Comments closedIf you are the family member of someone who’s highly immunocompromised, and you’re not able to protect yourself from infection in your workplace and your employer is insisting that you come back and work in an office where people have now shifted to the mindset that [COVID-19] is not that big a deal, if someone gets [sick] and you bring that home, that can be catastrophic.
Tag: first-person stories
Topic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Long COVID still has no cure — so these patients are turning to research
Published April 2, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Nature
Published on:
By Rachel Fairbank
When Lisa McCorkell got COVID-19 in March 2020, her symptoms were mild. Her physicians told her to isolate from others and that she would recover in a few weeks. But the weeks stretched into months and McCorkell, who was working on a master’s degree in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, started having debilitating and bewildering symptoms: fatigue, dizziness and shortness of breath. Previously an avid runner, McCorkell found her heart racing from simple efforts.
She struggled to find an explanation, and soon realized that her physicians didn’t know any more about her condition than she did. To complicate matters, the limited availability of high-quality testing for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in the early days of the pandemic left many of her doctors wondering whether her symptoms were really due to COVID-19 at all. “I didn’t have health-care providers that took me seriously,” McCorkell says. “That largely pushed me out of the health-care system.”
McCorkell turned instead to those who were experiencing the same puzzling symptoms and frustrations, joining a support group for people with what would eventually be called long COVID. As they compared notes, McCorkell and a handful of others — many of whom had research experience — realized that the information they were sharing might be helpful not only for those with long COVID, but also for those looking to study the condition. So, they founded a non-profit organization, called the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC), to design, provide advice on and even fund basic and clinical research into long COVID and other chronic illnesses.
Comments closedTopic: AustraliaView all posts for the topic: Australia
Video | Victorian children are diagnosed with long Covid
Victorian children as young as eight-years-old are being diagnosed with long Covid. Health experts warn it’s becoming more common, putting further pressure on the state’s health system.
Comments closedTopic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Video | Elle espère guérir de la COVID longue depuis 4 ans
Published March 26, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Radio-Canada
Published on:
By Rad Vidéo
Family physician Caroline Grégoire suffers from post-COVID-19 syndrome [long COVID]. She shares her symptoms and her life’s struggle over the past four years: to manage her energy. She deplores the government’s lack of help and says her chronic fatigue has not always been taken seriously, or even invalidated, by healthcare workers.
Comments closedTopic: TexasView all posts for the topic: Texas
Four years after COVID’s arrival, Austin’s ‘long haulers’ still search for answers
Published March 22, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: KUT 90.5
Published on:
By Olivia Aldridge
Comments closedThey do an activity that would normally not be tiring — it can be a pretty small mental or physical activity, [like] folding laundry, reading an email — and it just knocks them out and makes all their symptoms worse.
Topic: shinglesView all posts for the topic: shingles
Shingles cases are increasing in New South Wales. Experts say COVID might be why
Published March 21, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: ABC News
Published on:
By Sam Nichols
Comments closedI think that GPs would all agree that we’ve probably seen more cases of shingles over the last period of time over COVID. Absolutely, shingles is an illness that, theoretically and I think in practical reality, has been increased through COVID-19.
Topic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Four years on: the career costs for scientists battling long COVID
Abby Koppes got COVID-19 in March 2020, just as the world was waking up to the unprecedented scale on which the virus was spreading. Her symptoms weren’t bad at first. She spent the early lockdown period in Boston, Massachusetts, preparing her tenure application.
During that summer of frenzied writing, Koppes’s symptoms worsened. She often awoke in the night with her heart racing. She was constantly gripped by fatigue, but she brushed off the symptoms as due to work stress. “You gaslight yourself a little bit, I guess,” she says.
Soon after Koppes submitted her tenure application in July, she began experiencing migraines for the first time, which left her bedridden. Her face felt as if it was on fire, a condition called trigeminal neuralgia that’s also known as suicide disease because of the debilitating pain it causes. Specialists took months to diagnose her with a series of grim-sounding disorders: Sjögren’s syndrome, small-fibre polyneuropathy and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. To make time for the litany of doctors’ appointments, Koppes took a six-month “self-care sabbatical.”
