Ravi Veriah Jacques wakes up in his childhood bedroom and wonders if it’s going to be a good day, which he defines as doing about two hours of activity, maybe playing the violin or writing for a while. The rest, he will spend in bed or doing what he calls “existing”: watching television with his eyes closed, trying not to think.
For more than a year and a half, debilitating fatigue and a constellation of other symptoms have confined him to a quarter-mile radius around his father’s London home, circumscribing his former identity as a star scholar at Stanford University and an accomplished musician whose life spanned the globe. .
“To give up hope of improvement is to give up life,” he said in an interview. But every month that goes by without improvement makes it a little harder to wait.
Ravi, who is 24, is one of the tens of millions worldwide living with Covid. The degree of suffering varies, but patients share one thing in common: fear of an uncertain future.
One question dominates Ravi’s thoughts: who will he be after his illness?
At the beginning of 2020, he was on top of the world. He had just won the Schwarzman Scholarship, a prestigious scholarship to complete a master’s degree in global affairs at China’s top university. He also graduated from Stanford in the spring, where he had also founded a progressive campus magazine.
And then, a new virus emerged around the world.
Ravi Veriah Jacques shares his flat with his father in north London. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
Ravi finished his history thesis at home and graduated online. He continued with the Schwarzman program remotely and began taking classes on his computer from South Korea, where, in light of China’s strict quarantine, he and other scholars in the program had moved.
I had dealt with episodes of extreme fatigue in college of short duration, usually after periods of high stress. One arrived in November 2020 and another in February 2021, when he spent half the month in bed. A month later, the fatigue came again, and this time, it never left.
There was no Covid test at the time, and a formal diagnosis would come later in the year, when doctors assumed he had contracted the virus asymptomatically and diagnosed him based on his symptoms and blood tests. blood, which ruled out other conditions.
As an undergraduate, he was known as the student who did all the readings, and then some, and never shied away from confronting the undergraduates in debate with his characteristic, never pugilistic but rather disarming nature at through enthusiasm and humor.
For a 20-page final assignment in a class his sophomore year, he turned in a paper 40 pages over the limit. He had kept Kathryn Olivarius, an assistant professor of history, up until 3 a.m. reading and editing the draft. Impressed, she continued to advise Ravi on his senior thesis. Ravi would have been a “brilliant academic, an absolutely brilliant historian,” he says.
Ravi Veriah Jacques before experiencing long Covid. Photo: Courtesy of Ravi Veriah Jacques
But 19 months of struggling with his condition has worn away Ravi’s taste. These days, Ravi is just as smart, but tired and lives a little more in his head.
Martin Jacques, Ravi’s father and the former editor of the London-based political magazine Marxism Today (he has also contributed regularly to The Guardian), has suffered throughout his life from severe episodes of chronic fatigue syndrome that can last months .
Long Covid shares traits with ME/CFS in that it is often short for chronic fatigue, a condition that can also be triggered by a viral infection. Martin worried that Ravi might have inherited the same risk of fatigue, just as the two share the same color eyes and laugh. Ravi described his relationship with his father as something out of “Finding Nemo,” sometimes difficult, but the bond is unbreakable.
“Worst case scenario, I have Cs,” Ravi told his father.
“The worst case scenario is that you’re sick for a year,” Martin replied.
Worst case scenarios soon became Ravi’s reality. At first he aimed to expand the tasks to pass his classes. When that wasn’t enough, he made plans to postpone his thesis. After weeks of exhaustion, he formally requested a leave of absence, assuming that stopping work entirely would lead to his recovery. He spent more than 16 hours a day in bed. Even reading novels or listening to music seemed too much. He said he often felt like “a sick animal, going to hide in a corner.”
It didn’t improve, and to his surprise he realized that he had also lost his sense of smell and taste, which was easy to lose in the face of exhaustion. There had been unsavory meals, but he had rejected them because he was a bad cook.
