Learning to live with Covid rather than waiting to die

Four jabs in, and I finally caught Covid; me and everyone else who put their nose outside the door for the world’s longest Bank Holiday Weekend. As to where I got it, one could be no more precise than ‘Galway’.

But that’s not the point; what is remarkable is how something so frightening and so deadly has suddenly become so much the norm – not for everyone obviously or the hospitals would be dealing with normal stuff, but for most people, who have endured Covid that wouldn’t qualify as a heavy flu.

None of that is to make light of the suffering of people who are seriously ill or who have difficulty breathing or who are now chronically fatigued; it is simply to take the positive from the road we have travelled since this pandemic first began.

A colleague – who was similarly afflicted over the last couple of weeks and equally delighted to be able to carry on with life as close to normal as you could imagine – remembered the first case of Covid in their locality.

Health staff came out in hazmat suits to take the patient to hospital – and that didn’t seem to be even the smallest over-reaction.

Because these were the days when families weren’t allowed to hold the hands of loved ones as they drew their final breath; instead, they died alone and confused at what had become of them, to be buried in front of a priest and a camera, so absent mourners could at least join in the funeral by computer.

Children said goodbye to their parents on Facetime, thanks to the humanity of an overworked healthcare worker who took out their phone and held it in front of a frightened person no longer able to breathe without a ventilator.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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