This so-called essay is based on a verbal exchange with Sage Doshay, who works on a generation basis and has been dealing with prolonged COVID symptoms since a COVID-19 infection was suspected in February 2020.
I hit COVID-19 while on a job in February 2020. I wasn’t tested because the tests at the time were only for those who had traveled to express countries. When I returned from my home on March 9, I felt smart enough to move back to the paintings at the tech company where I painted.
I had persistent symptoms: I felt that 30% of my lung capacity was gone, my lungs were full of glass, and I was coughing. But other than that, I felt great, and even those symptoms started in June 2020. It was operating full-time until October 2020.
On October 3rd I woke up with the worst headache I’ve ever had. The migraine lasted 10 months. My company gave me 180 days off, in my medical situation and a note from the providers who treat me.
I was in a lot of pain. I spent the first month and a part sitting inside with the blinds closed, dressed in sunglasses. It took me about 3 months to realize it was COVID. I was reading articles and discovered the No End In Sight Void network on Twitter. Since I was 12, I have had symptoms of Ehlers Danlos syndrome that have an effect on my life. However, it wasn’t until the pandemic that I began to realize that I had been disabled my entire adult life.
By December 2020, I was improving, so I went back to working part-time and received a percentage of my full-time salary. There is accommodation, but my manager and I control a lot of things off-site. of my pre-COVID fitness issues.
There are facets of my task that cannot be done part-time or remotely, so there has been an adjustment to my responsibilities, but not to my official role and title. Sometimes we had to involve official people, like when we had to ask our IT organization to allow me to install extensions that obscure the entire pass.
I worked part-time from January to May 2021, and at first I was improving. I still had a constant migraine and severe, but tolerable photophobia. I still lived one hundred percent of the time with sunglasses, but my colleagues were used to it. the.
Then, in the spring of 2021, I started to get a lot worse. He suffered from severe mental confusion, exacerbation of post-exercise symptoms, and aphasia. I couldn’t read. In fact, I couldn’t do my homework very technically. My boss saw me and told me I had to go back on leave.
I didn’t need to lose my job. What I do really makes sense to me. My full-time salary was six figures. I live with my parents, so I don’t have to worry about rent, but health insurance is very expensive when you pay for it out of pocket. Fortunately, I was still covered through my company’s health insurance, my license, and the disability process.
I was absent from June to the end of December 2021. In August I warned that I had exhausted the 180 officially legal days of sick leave and began a much more bureaucratic process. My boss and vice president in two grades above him pleaded for me through this procedure. Without their statement, I think I would have been fired instead of getting an additional license.
They ask you when you’ll be back to full-time work and you don’t know. While it’s a difficult decision to disclose the diagnosis behind those accommodation requests, it has made those conversations more logical for others looking to figure out how the problem works. The formula can help me. So, I made the decision to reveal.
My company won a letter from my doctor saying I have to work from home and part-time. Find doctors who are willing to perceive an adventure, because I never had the test. But, as the Americans with Disabilities Act is written, hotels are well-grounded in symptoms, not diagnosis. You are incapacitated if you have disabling symptoms.
I returned to painting part-time in early January 2022. I now have a long-term disability through my company, which is a percentage of the rest of my salary I get for my part-time paintings.
There are things I want to do to control my fitness that just don’t work when you can’t control each and every facet of your environment. I can’t be under fluorescent lamps, I have a terrible migraine. load. I’m not looking to drive.
I joined a patient-led COVID organization for a long time that was really helpful. A network of colleagues can provide incredibly practical recommendations for accommodations, such as swapping blisters on your table or having access to a dark area when you have a migraine exacerbation.
There are so many tactics for our quality of life in paintings and outdoors; Patients are deeply aware because we know what paints us.