Travel and post office group manager at Lincolnshire Co-op Wayne Dennett gives an account of his recent experience with Covid
I manage the 14 travel branches and 38 post offices within Lincolnshire Co-op.
Since the start of the pandemic my role, like most in the travel industry, changed from one of driving sales, creating opportunities and, with the team, selling dreams to our customers – to dealing with refunds, managing customers’ expectations and keeping the team motivated as we battled to protect the business and our customers’ money.
Being reasonably fit and healthy, I wasn’t overly concerned about catching Covid as I thought I’d be able to fight it off easily enough and be on my feet in a day or two.
But, as we entered November, I started feeling really tired. I put this down to being exhausted from the relentlessness of the situation. Very soon though, a cough appeared and it was time for isolation and a test. Things then changed rapidly. Loss of smell, a strange taste in my mouth, headaches and a high temperature. When the ‘positive’ result came in, it was no surprise as I was getting progressively worse.
I continued to work from home, but energy was dwindling. That’s when the breathlessness started. For the next 48 hours, breathing became a serious issue. Even walking upstairs became a problem, so I ended up staying in bed. I was advised by family that I needed oxygen but I didn’t want to go into hospital, so fought against this. If it had gotten any worse, however, I would’ve needed to.
After my breathing started to return to normal, the tiredness seemed to get worse. Even going for a walk proved difficult and left me exhausted. Logging-on to work and engaging my brain was exhausting. It certainly took a good couple of weeks for things to start to settle down for me. It was a hard time because I needed to rest, but I needed to work. Fortunately, my team were amazing and took lots of the pressure off for me to take the time I needed to recover.
Five weeks on, I’ve been back at work for two full weeks and am starting to feel better. Have still got the tiredness, but it’s much better than it was. Several of the other symptoms are still lingering, but each day they are getting easier.
In hindsight now I am on the mend, I should probably have followed the advice and gone into hospital for some oxygen. I think the symptoms hit me harder due to being run down after a really tough eight months.
My advice to people is to take this thing seriously. You may think you are fit and well like I did, but because of the stress we have all been under this year, we just don’t know how our bodies will react.
We have done amazingly well to get this far, and the light at the tunnel is there now with news of vaccines being rolled out. So if we are sensible for just a few more months, we can all hopefully start to get back to some sort of normality.