Irene

Age at interview: 59

Brief Outline:

Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Black Caribbean
Background: Irene is 59 and Black Caribbean. She has three children and works as a child safeguarding nurse. Irene caught Covid in September 2020. As she was recovering she noticed some symptoms remained, particularly breathlessness and fatigue. These meant she had to take almost three months off work. She wished that people understood more about long Covid. 

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Irene remembered hearing about Covid-19 in January 2020 and thinking it was ‘really quite serious’, but noticing that the government wasn’t doing much about it. She went out for a meal for her daughter’s birthday in March and noticed that it wasn’t busy and that the atmosphere was different. She found seeing the reported numbers of people dying was ‘quite scary’. 
 
Irene was able to avoid Covid until September 2020. She didn’t have the ‘typical symptoms’, and experienced diarrhoea, feeling sick, high temperature and tremendous pain in her joints. Her appetite changed and she lost a lot of weight quickly. She suffers from sarcoidosis and felt lucky that she didn’t have to be admitted to hospital. 
 
When she was starting to recover she noticed some ongoing symptoms. She realised she was getting breathless climbing the stairs, which was unusual because she goes to the gym and is quite active. She also experienced ‘awful tiredness’ and felt that she was a ‘liability’ at home. She was off work for eleven weeks because of this tiredness. She felt that the GPs she spoke to about these symptoms were not very interested. She also thought that there was different support for long Covid available in different areas.  She wished that there was more understanding more about long Covid, ‘especially the emotional impact it has for some people’. 
 
Being from the Black community she recognised there was a lot of vaccine hesitance. She did some research herself and wasn’t reluctant to take the Covid vaccine, but experienced a troubling side effect from her first vaccine of limited movement in one of her arms. She wanted to understand more about the cause of this before she had her second shot. 
 
Irene felt like she has recovered a lot, though not back to where she was. She goes to the gym again and takes things at her own pace. She reflected ‘I’m alive, and I just do what I need to do’. She has been ‘extremely disappointed’ by the way the pandemic was managed by the government, and thinks ‘we’ve lost loads of lives unnecessarily’. 

To celebrate her daughter’s birthday in early March, Irene went to a London shopping centre which was very quiet.

And I was listening to kind of some of the research of particular radio scientist on a particular radio station that I listen to and I just thought, my feeling was that it was bigger than what it was but I don’t think that we, as a nation, were reacting to it. And then my daughter’s birthday was in March, March the ninth, and by that time, people were then, as I mean the nation, was then becoming quite worried because I was quite near Westfield’s in Stratford and so we met there for lunch and you just realised, no, it was Canary Wharf, sorry.

And then we just realised it wasn’t busy. The restaurants wasn’t really busy and yeah, it was just a whole different atmosphere and as March moved on and on and on and on, you just realised that people were worried and then we had the lockdown in March.

Irene, a child protection nurse, found it difficult to stop thinking about her challenging job.

I’m a kind of person that, when I’ve finished work, I walk outside the door, I’m concentrating on “when’s the next bus due” or “I’ve got ‘Keep fit’, the bus has got to come quickly, so that I can get home in time for my class”, right. So that’s me as I’m walking down the stairs. And what happens at home is that, so home is a safe haven so you can close off what happened at work no matter stressful was the day, you don’t bring it home with you. But working from home, it’s like that I didn’t have a safe place to go to because I was in my home. I was actually in my home and all I can equate it to is how I described it to my friends and family, it was like you were bringing bad spirits into your home, you know, because there was nothing positive about doing child protection work in your home.

Irene didn’t have the ‘typical’ symptoms that were often spoken about in the media so wasn’t sure if she had Covid.

I didn’t have the typical symptoms so I had like diarrhoea first, I was feeling sick and then it moved onto having the high temperature a few days later and I had the horrible pains in my joints, in my legs. It was just awful. I seemed to have lost a tremendous amount of weight in like days and but the weight just feel off of me. I lost my appetite and whatever.

Irene caught Covid in September 2020. She described the tiredness as ‘awful awful awful’.

And I had the awful tiredness, awful, awful, awful tiredness. I would sit down and then fall asleep, burnt dinner, all kinds of stuff. I was a liability really and that.

Irene had a bad experience with side effects from her first Covid vaccine. She felt unwilling to risk a second dose.

I won’t have the second one, which is due soon, until I know what’s going on with my arm. So, it’s from the site of where I had the injection so it went from being painful to like I can’t put my bra on. And I can’t hang clothes on the line, putting coats, you know, putting clothes on it’s really, in the gym I can’t do shoulder presses, whereas I was able to do shoulder presses. I can’t do it on that arm. So, it’s really kind of, can’t like carry my handbag is usually on my left arm and I can’t put it on my shoulder. I have to put it like, you know, like the like the posh ladies, over your arm as opposed to on my shoulder [laughs]. And that, so that has been a big downfall for me.

 

Irene felt frustrated by the way Black people were portrayed in the media.

Being somebody from the black community to suffer horrendous inequalities and covid just highlighted how bad it was but it wasn’t to do with the fact that we were making, we were at risk of, we were doing risky behaviours, it was part of the bigger agenda of our health inequalities. And the Government have had an opportunity to address it and they haven’t really addressed it so again we were kind of like, I just find this Government so corrupt but again, they were just using information just trying to twist it. Whereas they weren’t dealing with the proper issues, which was about that the, you know, the poor, you know, they were likely to be working in and having poor incomes. They were living in, you know, multi-occupancies because there were two bedroom family, housing six or seven people, you know. It wasn’t through choice. It’s, you know, and nothing has been done about that.