Tag: first-person stories

Long COVID Patients Say WorkSafeBC Is Making Life Worse

Published by: The Tyee
Published on: March 11, 2024
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.

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Montreal

Radio | Quatre ans avec la COVID longue, le témoignage d’une famille montréalaise

Published March 10, 2024

Published by: Radio-Canada / Tout terrain
Published on: March 10, 2024

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…

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hearing loss

COVID is not done and gone, nor is it particular

Published March 9, 2024

Published by: Star Tribune
Published on: March 9, 2024
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.

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Quebec

Four years later, long COVID continues to upend lives in Quebec

Published March 9, 2024

Published by: Montreal Gazette
Published on: March 9, 2024
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.

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long COVID

Living With Long COVID: ‘You Feel Like You Have Been Poisoned’

Published March 9, 2024

Published by: Newsweek
Published on: March 9, 2024
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.

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first-person stories

Covid Became a Pandemic 4 Years Ago. How Does Your Life Look Now?

Published March 8, 2024

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: March 8, 2024

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?

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long COVID

I’m back, long COVID never went away and world is still a mess

Published March 6, 2024

Published by: Toronto Star
Published on: March 6, 2024
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.

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long COVID

De l’espoir pour les femmes atteintes de syndromes de fatigue chronique

Published March 3, 2024

Published by: La Presse
Published on: March 3, 2024
By Mathieu Perreault

Research into long COVID may benefit other fatigue syndromes that follow infections. These difficult to diagnose and treat disorders affect twice as many women as men. A symbol of sexism in medicine?

“When we started talking about long COVID at the end of 2020, patients told me how close it was to their symptoms,” says Durand, epidemiologist from the Université de Montréal who studied a cohort of patients with long COVID. “These are patients who for years had chronic fatigue, mental fog, abnormally low resistance to exertion. Doctors often told them it was in their heads. These are symptoms that are called “non-specific.” There are no diagnostic tests.”

These problems are often grouped under the term “acute post-infection syndrome.” “The idea is that there are things that have changed with the infection, and there are still sequelae that we can’t measure right now,” says Durand. “Since many people have had COVID-19, there are many cases of long COVID. We are talking about 15% of COVID-19 cases. So there’s a lot of funding for long COVID.”

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Nova Scotia

Nova Scotians with long-term COVID symptoms face disability claim hurdles

Published March 3, 2024

Published by: CBC News
Published on: March 3, 2024

Two months after contracting COVID-19 and recovering, Beth Wood noticed that she was having trouble concentrating, getting winded easily and feeling unusually tired.

Like three and a half million other Canadians, according to Statistics Canada, Halifax’s Wood has long-term COVID symptoms.

Wood has worked as a community social worker for four decades.

She told CBC Radio’s Information Morning Nova Scotia, her employer has been helping her try to get back up to speed at work. But it hasn’t been successful and she is now considering taking long-term disability.

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long COVID

Long COVID Doesn’t Always Look Like You Think It Does

Published February 27, 2024

Published by: Time
Published on: February 27, 2024
By Jamie Ducharme

In the spring of 2023, after her third case of COVID-19, Jennifer Robertson started to feel strange. Her heart raced all day long and she could barely sleep at night. She had dizzy spells. She felt pins and needles in her arm, she says, a “buzzing feeling” in her foot, and pain in her legs and lymph nodes. She broke out in a rash. She smelled “phantom” cigarette smoke, even when none was in the air.

Robertson, 48, had a feeling COVID-19 might have somehow been the trigger. She knew about Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection, because her 11-year-old son has it. But “he didn’t have anything like this,” she says. “His set of symptoms are totally different,” involving spiking fevers and vocal and motor tics. Her own experience was so different from her son’s, it was hard to believe the same condition could be to blame. “I just thought, ‘It’s really coincidental that I never got well, and now I’m getting worse,’” she says.

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cardiovascular disease

Healthy runner’s stroke followed a bad bout of COVID-19

Published February 27, 2024

Published by: American Heart Association
Published on: February 27, 2024
By Diane Daniel

On a ride to high school one morning, Shelley Marshall asked her daughter how things were going with her field hockey team.

At least, that’s what she intended to say. The words came out so garbled that her daughter said, “Mom, what is going on? Are you having a stroke or something? Look at me.”

Marshall looked fine. Although slurred speech is a classic stroke symptom, she didn’t have a droopy face or arm weakness. In a clear voice, she told her daughter not to worry.

Marshall, though, was concerned.