Comments closedTopic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
The World’s Moved On From Covid. Some Of Us Can’t
Published March 16, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Rolling Stone
Published on:
By Elizabeth Yuko
Comments closedThere is still no help for most of us, largely owing to the fact that there is not a test for Long Covid, or even established diagnostic criteria. Without that, it’s impossible to claim disability assistance unless you happen to have a qualifying secondary diagnosis.
Topic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Video | International Long COVID Awareness Day
Friday was International Long COVID Awareness Day. The condition affects about 11 per cent of Canadians who get it. More than two hundred symptoms have been connected to long COVID, with shortness of breath and brain fog being the most common.
The symptoms of COVID can last for months and for most, they will subside. But there are many people who don’t recover or remain symptomatic.
A McMaster professor and long COVID researcher says she experienced symptoms for 18 months before recovering and the scariest part for her was the brain fog.
Comments closedTopic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Canadians with long COVID are struggling with myriad symptoms and patchwork treatments
Published March 15, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: The Globe and Mail
Published on:
By Caora McKenna
A year ago, Sandy Choiniere was so weak from long COVID, she couldn’t hold her 20-month-old daughter in her arms while standing.
Today, she feels functional, but only because she’s being careful, listening to her body and resting when she needs to. “I sometimes still feel like a 35-year-old woman in the body of a 70-year-old lady,” she says. “Sometimes I have to cancel plans I have with friends because I am too tired,” something that has been hard to accept.
Ms. Choiniere is one of the Canadians who shared their stories of long COVID with The Globe and Mail in 2023. Twelve months later, we followed up to see how they’re doing.
Comments closedTopic: measlesView all posts for the topic: measles
Doctors urge myth-busting, education to counter misinformation as measles cases rise
Published March 15, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: The Canadian Press
Published on:
By Camille Bains
It was a horrible thing to see this young girl who was brain dead. She died in that hospital. We were told that one in 1,000 people who got measles had a serious complication and one in 10,000 could die. You think that’s pretty rare but millions of kids got it before vaccination. So even though the percentage was low the absolute numbers were considerable.
Continue readingDoctors urge myth-busting, education to counter misinformation as measles cases rise
Comments closed Topic: British ColumbiaView all posts for the topic: British Columbia
Long COVID Patients Say WorkSafeBC Is Making Life Worse
Published March 11, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: The Tyee
Published on:
By Brishti Basu
Maryanne Andrew has been getting sicker and sicker since she caught COVID-19 in January 2022 while working in a Campbell River school.
And instead of helping, she says, WorkSafeBC’s attempts to require her to go back to work have made her symptoms worse.
Andrew is among more than two million Canadians still suffering from long-term COVID symptoms as of last summer, according to a Statistics Canada survey, which also found about half of the patients reported not seeing any improvements in their condition over time.
Comments closedTopic: MontrealView all posts for the topic: Montreal
Radio | Quatre ans avec la COVID longue, le témoignage d’une famille montréalaise
Published March 10, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Radio-Canada / Tout terrain
Published on:
Three years after the WHO declared the pandemic, this report plunges into the heart of the upset daily life of a Montreal family affected by…
Comments closedTopic: hearing lossView all posts for the topic: hearing loss
COVID is not done and gone, nor is it particular
Published March 9, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Star Tribune
Published on:
By Martha Wegner
On Dec. 27, 2023, I spent the afternoon playing mahjong. That was to be the last day I was able to hear the pleasing click-clacking sound of those plastic tiles as they are tumbled and mixed on the table.
