Long Covid Comes into the Light
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- got infected in December 2021
- 10 days of fatigue and headaches, couldn’t think clearly
- got better but had trouble breathing the following three months and had to stop any intense physical activity
- during the whole year 2022, every time I got any slight immune system challenge (catch a cold; have a short night sleep), the breathing problems would come back and stay with me for 2-3 weeks
- in February 2023 it seemed to have went away. No breathing problems for 4 months, yeepee!
- 2nd week of February and out of nowhere, I started feeling tired, but had no other symptoms. So I spent the week taking it easy and just working a less and sleeping a lot
- a week later, I went to get groceries and could feel my heart pump heavily through my chest, almost fainted twice
- since then it got worse and now I can’t walk, take the stairs or even sit upright on a chair for more than a couple minutes, else I risk fainting (and my heart beats like crazy the whole time)
- spent the past 4 weeks working from bed. Can’t drive; can’t walk more than 1 min; and can’t sit upright
- I feel fatigued almost all the time and have the same symptoms as when I had covid in 2021, symptoms I never had in my life before
- I don’t know if / when it will improve, doctor didn’t find anything
I don’t know if it’s because of long covid, the vaccine or just bad luck but I’m positive I never had these kinds of symptoms before catching covid in 2021. And now 2 years later I live with a debilitating disease that makes me objectively disabled for most things. I’m 33 and otherwise healthy. This is not a hallucination.
As a super simple thought, if you take an iron supplement do you reckon it might help at all?
Asking because when I occasionally get that, it generally means I'm so low in iron that I need to supplement for a while. (Some history of mild anaemia in the family, but nothing to worry about in itself.)
Note, not thinking it'd be a solution here. More a workaround that might help. :)
Right now trying Lactoferrin for the past 10 days which does seem to improve things a bit. it helps transport iron to the right places + supposedly helps dry up the virus by holding the iron from it (iirc).
I might add iron on top in a few days to see if it helps, thanks! Zinc seems to have some use as well.
Also make sure you have a chelated form of magnesium for improved bioavailability, the oxide kinda sucks
One POTS symptom would be dizziness, a big blood pressure change and bpm change when going from a lying down position to standing upright. It's something to rule out.
Another something you mentioned suggested exercise intolerance. One way to deal with that is very very slow and steady training of your cardio system and even strength training as well. Going too hard can set you back, but going at the right pace can make you better. [edit]: Some additional information. You pick what you train (running, cycling, some sport, weight lifting, whatever), you do it at the smallest level, and you wait 48-72 hrs to see if you get worse. If you don't get worse, you do it again at slightly more than that pace. If you get worse (I had shortness of breath, insomnia, night sweats, and random chest pounding, but others get debilitating fatigue or other inflammatory symptoms), you back off because it was too much.
Another possibility is anxiety (feeling your heart pumping and almost passing out could be physiologically induced, it could be anxiety-induced, or it could be a feedback cycle between them!).
All the above I learned at a long covid hospital which had specialists (pulmonology, cardiology, etc.) that were up to date on academic medicine. They were pretty dark, some of them, and as they say a man with a hammer sees only nails. But you sound like you seek answers, and hopefully the above gives some bread crumbs of some use.
One thing I don’t understand though: the day before I got bad again last month, I walked 10km and even ran a few times in the same day with 0 problem. I also use to do weight training before getting sick in 2021, so could it still be exercise intolerance?
As for anxiety, it’s something i only had occasionally before, and lately I’ve been feeling more relaxed as my financial situation improved.
But maybe I’m missing something and this illness makes me 10x more sensitive to anxiety so even what I consider low levels become problematic.
Exactly! The exercise intolerance manifests 24-72 hrs after (per my Mt Sinai pulmonologist). It was too much.
>But maybe I’m missing something and this illness makes me 10x more sensitive to anxiety so even what I consider low levels become problematic
My personal experience was that anxiety was enormously heightened not just due to my body having some new mysterious disease, but also something physiological.
That said there's a strong feedback loop. Getting better over time (with the above solutions you're looking into) should help with that.
From the little bit I saw it seemed like maybe he was recommending aggressive use of antihistamines. I believe some of it may have been incorporated into the FLCCC IRECOVER protocol.
The other thing that he seemed to believe might work is anticoagulants, but he was concerned that the doses that would need to be taken are potentially hazardous in and of themselves.
Get well soon!
I didn’t know physics girl but checked it out and wow I feel for her. I managed to thankfully get rid of most fatigue by changing my diet + not moving out of bed so I can still work. When I couldn’t it was the worth feeling. Hope she gets better soon.
Kinda how like Zuckerberg recently pointed to bogus 'reports' on in-office workers being more productive than remote workers, and then used it as an excuse to RTO. Except it's funnier in that case since Meta is all about the metaverse and being remote, so it's kinda ironic.
There is also the chance that it will develop into a post-viral condition (ME/CFS), which I've experienced myself (long before covid). However in that case the viral infection is really just a trigger, and stresses (whether pre-existing, or from the condition itself) seem to be more important in driving the symptoms.
once the vaccines became available to the general public in early 2021, it was game over for any covid mitigations. At that point, it had been about a year since worldwide lockdowns and people were ready to get back to normal.
From then it was a slow trickle of ignoring the problem and getting people to forget covid, in order:
- if you're vaccinated, you can't get or spread covid
- ok if you're vaccinated you can still get covid but it's basically just a cold
- alright, you can still spread covid, but you're vaccinated so not a big deal
- ok looks like there's some new variants of covid, but your vaccine is still basically as effective
- ok look like there's another new variant and it doesn't protect you as much as the original variant, but only unvaccinated people die from covid
- well, looks like the elderly and immunocompromised aren't protected well even with the vaccine, but whatever they can wear masks
- alright, so it looks like repeat infections might cause neurological and cardiac issues, but those people probably weren't healthy.
you get the picture. I'm being hyperbolic here, but this stuff happened over the course of 2-3 years, not overnight. All in favor of trying to keep a status quo that doesn't exist anymore.
https://jondouglas.dev/long-covid/
I’m writing a book on my 2+ year recovery. It’s been one hell of a journey. Almost back to 100%. I think I’ve tried literally anything I could find backed science on. Surprisingly the best ones are not talked about much generally. Nitric oxide, nattokinase, and nicotine patches (7 day - 14 days).
Every day matters with this condition. It makes you extremely depressed and anxious constantly. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
"For instance, 407 of the COVID patients reported having persistent concentration and memory problems at the end of the first year, while 276 of the controls also did. That meant that for every 10,000 people, only about 13 had cognitive difficulties that were attributable specifically to COVID"
^ is there a chance that a year later, these folks just got used to their "new normal" level of memory and concentration, and stopped feeling off?, and so reported lower levels of those cognitive symptoms?
Personally, I know someone who now takes amphetamine salts (like Adderall) for concentration issues post-covid, but they also show signs of severe depression. I don't intervene, because I am not a doctor, though bad enough depression shows itself clearly.
Long covid, of course, is real and can be severe. But some people need to reflect, be more humble, and consider how their own actions during the pandemic affected their wellbeing. This idea will probably be controversial now, unfortunately.