Can I survive in higher education with long Covid?

When I travelled to the US this summer for the first time since the pandemic began, I hardly noticed the jet lag. That disorientation of not feeling awake and alert when the clock says I should be is my new normal. I have a recurring fantasy that I might wake up one morning in the right time zone, cured. But the reality is that my prognosis is very unclear.

It isn’t only me, of course. In the UK alone, 2 million people have long Covid, each of us a bit differently. Long Covid affects me every day, in everything I do and the many things I no longer do. It affects my students, who bear with me with great kindness. It affects my colleagues, who cover for me while already carrying untenable workloads – decades of cuts in the humanities mean everyone is stretched beyond their limits and there’s no easy way of facilitating my recovery. And it affects my family, who for two years now have lived with my need for someone else to do the school run, play football, cook dinner and clean up.

Even as I try to take my symptoms seriously, I hear a “get over it” chorus in my head. Like everyone else in higher education, I’m used to working when I’m tired. So what makes this tiredness so special? Can’t I just have a coffee and push through? In fact, I can’t drink coffee at all any more. And this is a peculiarly vengeful tiredness – trying to push through is punished with headaches that painkillers can’t shift, alongside nausea, tinnitus and helplessness in the face of complex administrative tasks.

In a brilliant article for The Atlantic, the science writer Ed Yong notes how poorly the words “brain fog” describe long Covid. Everyone’s brain gets foggy when they’re tired. Long Covid, rather, is “a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard”. Executive function is what enables you to keep a few things in your head at the same time; to organise what you’re saying and get your mouth around the words; to upload a document to a Google drive, or download one; to engage somewhat effectively with the demands of an inbox; to concentrate.

On headache-free days, I can still quite often concentrate. Multitasking is much harder – and yes, I know none of us can really multitask, but I used to be able to keep a few balls in the air without having them disappear irretrievably into the ether. I’ve never been a fan of Google Docs or Dropbox, but they never used to cause me rabbit-in-the-headlights panic. And since my work is all about language, I really hate it when words elude me. It’s like a threat to my identity.

The confusing thing is that you can watch your colleague with long Covid do things requiring mental or physical exertion and never know they have a problem. My limits are confusing for me, too. My particular version of long Covid will usually let me get through some teaching or seem normal in a meeting. But while I can still mark one essay, or even a few, exhaustion will soon kick in. And when I ignore it, it will punish me harshly.

That’s when I hide and try to recover – long Covid is invisible not least because of the lengths people like me go to to cover it up. I work in an institution that values energy and stamina – those words signify heroically in promotions references, management discourse and everyday chat. And, of course, I work in an institution that values brainpower. It’s embarrassing to appear weak, physically or cognitively.

There’s a line of thought that says every disease brings benefits and insights. I’m sceptical – but long Covid has made some things starkly visible. Learning to work with the condition, if I’m ever able to do it, will mean learning to work the hours I’m paid for, rather than massively more, and learning to work at a humane pace. The burning question is not so much whether that’s possible for me, but whether it’s possible for anyone in contemporary UK higher education. Who among us can say that they’re comfortably able to deal with email, administration, teaching, research and/or whatever else makes up their workload, within their contracted hours? The University and College Union’s recent workload survey suggests that those people are very much in the minority.

Yes, my family are co-sufferers because long Covid means I’m not good for much nowadays. But if I’m honest, my family (and friends) have been co-sufferers for years, because work has left me so drained that I haven’t been much use to them.

I remember a whispered, shame-filled conversation about five years ago with a professional services colleague who confessed that she’d forgotten her mum’s birthday. We both knew it wasn’t an extraordinary occurrence. It was just another nail in the coffin of our humanity, in the context of all the phone calls to family and friends not made, dates cancelled or avoided, time not spent together.

My future is uncertain. A scary question is whether I’m going to be employable if I can’t overwork in contemporary higher education. Then it would just be long Covid and me.

Sarah Colvin is the Schröder professor of German and the university gender equality champion at the University of Cambridge.