On December 20th, 2021 - just after the last day of school before winter break, my son got sick with Covid-19. Four days later I would come down with it as well. My husband followed.
As usually happens in our household, my son and husband were much sicker than I initially. They both ran a fever of 102 for a day, and then were feeling better over the next day or two. I felt poorly, but didn’t run a fever. I’m happy to say that my son is doing well ever since. My husband has noticed increased fatigue ever since his infection, but has not been impacted in a major way and has been an amazingly supportive, caring spouse. He has picked up my slack, doing all of the cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring of the boy (until the boy got his license and a car), shopping, and caretaking of a lame duck of a wife. I’m such a lucky woman to have this support, and don’t know what my life would have been like without him.
My symptoms never got much better after my initial illness, and over the next week they actually got much worse.
This blog is my attempt to document my journey through Post Covid syndrome in the hopes that it helps me process my experience, and so that others might find benefit from it - whether as a Post Covid patient themselves, or as a person who wants to understand what may happen to those of us who are going through it.
With the consent of the Neuropsychologist Joel Peterman, who leads my therapy group through UW/Harborview in Seattle, I will share some of the information we know (so far) about Post Covid. It’s such a new phenomenon, that what we know and what we experience are changing all the time. I am not a doctor, and I am not offering medical advice, if you believe you are experiencing long Covid, please seek the advice of a professional.
When one is diagnosed with Covid, doctors believe that the virus invades every cell of your body. For reasons no one knows, some folks (vaccinated or not, with prior illness or not, male or female, young and old) will retain some elements of the illness and become Post Covid patients. There has been some evidence to show that women are more likely to suffer from it than men, and that folks who had severe Covid are also more likely to get it, but none of that is consistent with all Post Covid sufferers.
From the research, it appears that the constellation of symptoms people are experiencing fit into one or all of these three areas:
- Increased Inflammation
- Immune System Dysregulation
- Nervous System Dysfunction
There are a number of researchers working on Post Covid as I type this, but some of the best information for patients that I’ve found anywhere is available on the Province of B.C.’s Health Authority’s website. A lot of the information on that website has also been available to me through my Neuropyschologist, but that’s not publicly available.
In each blog post I will talk about the elements of Post Covid that affect me the most, and the treatments I’m working on trying and how they feel. I’ll be honest about what’s going on, not in the attempt to gain pity or sympathy, but in the sincere hope that it helps someone else.
About my personal health situation: I was in my late 40s when I got Covid, have an autoimmune disease for which I take immunosuppressive medications to control, and was having a flare of that disease when I came down with Covid. Even though I had been vaccinated and boosted, because of those medications and my disease, my body does not hold on to vaccines for long. This is true for all vaccines, and because of it, I have had issues with illnesses that I had been vaccinated for all my life (measles, whooping cough, etc).
If you need help with your Long Covid symptoms and you live in the Washington State region, you can contact UW/Harborview's Long Covid Clinic at their website: https://www.uwmedicine.org/specialties/post-covid-rehabilitation