sickbed chic: marabou slippers & vintage slips
everyday essentials for the modern woman's convalescence
I’m not sure at what point, exactly, you’re officially allowed to say that you have long covid, but as I enter my third month of debilitating fatigue, I’m calling it. This shit continues to be a problem.
It’s frustrating trying to navigate the after effects of a disease that we still don’t really understand. I started a note in my phone back in January, and have written fragments of my thoughts and experiences – it started as a way to sort out what I was thinking while stuck in isolation, and after I stopped being contagious morphed into some kind of covid-centric diary.
I was going to edit it, to take bits and pieces from what I wrote then and form it into something a bit more cohesive, but when I read it back it didn’t seem like there was any real point. This is what I thought, and what I felt, and the experience is not one that I’m sure I can smooth into something more concise.
1.
the thing about the sick bed is that it's unbearable to be anywhere else and then it's unbearable to be there too.
if i could manage it, i would be elsewhere. if i could manage it i wouldn’t be in sweat soaked pajamas and my hair wouldn't be knotted and i wouldn’t have saltwater caked on my cheeks where it dried and i wouldn't smell like disease. i wouldn't feel trapped here. here, in my body. here, in this bed.
2.
it's frustrating not being able to know for sure how you got it. you want to be able to point your finger and blame someone, or some circumstance, or really just to have any sort of clarity about it. you want to be able to make sense of a senseless thing, take your disordered life and force it into an order - a series of events, a plot you can follow. i went here, and this happened, and so now this is the result. but i can't, and i've tried. my timeline doesn't make any sense.
i could, and do, blame a country with rotting infrastructure where masks are expensive and difficult to source, where testing lines are a joke, where two presidents have seemed more than happy to do nothing substantive from the oval office and hundreds more are similarly useless in the house and the senate.
but these are abstracts, and there is no satisfaction in blaming concepts i cannot fully grasp and people i will never meet. occasionally, when i'm lying sick in my bed, i would like one person to look to and hate.
3.
i don't have the symptoms i expect. my nose and throat are clear, i can still smell and taste well. instead i'm nauseous and tired. i have no appetite and my body feels slow and heavy. my head hurts, my muscles ache, my brain is foggy. one time i get winded eating a bowl of soup.
4.
i'm lonely, holed up in my room and barely able to manage a phone call. what i want more than anything is a hug.
5.
i have no clue what i’m supposed to do, besides stay home. i have no clue if there are people i should talk to or numbers i should call. there appears to be no contact tracing in philadelphia- or maybe that's just the record case numbers speaking.
i keep the window in my bedroom open with the fan facing out, and hope against hope, despite all odds, that i haven't infected my roommate yet.
i live with my best friend. i don't want to kill them. i wish that i could see them. i'm so lonely.
(Somehow, miraculously, my roommate never got sick. No one in my family did either. Something to be said for the efficacy of vaccines, I suppose.)
6.
i waited in line for four hours to find out i was positive. it might have been longer, actually, at a certain point i stopped keeping track. it had snowed the night before. i wasn't wearing gloves and by the time i got inside i couldn't feel my fingers.
i felt certain that i had it - a kind of bone deep confidence in my own illness. i can't remember if i felt this certain the last couple times i got tested. i usually approach the process with a powerful sense of dread. i know that the odds here are not good, and my anxiety-ridden brain convinces me they're much worse.
7.
on the thirteenth day of being miserably ill, i haul my body into the shower and nearly throw up from the effort. i've been trying to convince myself that i should be better by now, that this is something i can bootstrap my way out of.
maybe if i shower every day i'll build up my strength, i tell myself as i gasp for breath. if i ate more i wouldn't feel so weak. i'm still dealing with the repercussions of my last meal, a pathetic half cup of soup. it's like there are daggers tucked under the soft skin of my belly. i'm not sure how much longer i can stand up. i feel incredibly guilty, and can't stop thinking about my job.
a clump of hair comes out in my hand. i watch it crawl towards the drain.
8.
24 days. i am very scared that this will last forever.
