On Monday, I was finally starting to feel a bit more like myself after having Covid – well, as myself as you can feel when you still have debilitating chronic pain, digestive nastiness, and crushing fatigue. But at least I’d stopped coughing quite so much and, miracle of miracles, had slept through the night.

Monday, however, had other plans. It threw a few curveballs at me, and I was far too exhausted to even swing a metaphorical bat to deflect them but somehow still did. Everything keeps happening faster than I can recover from the last thing.

Batter up.

I woke up feeling a bit more positive after finally sleeping through the night. During Covid, to sleep at all, I’d had to build a nest on my sofa in the living room. I’d tried sleeping in my bed at the start, but I take Quetiapine, and it turns me horizontal in my sleep. Even if I fall asleep sitting up, I’ll wake up lying down – which was a disaster when lying flat made me cough, choke, and fill my throat with Covid gunk. Twice, I slept through the urge to cough and spent the next day with my oxygen stuck at 96%. So I improvised. Sofa nest it was. My sats climbed back up to 99% for the next few days and stayed there for the rest of it. THANKFULLY.

By Monday, I was excited to finally sleep in my bedroom again. To celebrate, I decided to risk going outside – breathlessness and fatigue be damned – to pick up a new duvet cover I’d been eyeing for weeks. It was a penguin set, and penguins remind me of my best friend WeeGee, who I miss so much.

Going to Asda was rough. Covid has flared everything: I’ve lost muscle strength, my sacroiliac joint dysfunction is screaming from being sedentary, and each step sends burning pain from my groin up my back. My knees grind like sandpaper, and the costochondritis and intercostal strain from coughing make breathing an Olympic event. I can’t press on my chest or wear anything tight without hitting the ceiling in pain. My body even guards itself when I try to take a deep breath – a classic sign, I know it too well by now.

Still, I went to Asda. You have to start somewhere if you want to get back to where you were. But I felt awful about it. I’ve worked so hard in recovery to build lean mass and muscle so my pain would ease, and now it feels like I’ve taken twelve steps backwards – worse off than I was when I was underweight. Add in the cluster headaches, and I’ve basically been in agony for weeks.

Somehow, I made it. I bought the lovely penguin duvet, came home, to wash it so I could finally have a cosy night in my own bed. Then, as I checked the postbox on my way upstairs, I was greeted with yet more stress waiting for me inside.

Strike One – The Pest Control Letter

Inside the post box – which doubles as a communal bin for other people’s junk mail, for reasons still unknown – was a letter from my housing association. They’ve been sending endless notices lately about building work (this will become relevant later), so I didn’t think much of it.

However, to my absolute dismay – and to the detriment of every anxiety disorder I own – it was about pest control.

Apparently, there’s been a bed bug outbreak in our building, and the letter was to inform us to check our homes for signs of those tiny bloodsucking vampires.

OH NO.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.

I have a phobia of bed bugs. I’ve never had them, but I have lost my mind over a piece of sock fluff on my bed and washed everything I own at 60°C before. There was also the weevil bird-seed hitchhiker incident – an ordeal that left me feeling like my home didn’t belong to me anymore. I couldn’t stop cleaning. Even after I’d sent those weevils back to dark space, the same way Shepard did to the Reapers in Mass Effect 3, my home didn’t feel safe for weeks. I felt itchy all the time and swore I saw movement where there was none. It’s an OCD thing.

That’s why this bed bug letter sent me spiralling. I was already so ill, so exhausted, and in agony from Asda, but I still cleaned and hoovered compulsively – the kind of manic cleaning that hurts. It felt, honestly, like self-harm. I’d have to sit down every few minutes because I was too breathless and in too much pain, but I couldn’t stop until my body forced me to. When I stood up, I’d get dizzy and nauseous, probably from the pain and I burnt my hands from cleaning products.

It still doesn’t feel over. I’m on guard constantly, and sleep is hard. I was gutted; I’d been so looking forward to sleeping in my bedroom again under my new penguin duvet, freshly washed and waiting. But every night I imagine I’m being eaten alive by the Lost Boys of the bed-bug world – if the Lost Boys had terrible haircuts and zero charisma. Thankfully so far, they haven’t crossed the threshold. My son suggested a line of salt by the front door just to make sure.

During one of my breathless rest breaks from the obsessive cleaning, someone knocked on the door.
Monday wasn’t done with me yet.

Strike Two – The New Windows

As I’ve said, my building’s been under constant work. There’s scaffolding everywhere, wrapped in netting, which means I haven’t seen my pigeon for weeks. Squigeon can’t get to my window. I’ve cried a few times from missing him – it sounds silly until you realise he’s part of my little family. I miss his little face, the way he pecks the window and stares directly into my eyes. He used to brighten up my whole day.

I’m worried about him, and I really hope he comes back when the scaffolding goes away.

I REALLY appreciate that my housing association is trying to make the building safer after the Grenfell Enquiry, but it’s been a huge disruption to my life and my coping mechanisms. Sitting by the window and watching Squigeon and his family in the trees was one of the ways I kept calm. Now I can’t even see the trees.

It’s constantly dim in here. Even in the middle of the day, I have to keep the lights on because the scaffolding blocks out the sun. The flat is always cold now, with no sunlight warming the floor-to-ceiling windows like it used to. It’s affected my sleep and mental health more than I expected. Even when there is a bit of daylight, it filters through the netting like a movie set light – artificial and strange.

I’ve had a lot of letters about the construction work, but to my surprise, two workmen turned up at my door to tell me I was getting new windows on Wednesday. It was Monday. Out of all the letters, not one mentioned this. And apparently, I was the first in the building to get them – randomly chosen, tribute-style. None of my neighbours had been told anything.