I came home from my mahjong game that afternoon and reported to my husband that I had a sore throat. Darn, the start of another cold. That turned into a very bad cold, with an incessantly runny nose, sneezing and congestion. As I talked on the phone with my sister on my way to run errands, she urged me to take a COVID test. I could not understand why, since I had no cough, no loss of taste or smell, no shortness of breath. But I acquiesced to her wisdom — though not before I finished shopping the many aisles of Target, unknowingly spreading the virus to my fellow shoppers. Sure enough, the COVID test was positive. That was the beginning of the end — the end of me being able to hear the mahjong tiles, the delighted squeals of my grandson and the high-pitched tweets of the songbirds returning for spring.
Comments closedTopic: QuebecView all posts for the topic: Quebec
Four years later, long COVID continues to upend lives in Quebec
Published March 9, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Montreal Gazette
Published on:
By Jesse Feith
Sylvie Gagnon has been struggling with the symptoms of long COVID since early 2023, when she caught the virus for a fourth time since the outset of the pandemic.
A business development manager, Gagnon has been off work ever since. Needing help with daily tasks, she’s had to move in with her son and daughter-in-law.
On the few days she manages to leave the house in Vaudreuil-Dorion, she wears sunglasses and earmuffs — the condition has played havoc with her senses, leaving her hypersensitive to light and noise. Her pressure spikes without warning. Any exercise causes extreme fatigue.
Comments closedTopic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Living With Long COVID: ‘You Feel Like You Have Been Poisoned’
Published March 9, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Newsweek
Published on:
By Pandora Dewan
“The sensation often felt akin to being poisoned.”
Katherine Francis, 30, has been living with long COVID for three and a half years. “I was originally infected in October 2020, just a week before starting a new job in PR,” Francis told Newsweek. “Three and a half years later, much of my life is still largely confined to the four walls of my home, with occasional outings to various hospital appointments.”
“I’ve been diagnosed with Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia, Dysautonomia, asthma and lung scarring to name a few, all attributed to Long COVID.”
Long COVID can affect anyone, irrespective of the severity of their initial infection. At least 65 million individuals have been affected by this chronic post-viral condition worldwide, a study published in the journal Nature Reviews Microbiology in January 2023 reports, equating to roughly 1 in 10 individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Comments closedTopic: first-person storiesView all posts for the topic: first-person stories
Covid Became a Pandemic 4 Years Ago. How Does Your Life Look Now?
We want to hear from readers on how your life has or hasn’t changed.
Monday marks four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid a pandemic. Since then, millions of people around the world have died from the virus, and today, the persistent impact of long Covid is being studied and the latest variant to become dominant, JN.1, continues to spread in the United States.
Though the W.H.O. dropped its global health emergency designation in May 2023, life for many people continues to look very different now than it did before March 2020, when most of the world first went into lockdown to try to halt the virus’s spread.
We want to hear from you about your life. Do any new considerations shape your daily routine, or your decisions regarding friends and family? Has Covid changed your overall outlook?
Comments closedTopic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
I’m back, long COVID never went away and world is still a mess
Published March 6, 2024
Still COVIDing Canada Posts
Published by: Toronto Star
Published on:
By Heather Mallick
Star readers are the best and my Star readers are even better, a finer grind of bean. While I was off work recently recovering from long COVID, plus a medication error, I heard from many concerned subscribers.
Was I ill? On a lavish vacation? Was I returning? In the nicest possible way, I suspect they were checking if I were deceased, their emails being that little kick you give to possible roadkill. Is that inert coyote going to make it? Well, it looks pretty squished. Has anyone phoned her house?
Readers suggested cures, mainly vitamins and turmeric, but one recommended a device, electric copper rods that look like curling irons. I’m supposed to hold them in my hands, usually after dinner, the reader said. You can sit and watch the news, gently self-electrocuting.
Three and a half million Canadians have long COVID symptoms, but you hardly hear from them or about them, mainly because they work from home, if they work at all. Some symptoms are non-stop exhaustion, breathing difficulty, pain, headaches, insomnia, dizziness. Medical science offers no treatment yet.
Comments closed