"Over the subsequent months and years, long COVID worked its way through me in more subtle ways, ways that were easy to dismiss and hard to explain, even to the people closest to me. I had a headache every day but it was a strange feeling, not a pain so much as an insistent tenderness, like someone was pressing on a bruise or tightening a band around my head."
"That summer, I returned to the university campus where I have taught teenagers at a creative writing camp every year for decades-the same college I attended. It's a small campus in a small town. I know it intimately. And I got lost walking to the cafeteria, couldn't trace the path in my mind or explain to the students how to return to the dorms."
"Alice Wong warned us. The MacArthur "Genius Grant" winner, who was born with a neuromuscular disability, died on November 14 at the age of 51, following an infection. Wong was the author of a memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life, and editor of the anthology Disability Visibility. At the time of her death, she was working on an anthology focused on the impact of COVID on the disabled community. Titled Disability Vulnerability, it's slated to be published by Vintage in 2026."
A person experienced apparent recovery from COVID-19: fever subsided, speech and memory returned, and an emergency brain MRI was normal. Over months and years, long COVID produced subtle cognitive and physical symptoms: daily, insistent tenderness-like headaches, breathlessness climbing stairs, and frequent short-term memory lapses. Familiar places became disorienting and word-finding failures disrupted teaching and social interaction. For a professional writer whose life depends on language, these deficits caused deep distress. Disability activist Alice Wong died after an infection while working on projects documenting COVID's impact on disabled communities, including an anthology slated for 2026.
Read at Nonprofit Quarterly | Civic News. Empowering Nonprofits. Advancing Justice.
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]