Abstract

Drawing on and with established understandings of illness in health geography as embodied, lived experience, this paper explores the findings of four body-mapping workshops undertaken with women with Long Covid conducted between 2023-2024 in London and Oxford, and three further follow-on conversations with women from these groups. Body-mapping – a creative arts-based method – offers a means of expressing how post-viral illness reconfigured our participants’ lives and geographies. Framing long COVID as a post-viral illness, the paper invites comparison between the patient experiences discussed here and broader category of Infection Associated Chronic Conditions (IACCs), including Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and Chronic Lyme or Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS). Diverse IAC Cs share some common features, both phenotypically, including symptoms such as debilitating fatigue and brain fog, but also in terms the challenges of navigating a medical system which struggles to cope with an illness that lacks clear diagnostic markers and treatment pathways.

Three themes are highlighted here which speak to broader geographical concerns with: (i) crip time (seen in the ways participants use pacing tools to manage their condition); (ii) weirded metabolisms (and how post-viral bodies jar against expectations of what normal or recovering bodies can and should do); and (iii) haunted futures (where participants’ visions of the future are inflected through narratives of hoped-for futures now seemingly unattainable). Body mapping is posited as a tactic and an opportunity to make the dynamic, disruptive and unsettling nature of IAC Cs more visible to families, medical practitioners and policy makers. Simultaneously participants’ body maps serve to unsettle normative geographical discourses and terrains.