The Role of Digital and Oral Mediation of Post-Covid Syndrome Experiences: Narratives of Pain and Suffering

Abstract

: This paper analyzes the narrative reports and testimonies of people with the experience of post-COVID syndrome within the digital space (on Internet portals and social media), in everyday communication and ethnographic encounters. In everyday communication, the post-COVID syndrome is narratively shaped into a string of symptomatological personal narratives and narratives of personal experience about symptoms and is described, both among healthcare professionals and convalescents, as an “indescribable”, “surreal”, “bizarre”, “frightening” experience, an experience of long duration, unpredictable course, unknown causes, that evades language and the hitherto familiar symptomatology and descriptions of pain, weakness or suffering. The aim of this paper is to analyze the language used for communicating the so-called post-COVID syndrome in different agoras (Foley 2012) and genres, with the goal of showing that the antagonism between language and pain opens up a wide and varied range of expressions, pushing us toward language, which in turn makes possible the communication of an experience that is in the narrative and sensory sense unfamiliar to most people.