Penny

Age at interview: 34

Brief Outline:

Penny lives with her partner and has two children aged 3 and 5. She works four days a week and describes her ethnicity as white. 
 
Penny feels she has been relatively lucky. Her more serious symptoms have been limited to headaches and brain fog. After five weeks of sick leave, she is now well on her way to normality. Looking back, she thinks she’s had lingering symptoms of Covid. Penny was interviewed in June 2021.

 

More about me...

Penny has a busy life and works four days a week. She and her husband look after their two young children together. He runs his own business.
 
Her husband felt ill with tiredness and a runny nose before Christmas in 2020. On Boxing Day, Penny woke up feeling dreadful. She and her daughter felt ill for a few days, but none of them had ‘classic’ Covid symptoms. Her daughter had a racing heart, was ‘floppy’ and lethargic and had sickness and diarrhea. Penny was told at A&E that her daughter did not have Covid. Her husband was still feeling ‘under the weather’ when he noticed that he’d lost his sense of taste. After this they all tested positive. 
 
Her children recovered fairly quickly, but she and her husband got worse. She needed to take several weeks off work. From mid-January, she developed constant headaches and became noise and light sensitive. She also experienced tiredness, dizziness, and trouble breathing. She sometimes found it difficult to think clearly and to ‘find the right words.’ She felt in a ‘pit of treacle.’ She felt ‘scared’ about her future. She worried about whether she would recover and be able to return to normal life. She also worried ‘as a mum’ about what would happen to her children if either she or her husband didn’t recover. From February she had good and bad days, with some slow improvement. She mostly feels better now, but sometimes still finds it difficult to ‘process’ a lot of noises at the same time. She feels she is now able to ‘function’ in all her family and work roles.
 
She thinks it took her longer to recover because she had to try to juggle work alongside looking after her young family during lockdown: ‘There was just so many plates to keep spinning.’ She feels lucky to have had help from her child minder and close family and friends. She has also had support from her work and line manager.
 
She didn’t have much contact with her GP. She thinks she has been relatively lucky compared to others with Covid. She sees herself as having lingering symptoms of Covid but said: ‘I don’t know if I necessarily see myself as someone who had Long Covid.’ She hasn’t looked for information or online support about Long Covid.
 
Penny’s advice to others with longstanding symptoms is to be gentle to yourself and give yourself permission and time to recover. She wants people to appreciate that Covid can be a serious illness.
 

 

Penny felt that her symptoms took longer to improve because her caring responsibilities meant she was unable to rest and recover when she was initially unwell.

And I do think a massive thing was about the childcare responsibilities and the inability to rest and recover. And I think that’s why we got ill longer, it’s probably why I was ill longer than my husband as well [laughs] because I just wasn’t able to rest in a way that my body was telling me it needed to, I couldn’t do it at all. So, both of our children still wake up in the night as well. So even at night-time our bodies weren’t getting that rest because we were up and down taking care of the kids. So, I do think that was a massive factor in our slow recovery, and the longevity of the symptoms, because we just didn’t give our bodies a chance to get better in a way that we would have done had we not had kids. Or had we had older kids that we could say, you know, just play on your PlayStation for two weeks we don’t care, just let mummy and daddy rest [laughs]. But you can’t do it with littlies.

Are there other factors you think that, that sort of slowed the pace of your recovery other than not being able to rest and looking after the kids?

I don’t think so, I think that’s a key thing for us actually. I probably needed to stop working but that was something, and my husband would get frustrated at me about it. In a loving way, you know what I mean. But then, you know, so I was doing bits of work while the kids were at school or the childminder. I was grateful though for having the school and the childminder while I was working because it actually gave me a break. So, because I was still suffering with symptoms, my working days I could be a bit quieter and a bit slower and I didn’t have to like do you know, be dashing everywhere and, being entertaining or anything like that. So, I think working possibly didn’t help but then by working I got access to childcare, which I do think helped me. So, it’s double edged.

Penny accepted people had different responses to their Long Covid symptoms. She felt she just had to “ride the storm”.

