In a way, I'm glad that Corona lifted the awareness about post-infection issues. The common knowledge usually was "you're sick for a week and then you're fine".
I don't have ME/CFS, but my body started to react weird to some harmless common cold infections. My blood pressure drops and remains low, sometimes for weeks. Makes me feel dizzy, makes working out almost impossible.
Also, I had some stomach bug several years ago with some side effects lasting for 2 months. Most people don't believe that a "harmless" infection can cause side effects for weeks (and neither did I), but it's a thing.
The definitely need to do a little more research into this because my doctors were basically telling me it was just how I was going to be, and it does seem like, however accidentally, there was a solution to be had.
i thought i was gonna just croak at some point, with doctors just saying "i need to de-stress" or "eat better"
do you know what virus you had originally that did that to you?
Afterwards I kept going back about the heart palpitations and they did all sorts of tests and scans but kept basically telling me the same, destress, eat better, get more sleep, etc. When I told them I was tired all the time they told me everyone feels like that. But now it's cleared I can tell there was definitely something abnormal going on.
> All they said to me from the blood test was that it showed I was fighting a virus, but I don't know how they would have gone about working out which one, they just told me to get some rest.
> But now it's cleared I can tell there was definitely something abnormal going on.
i know it sounds crazy to some people, but thats my experience...
and thanks for sharing yours, its great to be able to exchange notes with someone who may have had the same issue
The short answer is yes, mainly with viral infection. Note though that sometimes it might be symptoms, not the infection itself, that causes damages. But in the case of some viral infections, like the HxNx or SARS-CoV-2, but also varicella, it's the immune response that is too strong and attack the body.
And Corona viruses have been with us for ages.
When star athletes have an injury that's more macroscopic we do expect it to heal but often the athlete can't or doesn't want to return because its higher risk for future damage and it's likely they won't be able to perform at their prior state. With less 'physical' injuries we expect a difference for some reason. Maybe the law of large numbers comes into play and we assume all the diseases and their damage is fully removed and replaced at cellular levels when we often have no idea if that's really occurring at full scale.
Overall, I think this is fine. Medicine doesn't promise full, better than new, recovery so to speak always (at least not from good practitioners). What it does often promise instead is a hope and empirical data of improvement and documented side effects with a lot of probabilities for risk and uncertainty quantification. What I think isn't fine is this notion that recovery is always 'complete.' Its likely, as you point out, we're only observing these sorts of smaller effects with COVID due to the widespread infliction it caused over the population and amount of resources humanity has thrown at it to study it in great detail. I suspect there are many other diseases with negligible fractions of resources for study that have similar unknown consequences.
Contrast this to something like rabies, which always affects the nervous system (and always kills you and there is no cure, but vaccination shortly after a bite can avert that outcome).