to a mate who's blind and still goes the Everton matches, hoping his acceptance some how rubs off but I can't help feeling sorry for myself, I'm still angry. I'm trying Niacin with flush, loads of supplements, intermediate fasting, 4 day fasts, trying to do it scientifically experimenting on myself. I'm reading about ATP, tryptophan, T-cell modifiers, blood brain barrier, viral persistence, mass cell activation, anti-histamines and histamine intolerance, functional medicine scouring the internet for valid scientific research, desperate for any answers.
At the start of this was that lovely knowledge that we were the best team in Europe and under Klopp we had a few years at the party, you could escape from your problems with that thought. The Atletico game, it didn't matter and because we're he best team in Europe we'll win it again anyway. I was genuinely ok with that result but come new year that's being eroded. Everything your fear comes to pass, it's like the Gods are playing with us in some Jason and the Argonaughts scenario. Injuries have effected our mentality, there's no escape from our predicament. I can't use the football to escape because that brings frustration. I see the big picture but this is sliding, there is no refuge. It's January start of Merseysides third wave and my daughter who's escape is Liverpool FC needs escape time like at no other time in her life but instead it's injury time goals and dodgy reffing decisions, and we soon fall from mentality monsters to pygmies. Life can be a struggle.
I go for my vaccine, at least we have the NHS, a few days later I try to do a bit of chasing out of the mortar in a back wall to make myself useful and end up in bed a few hours later for a week, it confirms my worst fears, I'm not the man I used to be and I have to accept that, manual work is beyond me now. I stop any training even walking around the Park in the morning. I start the process of accepting my fate. Compared to the people who died of this virus I really am lucky, I can't write about details because I've been in the privileged position of helping my family to offload, they take patient confidentiality very seriously and never tell me names or identifying information but If you'd heard even one or two of the hundreds I've heard you'd be deeply upset.
I'm doing well, then an old mate who is laying some slate for me in our back says he can fit me in on a cancellation, but can I take the old decking up to save him a day as it's the only chance to get it done before my wife birthday. I stupidly say yes, I realise I'll be in bed for a week but she wants it done so she can hire a hot tub for her birthday, she deserves it. We all have to sacrifice, I wrap up well and start taking up the decking but no band across my head, no dizziness I complete the job and wait the payoff but it doesn't come. That night no night sweats, no depression. I'm cautious, don't build your hopes up but thirteen months after starting this nightmare, it appears to have resolved itself, I'm getting out on the bike, I've started weights all with no reaction. After a few weeks I think I'm cured, I've left the ranks of the long covid sufferers. I hope anyone effected by this nightmare finds their solution my heart goes out to the people of India let down by Modi and politicians, my wife started a collection for basic medical equipment for one of her colleagues villages, you want t do something.We looked to politicians for answers but found it in the NHS with all it's faults, it's vaccine programme beat any of the private providers testing fiascos and the ordinary individuals who are giving more than we can repay them for, not the chancers boxing their mates off with multi million contracts and looking for any chance to take advantage of the misery we've been through. It's a cliche and I can hear the Evertonians laughing already, fair enough my wife's a Blue, but it's a cliche for a reason. When you walk through a storm...