9.
there is a quality to every illness that feels like eternity
10.
my parents come to visit, to "get eyes on me" and make sure i'm not silently dying.
dad makes soup in my kitchen and worries. mom sits next me to on the couch and worries. they tell me i've lost weight - ten pounds, they guess, though i didn't ask for a number.
dad rearranges all my board games. he thinks they should go under the coffee table. i let him, and plan to move them somewhere else before my roommate comes back, but i don't.
i send them away after an hour or so of this. my head hurts again and i need to lie back down and be alone in the quiet. when i lock the door behind them, i feel lonely and heartbroken. their fear lingers in the living room of my apartment. i eat my dad’s soup for the next four days.
11.
when the painkillers start to work, my first thought is always that i must have been faking the pain
i prefer the days when the pain is physical. it may hurt to swallow and i may have fallen over while washing my hands, but at least i can think. and at least i know that this is real. fatigue is hard to trust. it sounds a little too much like laziness
12.
i don't know how to experience this without talking about it and i don't know how to talk about something i don't understand. i feel so fucking lost within myself, and am trying to not to feel betrayed by a body that i can no longer understand. there is such limited information, and so little clarity, about this virus that is continuing to wreak havoc on me, and all i want is some answers. every day i am terrified of what's happening to me, and even more terrified of what may come, of all the questions left unanswered and the great unknown that i am stumbling into. i am not stumbling alone, but it is certainly lonely, and even those who have been here longer than me have not been here long enough to really know where we're headed. they are just as desperate to understand this is as i am.
i spent so much of the last two years obsessing over death, without really considering this alternative - that the virus could come and go, and leave you unharmed enough to avoid the hospital but utterly transform you. i am scared that my body will never be the same. i am scared, too, that this pain will go away and i will have to relearn how to be without it. i don’t know how to go back to my job, my life, after all of this.
13.
i become obsessive about bringing my phone to the bathroom with me, convinced i'll fall down again and have no one to hear me this time.
14.
my mom wants to come visit again or come pick me up or do something to take care of me. as lonely as i am, as much as i want to be cared for, the idea of being seen in this state is unbearable. my sickness is so wretched, so pathetic, that my solitude is a disgusting comfort. i am ashamed of my weakness, my exhaustion. i know that if my parents see how little i am capable of, still, after all this time, they will worry. i will see in their eyes how badly i know i am doing and it will feel so much worse.
i sit and i ache and i nurse my pains and sadnesses and with each precious moment of clarity i try to write down what i think, try to make sense of my brain.
and i know that when i read back what i've written i will think i'm being dramatic, that i'm lying about how bad it's been to make you feel sorry for me. but i’m not lying. it's bad, and it's hard, and it doesn't need to be worse for me to take it seriously
15.
it takes a long time for me to realize - a long time before i am able to admit to myself - that i am devastatingly fucking sad about this whole miserable thing. i have spent so much of my stupid short life being sick, and i don't want to do it anymore. when it finally sinks in that i will have to, that once again i have no clue when things will get better, or what i need to do to make them improve, the enormity of my sadness crushes me.
i have a hard time writing about my depression, as often as i find myself trying, because the vast nothingness of it is deeply boring. i could not function, and i spent a lot of time hating and hurting myself and i spent a lot of time fighting bitterly with my parents who couldn't understand what was wrong with me and i spent a lot of time lying on the couch and running my tongue over my teeth, which were gritty and uneven and tasted like death because i hadn't been able to brush them. i spent years doing what felt like wasting away, unable to get out of bed, and i clawed my way out and i do not want to go back. it doesn't matter, not really, that this sickness is not the same because the end result is: wanting things i cannot have, and wishing i was anywhere else but my bed.
the truth is i don't want to feel any of this, because it hurts to much and the only way i have ever know how to handle this kind of pain is replacing it with another, and i don't do that anymore. i have to just let this hurt. and i don't want to. i don't want to i don't want to i don't want any of this. it's unfair, it's so unfair, and i have nowhere to put all this anger either.
I write the most when I feel the worst, in the moments where I’m trying to exorcise some sort of pain or sadness, so the notes I’ve made are disproportionately negative. Although maybe that’s not fair to say, since my life for the last two months has in fact been a pretty negative experience.
But I’ve gotten to a point in my recovery now where my brain is clear again. I can think with relative ease and clarity. I can sometimes maintain a conversation for an hour or two. I can spend an entire ten minutes washing dishes before my hands start shaking. My mind has recovered far more quickly than my body, and I long to do things I am still not quite capable of. I have, on average, the ability to spend two hours writing, emailing, or otherwise maintaining my focus. I can go for a walk around my block, but doing so means I will not be able to do much more than sleep the next day.