Martin saw Ravi’s illness through his prism – perhaps Covid had triggered a chronic illness that Ravi was predisposed to – that had its benefits. Chronic illness has the stigma of being psychosomatic, but Martin knew from his own bouts of fatigue that what Ravi was going through was not in his head.
Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
It is not known whether having a parent with a chronic illness makes one more susceptible to suffering a long Covid. “It’s a blind spot right now,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, a longtime Covid researcher at the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Missouri. Anecdotally, he added, he had seen long-term Covid patients who had relatives with chronic fatigue, but the issue needed to be investigated.
At the moment, Ravi was missing his mother very much, who had died when he was a baby. Harinder, Hari for short, was the kind of person both father and son agree you want by your side when you’re sick.
Martin met Hari while on holiday in Malaysia, and it was love at first sight, despite their differences: white and brown, atheist and Hindu, 47 and 26. The two married, and the work of Hari as a lawyer brought the family to Hong Kong where Ravi was born.
The fairytale romance ended in extraordinary tragedy. At the beginning of the 21st century, when Ravi was only one year old, Hari, who had epilepsy, suffered a terrible seizure. “I’m at the bottom of the pile here,” she told Martin at the hospital, referring to the racism she faced from doctors and staff because of the color of her skin. Martin rushed to discharge Hari, but an hour before he was ready to take Ravi to the hospital and take her home, he died of another seizure.
Martin raised Ravi alone while taking legal action against the hospital, arguing that Hari’s death was the result of negligence, a case that was settled 10 years later. Martin tried to parent Ravi, but the more loving and caring side that came out so naturally when Ravi was a child became difficult to express when the boy became a teenager.
Ravi recalled a father who pushed him to succeed academically and with the violin. His mother, he was told, used to say, “I don’t care who Ravi is, as long as he’s nice.” Ravi only knew Hari through stories, and remembered her as almost impossibly perfect, complicating his relationship with his very real and very present father.
Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
As his illness dragged on, Ravi set up a summer appointment with a general practitioner through England’s publicly funded National Health Service.
The process of getting a date was slow and not helped by Ravi’s reluctance to go; I was still sure it would get better any day now. The doctor long suspected Covid and referred him to the post-Covid clinic at University College London Hospitals (UCLH), where he got an appointment for December 2021.
For Martin’s birthday in October 2021, Ravi thought about what would be the best present he could give, as his father’s life had also been taken over by Ravi’s illness. Ravi decided to take up the violin again, as he thought his playing skills were one of the things Martin was most proud of about him.
At the age of 11, he had named his dog Brahms, in honor of the composer. And the older he got, the more time his teachers expected him to devote to his craft. He woke up at 6am to practice for an hour before attending Westminster School, a prestigious private school in London, and squeezed in a second session at 10pm after doing his homework. He couldn’t keep up with the other students who could play twice that time, and found himself embittered by the instrument during those years.
Ravi prepared for the birthday by playing 30 minutes a day for three days, as much as he felt physically capable of doing. On the night of the birthday, he emerged from a side room with his violin, surprising Martin and longtime family friends. He tried to put technique aside and focus on bringing out the slow, transcendent moments of the Violin Sonata no. 3 by Brahms.
The music surprised Martin, who was more than pleased. Ravi might have been rusty, but it didn’t matter how he played, although “the more he played, the better he got,” Martin said.
After the birthday, Ravi experienced a gradual improvement in his health, a promising sign ahead of his December visit to the UCLH clinic. At the appointment, on a scale of one to 100 points from worst to best health, Ravi was rated an 18. A physiotherapist gave him advice on pacing, an activity management technique to control his symptoms and the doctors ran a battery of tests. on him to rule out other conditions. Everything became clear: long Covid is a diagnosis of exclusion.
A doctor told Ravi that he would hopefully continue to improve in the coming months. It was nice to hear then, frustrating to think about now.
Since the diagnosis, Ravi’s physical health has plateaued, despite moderate improvement by the end of the year. He is still learning to live with the disease and to manage the psychological consequences of losing his previous life.
He wonders if his fast-paced life has contributed to him getting the Covid for a long time, but he has reached…