I was so shocked, flustered, and Covid-brain-fogged that I forgot how to human. Instead of asking, “Why are you changing the windows?” I blurted out, “What are windows?” Then, trying to recover, I said, “No, I mean what windows – when windows?” which did not make it better. I had completely forgotten the word why. They just stared at me while my brain red-ringed like an Xbox 360 holding my best game saves hostage.

Guess I turned into a Geth from Mass Effect for a minute – Geth don’t use windows, structural weakness.

Since I live in a housing association flat, I didn’t have the option to refuse. They weren’t asking; they were informing me. I was already fried from the obsessive cleaning, and now I had to prepare for workmen to come in and tear out my windows.

WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAPPEN AT ONCE? I wasn’t even over the bed bug letter, let alone Covid.

The truth is, I’m not okay with people in my home anymore. I used to be fine with it – when my mental health nurses visited, or when workmen came to fix things, I’d even try to make them comfortable. But after a traumatic incident with my mother a few years ago, I can’t shake the fear. She made me and my son unsafe in our own home. Since then, letting anyone in feels like gambling with safety. If your own mother can make your home unsafe, how do you trust strangers?

My body goes on high alert until they leave. Even after, it takes days to feel safe again. I still let people in when I have to – boiler checks, alarms, repairs – but it costs me.

So yes, I was going to let it happen. I just didn’t know how I was going to cope with it. Not with everything else. I didn’t have the energy left to fight another thing.

Strike Three – Recovery Fell Down the Priority List (the way it has here on my post)

Recovery has taken an unavoidable backseat through all of this. I’m still dealing with digestive chaos after Covid. It’s hard to eat enough – I think I’m eating plenty, then track it at the end of the day and find I’m constantly short, but can’t face another bite.

I’ve lost a bit of weight over the past two weeks. My appetite disappeared, and everything I ate gave me severe bloating and reflux – even water. My stomach is still reactive, and crunchy or crumbly food still triggers coughing fits. I’ve been living on soft food: soups with very soft bread, protein shakes, pistachio creme and quark. Thankfully Biscoff biscuits are still ok, so long as they’re dunked long enough in milky decaf coffee to melt into submission.

Food has slipped back into being just fuel, which makes me sad. I was working hard to find joy in food again, and now it’s back to “whatever’s soft and gets calories in.” It’s strange – I forget to eat because that whole system feels switched off. I’m not getting reliable hunger cues, and when I do eat, I feel stuffed for hours after small portions.

Protein shakes have saved me; they’re the only thing that feels light enough to digest. But there’s a limit to how much you can drink a day before they cause… catastrophic, relationship-ending digestive effects. My son has threatened to move out if I ever hit my protein-product quota again.

I miss my high-fibre salad bowls – how good they made my body feel – but fibre sits like cement right now, making it even harder to eat enough. Kale has literally caught in my throat and triggered choking fits. Why does healthy food always become enemy number one when you’re sick? Frozen fruit salad has been nice, but it fills me up too quickly.

It’s strange because I’ve never been a “get full easily” person. I’m the “I could probably eat cereal or Domino’s forever and never get full” kind.

Mentally, I haven’t been in the right place to work on recovery either. Corrupted Clippy (my ED voice) has been making a massive play since I lost weight – whispering that it would be the worst thing ever to gain it back, that losing control in everything else means I should at least control this.

And right now, so much really is out of my control. I can’t control whether bed bugs make their way in no matter how compulsive I am, or the window installation, or my health flaring from Covid. I can’t control how fast I recover, and it’s been over two weeks. It’s the perfect storm – plates spinning everywhere, and Clippy screaming that it knows the perfect escape.

I feel ashamed too. Because on paper, everything in this post is just “life stuff.” My neighbours probably didn’t react like me to the new-window saga, and only the ones with bed bugs probably panicked like I did. But to me, they feel like mountains I can’t climb – battles I didn’t sign up for. When Clippy whispers its solution, it’s hard not to listen. And it’s even harder to fight when eating itself feels like a battle.

My mental health has flared just as much as my physical conditions, and it’s not over yet. I just want time to stop – to deal with each crisis before the next one arrives. But this entire post? That was just Monday.

Three Strikes and You’re Out?

I feel really down, but I’m not out – somehow. Honestly, I keep doing things and I don’t even know how I’m doing them. I’m still eating at all, still cleaning, still endlessly searching for bed bugs despite the pain. I’m still clearing around the windows to make it easier for the workmen I don’t even want in my house. Maybe it’s the constant anxiety fuelling me with adrenaline, but I’ve already injured myself and suffered far worse cluster headaches from pushing past every stop sign my body has tried to hold up. I know there will be a crash soon, I am not physically able to keep up with this at the best of times, and it is the worst of times, I’m completely wiped.

When people talk about recovery, they talk about putting yourself first – letting parents or carers take over responsibilities so you can focus solely on eating and the mental work it takes to stay in recovery. But when you are the parent, and an adult, there’s no one else to hand those responsibilities to.

I wish I had the energy to challenge fear foods right now. Instead, I’m challenging fear itself: fear of bed bugs, fear of trauma resurfacing, fear of strangers coming into my home. Honestly, the idea of sitting down to eat a “fear food” feels almost simple compared to the fear of losing everything in my bedroom to an infestation while battling chronic pain and post-Covid exhaustion.

So yes – three and a bit strikes. Covid, the pest-control letter, the windows, recovery.
But I’m still here, somehow, still swinging – even if all I’ve got left is the strength to hold the bat.

For the song, we got the brilliant Lost Boys theme. –
Immortal fear, that note so clear
Through broken walls, bed bugs I hearrrrrrrr 
Cry little sister!