I think it’s difficult isn’t it because in terms of Covid I guess people’s responses when they get Covid and their recovery, seems so different doesn’t it. Everyone you talk to it’s so varied. So, I think it, it must be hard to have a clear idea of how to manage patients necessarily going forward. And I guess there was probably concerns about at that point particularly it was January, about NHS overload. So, they weren’t possibly that eager to get me in to, to assess me because they didn’t want me in there. So, this was obviously after I was my isolation period. They probably didn’t, they weren’t eager to get me in to assess me, but it probably just sounded like Long Covid, which it was. And I was probably quite like I need a signal, these are my symptoms, I need to just get on. So, I wasn’t really pushing for anything either because I was probably of the mindset where, you know, I just need to ride this storm.

So, I’m accepting of that, I didn’t really expect more. Maybe if I’d gone with a different, maybe if I was a bit more, sort of, hopeless and overwhelmed in the management of my symptoms, they might have responded to me differently in that initial phone consultation. I think I was quite accepting of I’ve just drawn a, a bad straw but I could have drawn a worse one.

Six months after contracting Covid-19, Penny said she was “definitely better”. She could “juggle work and the kids” but sometimes she was still “tired out”.

So, I would say honestly well from mid-February onwards it started to improve slowly, and it was like intermittent days of feeling good and bad. And I would say it was the end of March when I started to think “okay I’m feeling like me again”. So, yeah, the worst of it was really. So, there was that intense period when we had Covid and we were isolating, where we felt really rotten physically as well with the aches and the pains. But for me I think the worse period was that January to mid-February because it scared me and, and that. So, that was probably, actually the symptoms in the first period were probably worse because it was more intense. But it felt like a discreet period, and I was just waiting for it to end.

I think I still have days where I’m tired out of, inexplicably and I still have sometimes where I need to catch my breath a bit more. But I would say actually I’m better now and I’m out running about doing stuff with the children. I didn’t exercise at all until May because I didn’t, so that was, yes, so in May because I didn’t feel like I was able to have the sort of, lung capacity to exercise. So actually, even though I’m saying I’m better by March, actually I still don’t feel like I could do any exercise because I didn’t have that strength in my body, and I didn’t feel like I could breathe properly to do it.

So, I also put a lot of weight on in the beginning of the year as well because I wasn’t exercising. But now I’m at the point where I feel like I can exercise again, I’m running around with the kids, I’m able to juggle. I mean, as much as anyone can, able to juggle work and the kids, before I just couldn’t comprehend it all. But I’m definitely better, there’s just the odd lingering thing that’s, kind of, there. But, yeah, I definitely feel like we’ve come out the other end of it.

Penny felt she was less patient than usual with her children after she became very sensitive to noise.

I was really noise sensitive, which is obviously ideal when you’ve got a three year old and a five year old [laughs], who were then getting better at that point. You know, you also when you’re ill don’t have the option of not parenting because that option doesn’t exist. So I’m still trying to do things with them and keep them happy and craft and this and that. And what…and it was just really difficult with the noise. The kids probably got shouted at quite a lot during that period from me, because…disproportionately to how I would normally be. Because to me they felt so loud.

At one time, Penny worried that she might need to leave her job because of Long Covid. She said “that was the worst period for me” because of her worries that they would have to give up their home.

But for me it was the January to the mid-February was the worst thing because it was scary and it was debilitating, and it really affected my day-to-day functioning. And it really frightened me as to what my future was going to look like, and would I ever get better? Would I ever be able to be the mum I wanted to be? Would I, you know, have to leave my job and just…I don’t know, like just get a little job in the supermarket or something that I could handle and what did that mean for us as a family financially? There was stuff going on with my husband’s business at the time as well because of the past year, he’d ended up shutting his business. Now actually in hindsight it’s the best thing that could have ever happened and he’s far less stressed and earning the same amount of money that he used to. But in that period at the beginning of the year when he was shutting his business and had very little income, the thought of me then not being able to perform and having to leave my job, that was even scarier because what does that look like? We’ve just got, you know, our house and, you know, nothing huge but we couldn’t have kept our house. I mean, it’s just…it’s a four-bed house, you know, which is lovely, but we would have lost that. So that was the worst period for me, and it really did scare me. So, I think there was I guess a mental impact of that period just as much as the symptoms because of my fear going forwards.