“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” only works under one condition: the thing trying to kill you has to leave once you survive it. Chronic illness is different. It does not necessarily want victory. It wants cohabitation. It wears you down, weakens you, makes your skin and muscles and nerves pay rent to it. Or perhaps it wants nothing at all. It starves the body, exhausts the bones, and eventually you realize there is no grand mission descending from heaven. There is only pain, plain and pointless.
After Covid began, three chronic conditions attached themselves to me.
The Largest Organ: Eczema
It started with the skin under my mask turning red and itchy. Then the places where my neck rubbed against my collar became strangely sensitive. At first I thought it was a problem with the material of the masks, but changing masks several times did nothing.
For the parts that were not on my face, stronger steroid creams usually worked. They could make the symptoms disappear, at least for a while. But any shift in environment or mood could bring everything back: Seattle’s rainy season, a heavier workload, a bad stretch of stress. The eczema on my neck came and went, and once winter arrived and thicker clothes started rubbing against it, stability became even harder to maintain.
Eczema is one of those incurable, vaguely mystical illnesses. Doctors do not have many satisfying answers. They prescribe a new ointment, and the ointment does help. Then, some time later, the symptoms return, and you begin to wonder whether this particular doctor simply is not good enough, so you find another one, and the cycle repeats. On the one hand, every doctor reassured me that it was not a serious disease. On the other hand, they also agreed it could not really be cured. They were also consistent about the likely triggers: staying home too much during the pandemic, weakened immunity, and bad mental health.
Only later did I realize how many people had developed eczema during the pandemic—friends I knew in real life, people online. I even found a support group on Mastodon. A few colleagues and I also had a WeChat group where we exchanged information about eczema treatment in the Bay Area. Who would have thought this would become one of the pandemic’s widespread side effects?
Eventually, I managed to get an appointment with a dermatologist, which is not easy in the United States. From the beginning, she displayed a level of professional caution that immediately impressed me: “First, we need to know whether this is actually eczema before we can treat it properly, right? I have a few guesses, but we need lab results to confirm them.” I was deeply moved. As expected from a specialist: first ask whether it is true, then ask why. Very professional.
Then she cut a small piece of skin from my chin and sent it to the lab.
More than ten days later, she received the report and cheerfully told me, “The result is reassuring. It isn’t some other skin disease. It’s just ordinary eczema!” And so the exact same treatment cycle started all over again. Perhaps she could see how discouraged I was, because she suggested that I see a more specialized skin allergy doctor and get an allergy test. After six months of waiting, the test showed that I was allergic to one common allergen. It did not help much. As usual.
That, I suppose, is the charm of chronic illness.
Pain Deep in the Body: Back Trouble
In 2020, I once saw a chiropractor because of back pain. The doctor took X-rays of my spine, but there was nothing significantly wrong with the spine itself. I suspected inflammation, and later it went away on its own.
In 2021, things worsened. A severe pain appeared around my left shoulder blade. I later realized the root cause: I had upgraded from an iPhone 12 mini to an iPhone 13 Pro and apparently could not bear a phone with such concentrated density. This sounds absurd, but I am not the only person who has suffered because of an iPhone’s weight. A friend of mine had similar symptoms.
Long-term work from home made the problem worse. Neck issues fed into the back pain. Later, as work slowed down during the holiday season, the pain gradually improved. After recovering from Covid, I did yoga stretches once and made the back pain much worse. Only afterward did I learn that pain along the inner edge of the shoulder blade should not be relieved through stretching; stretching can aggravate it.
In this way, the back pain bothered me for nearly ten months. During that period I tried all kinds of doctors and treatments. I got massages many times. Every time, they addressed the symptoms but not the cause. The relaxed muscles would tighten right back up. Over time, it even became a pain that breathed: when I inhaled and my chest expanded, the muscles in my back tightened. Later I learned that the inner side of the shoulder blade has another name in Chinese medicine vocabulary: gaohuang, a place associated with illness so deep it is beyond cure. So in a very literal sense, my illness had entered the gaohuang.
I did not go back to a chiropractor for a while because it felt like a muscle problem rather than a bone problem. Later I saw a doctor through my company’s internal clinic. He said there were two options. One was to see the company’s internal chiropractor, who was apparently very professional and experienced with this kind of occupational disease common among programmers. The other was injection treatment. I decided to give the company chiropractor a chance.
At my first appointment, he said to me, “This can be treated, and it can be fixed quickly.”
These may be the most beautiful words a doctor can say. I was half convinced, half suspicious. But after the first adjustment, my back immediately relaxed a lot. He explained that poor posture had kept the joints of my spine from sitting in the correct position for a long time. That caused the muscles to stay tense and pull on the bones, while the bones could not return to their proper place. A vicious cycle.
Once the bones were adjusted, and with exercises added afterward, my back pain basically disappeared. I recommended this doctor to all my friends. He deserved one of those silk banners that say “miracle doctor” in gold characters.
Unfortunately, after I got Covid for the second time in New York, the back pain was reset to its original state. It seemed that too much bed rest, together with fever-induced muscle soreness, made my back lose the muscular support it needed. Everything had to start over. You think it has left, but it will come back. At least now I have some hope: regular exercise plus periodic adjustments can reduce the pain to a level where I barely notice it.
A Chronic Condition Called Immigration Status
If there is one other thing that has tormented me, consumed my attention, and behaved like a chronic illness, it is the problem of work status in the United States.
Working in the U.S. is not secure even after you win the work visa lottery, because the visa is tied to your employer. If the job disappears, so does the status. To solve the status problem, you have to apply for a green card. The first step in that process requires the company to post recruitment ads and prove that no one in the United States is qualified for your role. Usually this is more of a formality, but the Department of Labor can still issue an audit notice, or conduct extra scrutiny of a particular company. Many people at Meta, for example, have had their green card progress delayed because of this.
Once the recruitment process begins, the applicant gets a place in line, a Priority Date. Because people born in mainland China are placed in a separate queue, it often takes several years from application to green card approval. Your position in that queue matters enormously.
During the pandemic, the law firm did not receive an electronic audit notice from immigration authorities. In the past, they had mostly paid attention to paper notices. As a result, my previous application was completely voided. In the end, my place in line was pushed back by a year, which may translate into receiving the green card several years later.
Whenever the industry becomes unstable, as it has recently, or whenever I need to leave the country and reapply for a U.S. visa, this pain returns and hovers nearby. Compared with the other two illnesses, this one is even less treatable. There is no medicine. There is only waiting.
A Cure, or Something Less Than One
After a year or two, the most essential suffering is not the ongoing illness itself. What truly breaks you is the moment when the symptoms seem almost gone and then suddenly return. Each recurrence is another breach in the psychological defenses.
If I have learned anything from these chronic illnesses, it is only this: we’ll live with it and we will see.