The first time I caught Covid-19 was in April of 2020.
You remember those days, don’t you?
People were getting sick all across the world, but no one knew what to do about it. Here in the United States, President Trump declared a national emergency only a few weeks earlier on March 13th, the response to the pandemic was slow, to put it kindly. Disaster declarations were being made in state after state and deaths from the virus and its related symptoms were steadily increasing all over the country, and reported on daily.
Families could only watch as their loved ones succumbed to this insidious virus. Hospital staff were overwhelmed. Morgues were so full that bodies were being stored in parking lots in refrigerated trucks.
I mean, how could any of us forget?
Vaccines were still eight months away.
Millions died.
I caught Covid the second week of April of that year and was bed-bound for about three weeks. I had significant chest congestion, extreme fatigue, fevers, and I lost my sense of taste, to name a few of my symptoms. Thankfully, despite being diabetic, I never reached the stage where I needed to be hospitalized or put on a ventilator.
After a time, I recovered and got back to work.
Work for me was toiling away in the word mines.
I’d spent the twenty years prior to that point earning a living as a writer of commercial fiction. Specifically, genre fiction. I write urban fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers for the most part and my work has been published by major New York publishers like Simon & Schuster, HarperVoyager, Gallery, Tor Books, and Harlequin/Gold Eagle. My work has been translated into six languages (Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, German, and Russian) and has been nominated multiple times for major industry awards, including the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. I’ve hit the New York Times, USA Today, and Der Spiegel bestseller lists. At the time I caught Covid, I had sixty-some odd books published and had sold more than a million copies of my fiction.
All of that came to a screeching halt when the first of my Long Covid symptoms appeared two months later. One day I woke up and I was plagued by a host of symptoms that seemingly came out of nowhere. Dizziness, vertigo, memory loss, difficulty finding words, difficulty finishing sentences, extreme fatigue (and I mean extreme — walking up the stairs to the second floor of my home was utterly debilitating), loss of taste, loss of smell, brain fog, confusion, forgetfulness, muscle aches, joint pain, headaches. The list goes on.
The cognitive issues were the worst and if my wife wasn’t experiencing something similar from her own case of Long Covid, I might have thought I was going crazy. Thankfully, we had each other and our mutual support helped us navigate the difficulties ahead.
We didn’t know it then, but those difficulties would continue for the next three years and they still continue, in part, today. (For the record, I also caught Covid a second time in June of 2022, which was much easier than the first time because of vaccines and anti-viral therapy.)
In the past, I’d had no trouble sitting down at the computer and dashing off a few thousand words of fiction per day. Do that for a few months and you’ve got a book. I had done it before, dozens of times.
Long Covid put a stop to that.
Suddenly, the blank page was a near impossibility. The words simply would not come. When it comes to my fiction, I am a meticulous planner and so I knew exactly what had to happen in every single scene of the book that I was working on at the time — I had it all written down on individual index cards per scene, for heaven’s sake! — and yet I could not string more than a couple of words together at a time. Full sentences were pretty much beyond me, never mind paragraphs or a complete chapter. A book was a literal impossibility.
I was fifty-three years old with a family to support and I was suddenly staring down a piece of cold, hard truth that for me was utterly horrifying — I might not write another book ever again.
I had what amounted to a chronic, debilitating illness. There was no way I could go back into the marketplace and work a full-time job for someone else. I quite simply didn’t have the physical stamina to make it through an hour of work, never mind a full eight-hour workday.
Terrified doesn’t do what I was feeling justice.
I have always preached that a writer shouldn’t edit their work while they are writing, because switching back and forth between the right side of your brain (the creative side) and the left (the analytical side) can cripple your creativity. Finish the work, get all the words for the rough draft out onto the page, and then turn on your inner editor to clean it up, has been my motto for years now.
To my surprise and amazement, Long Covid did not impact the analytical side of my mind. I could edit written work just fine; I simply couldn’t create it from scratch. I’d been supplementing my writing income with coaching and freelance editorial work for years at that point, and that became my family’s saving grace. I wasn’t able to produce any new books, but I could help others do so and so I threw myself into doing that with a vengeance. Now don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t going to get rich any time soon. Editing pays less than writing does, but at least I was bringing in enough to keep us afloat.
In late December of 2021, my Long Covid symptoms went away. I worked feverishly for six weeks and managed to write a novel that I owed to one of my publishers.
A week after I finished, the symptoms returned.
Back to editing I went and there I stayed for two-and-a-half years, unable to write anything of my own but doing everything I could to help my fellow writers’ projects shine. It was gainful employment, for which I am very thankful, but it was also terribly frustrating, and, dare I say, demoralizing that I couldn’t write. I planned multiple projects during that time but didn’t have the cognitive ability to bring them to fruition.
My book sales dwindled month after month and my fans began to drift away without anything new to engage them in this 8-second attention span world we live in now.
Then, in August of this year, I had a stroke.
The clot that caused it was identified in the MRI report as being “age indeterminate.” It could have been there for years, for all I know. Or it could have been new. Studies are starting to show that Long Covid sufferers often form micro-clots in their bloodstreams. It is my opinion that all those micro-clots got together, decided to have a party by forming one big clot, and caused my stroke. No real way to tell, but that at least makes sense to me, where so much of what I’ve dealt with over the last three plus years does not.
My stroke caused me to lose control of my right leg, gave me terrible headaches, and left the right side of my face swollen for several weeks.
It also gave me back my ability to string words together on the page.
I discovered this by accident one day while still in the hospital for rehab. I was editing a manuscript for a client and was trying to figure out how I would start a given chapter that just wasn’t working right. I wasn’t certain my idea would work so I started typing it out…and to my utter surprise, it worked. Not the idea, that required a few more runs at it to get right, but the writing itself. It was clunky and needed editing, but ALL of my first drafts need that. (I call them vomit drafts for a reason!)
The words flowed, the sentences hung together properly, and I was able to write several hundred words at a go before tiring out.
Since getting out a rehab I’ve been working every day. Earlier this week, I finished the 65th novel of my career. It took me far longer than any other project ever has — two years and seven months, to be exact — but I finished it. Edited it. And turned it in to my oh-so-patient publisher.
And, if I do say so myself, it’s pretty good.
It’s been seven weeks since my stroke. I still can’t walk all that well and the headaches haven’t entirely gone away, but whatever Long Covid did to my brain, my stroke seems to have fixed. I can’t explain it. Not even going to try. But in an incredibly odd way, I’m thankful that I’ve had to go through this.
I survived my stroke. I have my writing mojo back. And I’m planning on telling as many stories for as long as I possibly can as a result.
I hope you’ll come along for the ride!