These days, I have to take a few extra looks at the calendar in the morning before I head to the clinic. My birthday was in April, so by traditional standards I’ve aged one more year. By COVID-19 standards it’s a much different story. It feels like I’m about 14 years older than that. Is this what being “over the hill” feels like? The last six months spent with COVID-19 being the number one news, conversation, and personal thought topic has aged everyone on the planet in a bit of a terrifying way.

Normally, I’m a physical therapist working for Emerson Hospital at the Clough Family Center for Rehabilitative and Sports Therapies. Normally, the world is not in the midst of an intense pandemic. When the clinic closed with the state-mandated shut down, for about one month I was a lot of things: couch-potato, professional Netflix watcher, amateur bassist, and a semi-permanent resident of my apartment – and only my apartment. Just about all of the physical therapists at the Clough Family Center were in the same boat.

When it came to be that Emerson Hospital had the need for extra assistance in treating the intense surge of patients afflicted by COVID-19, the physical therapists from the Clough Family Center stepped up. For 11 weeks, we worked 12-hour shifts, often overnight, as patient care technicians. Our daily tasks included taking vitals on patients every four hours, bringing meals to patients, answering patient calls from our desk, setting up heart monitors on patients with cardiac complications, and cleaning patients who didn’t have the energy or the capacity to clean themselves. All while wearing what felt like 20 different layers of personal protective equipment.

We worked with the nursing staff to do everything we could for those people hospitalized by the virus. It was exhausting in pretty much every way imaginable: physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. But in 11 weeks working in the hospital, we got something that years in our regular jobs couldn’t have given us: perspective.

We had the education to understand the symptoms people were experiencing, and we saw first-hand the suffering of hundreds of patients. Some that were fortunate enough to recover and go home, and some that weren’t as fortunate. Every day we worked with patients doing their best to weather the virus, and every day we learned a little more about what it’s really like to go through it.

Now that we’re back working in the clinic, our lives have become a little less chaotic and a little more normal. But those who have recovered from COVID-19, whether that be in the hospital or while quarantined at home, may not have gone completely back to “normal,” whatever that may be for each person.

People recovering from COVID-19 experience general fatigue, shortness of breath, decreased blood oxygen levels, increased risk of blood clotting, and even some cognitive deficits due to the long-term oxygen deprivation that commonly occurs. Working collaboratively with physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, people recovering from COVID-19 can more effectively recover and get back to a new normal.

The COVID-19 Care Team at the Clough Family Center for Rehabilitative and Sports Therapies is committed to helping those affected understand their symptoms and work through their current limitations. We know what people have been through from the very beginning, and can work with those affected to reach their goals and put the virus behind them.

To learn move, visit emersonhospital.org/CovidRecovery or call the Clough Family Center for Rehabilitative and Sports Therapies at 978-287-8200.