My mother-in-law arrived that evening, to help with the kids while I was gone.

On the afternoon before I was supposed to take a trip to Europe, there was a stabbing sensation around my teeth and discomfort sharp enough to call a headache. My neck began to feel intermittently stiff and painful and I developed what felt like a вЂ¦ vibration in my head. Nothing to worry about was exactly what I wanted to hear, but the next two weeks were less soothing. вЂњItвЂ™s just a boil,вЂќ he said after a cursory inspection. So I went to a walk-in clinic in the heart of Capitol Hill and let a young internist take a look. Our third child.Д«ut after I fist-pumped and we embraced, after I went out into the rain to take our daughters to their nursery school, my mind and fingers kept circling back to the discomfort in my neck. She was holding a pregnancy test, the telltale strip faint but clear. I came out and sat rubbing my neck, and my wife came up behind me, her voice unusual: вЂњRoss.вЂќ I awoke with a stiff neck and went to the bathroom to find a red swelling, a painful lymph node just down from my left ear. Then I looked up at the main house perched above me and thought with satisfaction: Yes, this is what I want.ДЄ few days later we were back in Washington, having set up the closing dates so that we could spend the summer wrapping up our old life. On the day the house inspection revealed a daunting list of issues, I walked the overgrown paths on the property, watching a family of deer dart through the meadow. It was expensive, a definite reach, but we were young, energetic and healthy, and a reach was what I particularly wanted - a place that would force me outside, tear me away from the internet, the sedentary punditвЂ™s life. I had always nursed a fantasy of escaping the metropolis for rural isolation, and after our Capitol Hill rowhouse sold for an absurdly appreciated figure, we plowed the money into a 1790s New England farmhouse with three acres of pastureland, a barn and an apple tree, a guest cottage and a pool. It was the spring of 2015, and my wife and I were moving, with our two young daughters, from Washington, D.C., to Connecticut, where we had both grown up. Most notably, I shared a common idea of what chronic illness is like - imagining a kind of Victorian fainting-couch experience, a hyperactive fixation on tingles and twinges, an exaggerated version of the fatigue that comes after youвЂ™ve stayed up with a newborn or the aches you feel after exercising for the first time in months.

I understand these ideas because for a long time, despite close relationships with people who suffered from chronic illness, I shared some of them. Conservatives who are critical of liberal public-health policies increasingly regard long-term Covid as a kind of blue-state hypochondria. Liberals who eye-roll at the enthusiasm for, say, ivermectin may do the same for the weirder experiments in treating chronic Covid symptoms.

Meanwhile, among friends naturally inclined to skepticism, I can see the initial sympathy inspired by long Covid giving way to the doubtfulness that hangs around chronic fatigue syndrome, or fibromyalgia, or the chronic form of Lyme disease. Recent articles in The Atlantic and The New Yorker cover the emerging lines of debate, which pit patient advocates urgently seeking treatment against scientists following cautious research protocols. This created a sense of immediacy and urgency absent from other chronic-illness debates and a constituency for research and treatment among a population - doctors, especially - thatвЂ™s often skeptical of difficult patients and mystery illnesses.Д«ut already with long Covid you can see the usual structure of chronic-illness controversies reasserting itself. But unlike other such conditions, which tend to creep up on society, long-haul Covid arrived suddenly, creating a large pool of sufferers in a short period of time and afflicting frontline medical workers and younger patients in large numbers. The long-term form of Covid-19 has something in common with other forms of chronic illness - strange and varied symptoms, lasting debilitation, no certain treatment.

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