Cathy was under pressure to go back to work full time. A long COVID clinic signed her off work completely.

Transcript

Well, I got sick almost two years ago so there was not a lot of information out there. Basically what I had been told is, yeah, after two weeks you can go back to work. But I was still really, really ill and I wasn’t going back to work. It was two-and-a-half months before I went back to work but I went back to work sick because they told me the symptoms would go away but they didn’t … And I realized as soon as I started I was in over my head because I was doing four hours per day. But that’s all I could do. Like, I would come home and go to bed. You know? I couldn’t do anything else. I couldn’t go mail a letter; I couldn’t go and get my groceries; I couldn’t – well, exercising was out of the question. And before I got sick I was going to the gym five, six times a week and doing a really tough workout. And all of that left my life. It was only work and go home and try to cope with the symptoms and go back and do it again. 

The expectation over two years ago was you’ll get better and will increase your hours. So my hours were all of a sudden five hours per day. And then they were going to increase to six hours and the months were going by and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do that. But, to be honest, I was afraid I might lose my job. 

So I agreed to it. They decided so they could get more out of me that they would split my shift. So I would come in and work for a couple of hours and then I was to leave the building. And then I would come back. And the six hours was brutal. I had I guess it was an hour gap. And I basically came home and I lay on my bed or on the floor on my yoga mat trying to get the pain under control so I could breathe again to go back to complete my shift. So again, I couldn’t do anything else in life. The normal stuff people would do after work, right? I just had no life. It was just work and feel sick at home. And I realized they were getting ready to send me back to work full time and I knew I couldn’t do it. So I started to say, “Excuse me, like, you know, I can’t do this.” And in that timeframe it just happened that my doctor had referred me to a post COVID clinic at my request … I got accepted into the clinic. And as soon as I was accepted into the clinic the doctor had an hour appointment with me – the specialist – and she said you are off work now. So then I’ve been off work now for almost all this year trying to get better.

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