Emma Kavanagh

So, it has been a while… Perhaps it would be a good idea to share what has been going on with me and why you haven’t seen any books from me for a while. Many of us authors establish a cycle, a pattern to our writing and our releases. Mine was a book a year, a steady drumbeat of work that would then feed into a relatively reliable publication schedule. Then came 2020. Do I need to say more? For so many of us, 2020 was the wildcard year. The year where everything was thrown into chaos. For some, once the long lasting trauma of a global pandemic began to fade, life returned to normal.

My return was not quite so simple. In March, 2020, I caught covid. By September 2020, I still could not walk to the end of my road. And it was not a long road. I was one of the unlucky many whose covid mutated into the chronic version – Long Covid. For a year, I could not do any creative writing. At all. Words would seem to slide off the screen in front of me. It wasn’t writer’s block, rather a fundamental misfire in my brain’s capacity to generate worlds. There were other symptoms – far too many to get into here – the key one being an intense bone weary exhaustion, the inevitable consequence of any physical activity or mental strain. And so my life slipped into a cycle of forcing words onto the page for as long as I could bear, followed by collapse, where I could not get off the sofa. Of course, when you are the self employed mother of two young boys, illness is a luxury many of us cannot afford.

So the writing began again. Slowly at first, then gradually coming with more ease, the end of each day marked with an unbearable tiredness. Adding to the challenges was the fact that the book I was writing was different, unlike what I had done before. It was a book that pushed me far beyond my comfort zone, stretching me out in all directions at once. Whenever I think of this time, I think of Bilbo’s line from The Fellowship Of The Ring. “I feel thin…like butter scraped over too much bread.” It was, in truth, a time of survival. Of making it through the day. Being a good enough mother, a good enough author, just to get by until it was time to collapse again. The morning’s were the worst, when I would open my eyes and pray that it would have passed. That today would be the day that I felt better. Then my hands would begin to shake, my chest tighten, and I knew it had not. And I would sit up, force myself to face the day, as tired as I had been the night before.

I don’t want to turn this into a monologue on Long Covid. But I do want to spare a moment to acknowledge the many thousands of us who are here. Whose lives were changed in 2020 and who still do not have the answers they need. I was luckier than many. I volunteered for a study into the effects of Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment on Long Covid. Frankly, I didn’t know what that was. Only that it was something I hadn’t tried. And I had tried EVERYTHING. Some things made a difference – changing my diet to make sure I was eating as many nutrients as possible, avoiding processed foods, focusing on reducing inflammation – others did nothing. For me, Hyperbaric Oxygen was a game changer. Although the initial treatment was mind blowingly exhausting, by the end of the second week, my headache (a constant companion) had begun to lift. By the end of the treatment, I had begun to feel like myself. (For those who are interested in the study, here is the citation – Gill, P., & Gale, N. (2023). Development of a Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy service to treat people with long COVID in a community pharmacy setting.)

I now consider myself to be in remission. I am 90% better than I was. I can write, walk, read and generally live my life, although there remain consequences if I overdo things. I am fortunate enough to have weekly oxygen treatment from the Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre, which keeps the worst of my symptoms at bay. And which allow me to return to my author life. Which, apparently, is about more than merely writing books.

I always loved the public facing side of being an author. I loved meeting readers and interacting with people who are passionate about books. But for the past four years, truthfully, it has been more than I could manage. Now, with my most recent book finished, I finally feel that I am recovered enough to venture beyond the walls of my home and to have conversations with people that do not exist only in my own head. That means that this year is going to contains events! Ones in which I leave my house! Hurrah! It is going to contain me sharing what I am doing, on here, on my author page on Facebook, and on Instagram. Please be patient with me, as this will be a slight experiment as to how much this new version of me can manage, so if you reach out and don’t receive a reply, please forgive me. Soon, I hope, I will be able to start sharing all about my upcoming book and I can’t wait to talk to you about it. Until then, thank you for your patience.