Two days earlier, she noticed that she’d slurred her own name. Her blood pressure had recently been slightly elevated. And she was still recovering from a serious bout of COVID-19, her third. All of this was unusual for Marshall, then 47 and in excellent health, thanks in part to running nearly every day.

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long COVID

Millions of Americans suffer from long COVID. Why do treatments remain out of reach?

Published February 26, 2024

Published by: USA Today
Published on: February 26, 2024
By Eduardo Cuevas, Karen Weintraub

More than a year after catching COVID-19, Sawyer Blatz still can’t practice his weekly rituals: running for miles in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park or biking around his adopted hometown.

In many ways, the pandemic isn’t over for the 27-year-old and millions of other Americans. It may never be.

They have long COVID, a condition characterized by any combination of 200 different lingering symptoms, some of which, like loss of taste and smell are familiar from initial infections and some totally alien, like the utter exhaustion that makes it impossible for Blatz to walk much more than a block.

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Australia

Too many patients are catching COVID in Australian hospitals, doctors say. So why are hospitals rolling back precautions?

Published February 10, 2024

Published by: ABC News
Published on: February 11, 2024
By Hayley Gleeson

Steve Irons’ older brother Jim was only supposed to be in hospital for a short while. A retired stockman from Maryborough, Queensland, Jim was diagnosed with leukaemia just before Christmas in 2022. He was flown to Brisbane for testing, then back to Maryborough Hospital, where doctors were putting together a plan for him to be treated at home.

But a patient in the room next door to Jim’s had COVID, Steve says, and on January 14 last year, Jim tested positive too. “After four days, when the hospital told me he was no longer infectious, I took the risk and decided to visit him,” says Steve, who’d flown up from Tasmania. “I sat with him for three days, playing country music, reading to him.”

And then, on Saturday January 21, Jim Irons died of COVID-19 pneumonia and acute myeloid leukaemia, aged 79. It still distresses Steve to know his brother would have lived longer had he not caught a dangerous virus in a place he should have been safe.

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ocular diseases

Video | Doctors raise worries over COVID eye condition causing inflammation

Published February 8, 2024

Published by: Global News
Published on: February 8, 2024

The world is now used to COVID-19 and while the illness isn’t dominating our lives like it used to, it’s still with us. Now doctors are sounding the alarm about a growing number of cases affecting people’s eyes.

They are still learning about why and how it happens, as well as how it can affect vision. Mike Drolet hears about one man’s experience and what optometrists are saying about the condition.

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long COVID

Rosa (12) heeft long covid en zingt in speciaal koor: ‘Nu sta ik er niet alleen voor’

Published January 16, 2024

Published by: Omroep West
Published on: January 16, 2024

ZOETERMEER – 12-year-old Rosa sings in a children’s choir. Nothing extraordinary in itself, but it turns out that all the children have one thing in common: they are all suffering from a COVID-19 infection they contracted years ago. The participants come from all over the world and sing together via a video link.

Two years ago, Rosa from Zoetermeer contracted COVID-19. She became very ill and even needed help with showering. Only after a few months was she able to sit up again and take online lessons for half an hour.

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Quebec

Video | COVID longue : une personne sur dix serait touchée

Published January 15, 2024

Published by: Radio-Canada
Published on: January 15, 2024
By Téléjournal Montréal

About 10% of people infected with COVID-19 would still experience symptoms after three months. This is called long COVID. For some, it’s much longer. They suffer from extreme fatigue, pain, problems with concentration, and they just can’t get back to a normal life. Report by Jacaudrey Charbonneau.

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long COVID

Life with Long Covid – what it’s really like

Published December 28, 2023

Published by: 1 News
Published on: December 28, 2023

Living with Long Covid can be exhausting, painful and lonely, and most people do not know when their symptoms will improve.

More than 2000 people in New Zealand have registered as having Long Covid, while another 1200 have started the process to join the official registry.

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long COVID

Long COVID will take your health, your wealth — then it will come for your marriage

Published December 26, 2023

Published by: ABC News
Published on: December 26, 2023
By Hayley Gleeson

I’m talking about the workforce being diminished, the fact that people can’t think the way they used to think — we’re losing intellectual capital, we’re losing physical capital, we’re losing social capital.

And I wish people would understand the urgency of solving this, because what I’m seeing various countries doing in terms of their response to long COVID is they’re throwing a token amount of money towards research and saying, ‘Well, that will solve it’, patting themselves on the back without understanding that this is just as large an existential threat as climate change.

— Dr. David Putrino

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Tag: first-person stories

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We want to hear from readers on how your life has or hasn’t changed.

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