It’s all very frustrating, and it’s all very insular. I’m spending a lot of time inside my house, and most of that time in my bed. I have been forced to figure out how exactly one confined to rest can still feel like an actual fucking person.
I don’t like wearing sweatpants or pajamas all day. It makes me feel sick, in a way that actually being sick while fully dressed doesn’t. But it’s also pointless to put on an outfit only to immediately be uncomfortable in it when I lie down.
Enter: my favorite ebay search terms, “vintage slip dress” and “vintage nightgown.” There is a wealth of well-maintained, affordable faux-silk gowns online if you have the time and patience to sift through them all. And if there’s anything I have right now, it is time.
I also pull the trigger on an item I’ve long been dreaming about but haven’t been able to justify: a pair of marabou slippers. Marabou – that delicious, ridiculous fluffy feather trim you see on lingerie – deserves its own post. It’s been a popular type of trim since the eighteenth century, but became associated with sex appeal in the 50s, when the likes of Marilyn Monroe sported marabou mules – “the only significant modern survivor of the boudoir slipper” according to the Met.
Slips and sexy little house-shoes always evoke an image of a midcentury housewife to me, getting ready for her day in a cloud of perfume and mild desperation. This is probably because most women stopped wearing full slips under their clothes in the sixties, when increasingly shorter hemlines made them less practical. We don’t need satin to cover up our girdles and corsets anymore – instead we have shapewear like Spanx, which combines the functionality of a slip and the garments below it for people who still want that sort of thing. And our clothes are more disposable too – with the rise of fast fashion, we don’t really try to protect fabric from sweat and stains.
So now slips are semi-kitsch. They’re outdated, inessential; they’re for show, and only appeal to a niche audience. Wearing them to lounge in my bed feels luxurious to me in a way that also feels pleasantly silly. It’s the same impulse that inspired me to buy an antique vanity, where I like to brush my hair in front of the mirror by candlelight. I can pretend I’m a fancy lady, living within some wildly romanticized, magically unproblematic version of the past, and it all absurdly makes me feel better about the fact that I am currently physically incapable of holding down a job.
We form so much of our self-worth, in fact so much of our sense of self, from our work in this country, that to be suddenly stripped of my ability to be productive is dizzying. Illness and disability are seen as a moral failing, and contracting covid is especially bad. The severity of your illness and the success of your recovery is all viewed skeptically – people want to know that you “did everything right” in order to deserve your health.
Did you get vaccinated did you get boosted did you wear your mask did you social distance were you careful did you travel did you go to work is your job in person are you high risk are the members of your household high risk and how high risk are you/them and don’t you need money to survive anyway? I got my three shots and I wore my mask and I think I was careful but I did travel for the holidays and my job was in person, around a lot of customers in an inessential business and technically I’m high risk and so are many of my loved ones and it’s been a long time since I’ve had any clue what we mean when we say “careful.”
I don’t know how I got covid and it wouldn’t matter if I did. No one deserves this. Health isn’t something we should have to “earn” – not through our productivity, and not through our choices, however “healthy” or “unhealthy” those may be. I did what I could, and I got sick anyway, and now I’m still not well.
And, inside of all of this, I am just trying to feel human again. So I’m putting on my little imitation silk dresses, and I’m looking at myself in the mirror, and I’m telling myself how very pretty I look. I’m slipping my feet into my ridiculous little marabou slippers and wearing them around my house, where they feel close enough to shoes to pretend I’m fully put together.
I’m reminding myself to move slowly, to listen to my body and my doctors. I am trying my absolute hardest not to feel guilty for the lack of movement in my life, and if dressing myself up like a doll is what it takes, so be it. I have very little to offer the world at this moment, so I’m going to figure out what I can possibly offer myself.
I set out to write you a short essay about my recently acquired kitschy loungewear, and ended up with a lot of possibly disjointed complaints about illness, many of which were just pasted from my notes app. But here we are. I’m not going to rewrite this. Hopefully it made any sort of sense.
I love you all. I hope none of you can relate.
xoxo
Franny💋 🛏
Love the slippers! and love your writing too. I also have longhaul covid. Been improving a lot, but it ain't over yet. Hope you may rest your eyes on something lovely today.