Health

The healthcare workers with long Covid: ‘I’m living with the consequences of a ‘meaningful Christmas’’

‘If I leave my son to school in the morning I come home and need to rest for an hour-and-a-half. It’s a 10-minute drive’

Commissioned by Brenda Fitzsimons for The Irish Times

HSE workers Noreen Lucey, Olivia Barry and Helen Hypolite who are Long Covid sufferers. Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision

Emmet Malone's face
Emmet Malone
Fri May 10 2024 - 18:20

“It was Micheál Martin who said he wanted everyone to have a meaningful Christmas and all this time on we’re still living with the consequences,” says Olivia Barry, a Health Service Executive nurse living in Cork and coping with Long Covid.

“December 31st was the day I tested positive,” she recalls. “We’d had an outbreak on the ward and afterwards my family all tested but they were clear.” All have been affected since, however, by an illness that leaves her so easily and persistently exhausted she has to make basic choices between the sorts of daily chores she used to take entirely for granted.

“I did 12-hour night shifts then cooked the dinner or did the homework, then went for a walk,” she says. “Now, if I leave my son to school in the morning I come home and need to rest for an hour-and-a-half. It’s a 10-minute drive.”

Barry is one of about 120 frontline healthcare staff to get Covid while working during the early part of the pandemic when proper protective clothing was still in short supply, and whose life, she says, has come to be dominated by the effects of her ongoing condition.

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Long Covid Advocacy Ireland told an Oireachtas committee last month some 350,000 people suffer from the condition, supports for which are “potluck pick and mix”.

Barry, and the five other nurses in the city with whom she has campaigned for better services, can vouch for the second part, it seems, with the broad mix of symptoms leaving sufferers having to access everything from neurology and physiotherapy, all while battling crippling fatigue and other debilitating issues.

“We’ve knocked on the door of nearly every politician in Cork,” she says, acknowledging the particular interest TDs Mick Barry and Colm Burke have taken in their cases. “But we’d often have to take turns doing the work, depending on who is up to it on a given day.”

[ Long Covid services are ‘potluck’ for sufferers, TDs told ]

Barry has made four attempts to return to work, the first of them after just two weeks, but has quickly realised each time that she simply wasn’t up to it.

Uncertainty, even scepticism, about the condition’s very existence, may not have helped. Among the many referrals she has had along the way has been one to a psychiatrist. “I thought it was dismissive at the time that they wanted to know if it was all in my head, but the psychiatrist was very supportive and said I was definitely displaying signs of post-viral fatigue,” she recalls.

That fatigue, she suggests, seems almost never-ending. Just 46, she used to run a bit in addition to working as a general nurse and doing all the rest of the things daily life and a family, including sons of 15 and 20, would throw at her. “Now I wake up exhausted,” she says,

Money is an issue for the nurses too,” she says. Like the rest of the 120 affected staff, she is on the HSE’s special pay scheme, which covers basic salary but none of the shift money or premiums that would form a significant part of her income.

The scheme has been extended a couple of times and extended negotiations resume on Tuesday at the Workplace Relations Commission on what will be put in place for the longer term.

“We want something agreed so we are not taken to the edge. We want it recognised as an occupational illness. We want the supports we need to get well and get back to work which is where we all want to be,” she says.

There were repeated expressions of support at the annual conference of their union, the INMO, in Croke Park this week with perhaps the most significant coming on Friday from Stephen Donnelly.

“[In] My view,” he said, “it’s a relatively small number of people. We asked our healthcare workers to go into the hospitals and to go into their community care settings to take care of sick people. I know the whole country is immensely proud of what they did. And I think when it comes to this issue, we need to do right by our healthcare workers.”

Covid-19