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Comment by Itsdijital | Hacker News Reader

It's not like that. There is definitely something damaged or some wires crossed. Stress and anxiety make it worse, but it's still there all the time regardless.

Full deep breaths cause all kinds of aches to shoot around my torso and laughing is outright painful. The skin on my hands shriveled so much they look like 60 yr old hands. I have head aches all the time, whereas before I never got them. At anytime I can feel my heartbeat throughout my body, especially in my hands and neck. My feet get so cold now I feel like i could get frostbite in a 70F room. Hard exertion quickly brings me to a point where I almost faint. I get dizzy periods usually for at least a few hours a day.

Also this year was hardly stressful/anxiety inducing for me, at least on the day to day level. Other periods of my life were orders of magnitude worse with typical stress/anxiety symptoms. Nothing like this.

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Hard exertion quickly brings me to a point where I almost faint.

This is a (side-)effect of the beta blockers, I suspect. They actively block your heart from exerting itself, which you would need for sustained physical activity.

Beta-blockers are useful as a protective measure after heart surgery, but you can't build up your physique while on them.

This started before I was prescribed beta blockers. I also take a relatively low dose.

Stress and anxiety often results with real physical symptoms, like high blood pressure and it does make your skin go as you described. My main giveaway was when you mentioned cardiovascular symptoms, but your cardiologist was not concerned. And then there's the feedback loop, where the stress from the symptoms causes more stress.

Unless you're an actual physician with expertise in this area and have access to their medical records, please stop trying to invalidate their pain and experiences and explain things away.

This behaviour is the reason people stop talking about it and part of why we still know so little about the long-term consequences of it all.

We've come a long way where just discussing alternative ways of looking at things are assumed to be "invalidating someones pain". bouncycastle never said the pain is not real or that Itsdijital is wrong in any way. They simply stated that there are other common sources that causes similar pain as well.

> This behaviour is the reason people stop talking about it

If you bring something up in order to discuss it, and someone talks about it in a way you don't prefer and therefore you stop talking about it, a healthy response would be to not bring it up in the first place or reply to it in a friendly manner. We cannot decide how others treat us but we can decide how we respond to how others treat us. It's your choice to either keep quiet or be fine talking about it, you can't have both at the same time.

Exactly. I have no doubt that the pain and symptoms are very real, not dismissing them.

Also, I understand that there is some stigma with mental health too.. so I am not surprised that I'm getting strong reactions as soon as it's mentioned.

Well, I'm sorry if I ruffled up some feathers. But I think all angles of the issue need to be considered, and probably the best way to deal with this is to be open to the possibility.

It's definitely why I don't discuss this with people, and goes back to the general hostility towards long covid. It's not worth the energy trying to convince them otherwise.

I have had anxiety my whole life. I've gone through times so stressful I was hallucinating. It's not that.

I hope people can see from reading this thread why it's easier to just say "I fully recovered".

I had a bout of "health anxiety" that I suspect had a strong biological component - maybe post viral syndrome, maybe some gut dysbiosis, autoimmune component, I don't really know.

Anyways I kept going to the doctor and all of my tests were normal / not bad enough to raise any major red flags so it got diagnosed as anxiety / psychosomatic.

In cases like this it seems like you can either find an online community that's dealing with a set of symptoms or accept that "it's all in your head." For the former, if you have the money, their set of friendly doctors who may be willing to pursue off label treatments. For me, I ended up sort of falling into the latter camp (though as I said, I do think something biological was happening). Diet, exercise, CBT, and time ended up helping the most.

As someone who has suffered through anxiety issues and now have some form of long covid I can see how you would make that link but frankly for me it's not there.

The lockdown is not stressing me, if anything I'm the happiest I've ever been (no commute, more time with my wife, ...), but when I go on my daily walk the struggle can be very real when it wasn't a year ago: shortness of bress, tightness in chest when going uphill. Not every day, but some days it's just there with seemingly little to trigger it.

I also use to cycle about 150km/week, I can barely last 20 min on the bike now. Even during my worst period of anxiety cycling was not an issue, if anything it always made me feel better.

Anecdotal for sure but I'm not sure stress/anxiety is a factor of significance

You should probably do the full cardiac stress test, just to make sure.

It absolutely reads like anxiety to me (except for the dermatological issues).

Feeling short of breath (short of an emergency) can cause headaches, dizziness and random pain as a consequence of breathing too much. Left arm goes numb when there's too much tension in the left shoulder. Palpitations can also be related to excessive tension in the upper body, as can the circulation issues.

It doesn't need acute stress for that, just a steady accumulation.

I hope it's not disrespectful, but this is the most common explanation, although it doesn't usually get this bad.

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