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    FAO Dan: Long Covid Archived Message

    Posted by Tomski on September 22, 2020, 9:50 am

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-54106272

    Long Covid: 'My fatigue was like nothing I've experienced before'

    Thousands of coronavirus patients, including many who were not ill enough to be hospitalised, have been suffering for months from fatigue and a range of other symptoms. While professionals struggle to support them, what can they learn from those living with chronic illnesses?

    If you've been following the stories of people who have contracted coronavirus and are experiencing debilitating symptoms that won't go away, Jade Gray-Christie's story may sound familiar. Because her symptoms were considered "mild", she was not hospitalised, but her life has been turned upside down since falling ill in March.

    Before the pandemic, Jade had been living an extremely busy life. The 32-year-old from Stoke Newington in London was balancing a fulfilling job supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, with an active social life, and going to the gym three times a week.

    But in the early hours of the morning on 15 March, Jade came home from a long day at work, and knew something wasn't right.

    "I felt horrendous. I was starting to feel really hot and cold and I just kept coughing and coughing and coughing," Jade told me, speaking softly, through laboured breaths.

    As the days went by, Jade, who is asthmatic and lives alone, started to feel more and more unwell and scared.

    She called 111. They sent an ambulance to her ground-floor flat, but the paramedics refused to come in.

    "They spoke to me through the window and asked what was going on," she says.

    Lying in bed and struggling to get the words out, Jade explained that she was finding it hard to breathe and had severe pains in her chest. She was told that she had the classic "Covid cough", but because of her age, they couldn't take her to the hospital. She was young, they said, and her body was strong enough to recover.

    Jade was taken aback. "What do I do about my breathing? I'm asthmatic. I live by myself so if something happens I've got nobody to support me. What do I do?"

    But she was told that they weren't taking anyone under the age of 70 in case she made someone else in the hospital ill.

    "So I was kind of just left," Jade says. "I understood what they were saying, but at the same time I was really poorly and I didn't know what would happen. I was quite scared to go to sleep at night."

    Jade started leaving her front door unlocked, asking her neighbours to check on her daily to make sure that nothing happened to her as she slept.

    As time went by, she did seem to slowly improve. But every time she thought she was making a recovery, her symptoms returned.

    In May, Jade felt well enough to start working part-time from home. She was still experiencing chest pains and some tiredness, but as someone who was used to a busy life, she felt she could manage.

    Then, at the end of the month, something changed.
    "My chest got really bad again. I was struggling to breathe and I wasn't able to get out of my bed," she says. "My fatigue was like nothing I've ever experienced before."

    Months passed with little improvement. Sometimes she slept more than 16 hours per day, and struggled with the day-to-day activities needed to look after herself.

    When I checked in on Jade at the end of July, she told me that her doctor said she had post-viral fatigue - but she hadn't been given any advice on how to manage her symptoms beyond being told to "pace" and have a routine for sleeping and waking.
    Pacing is a skill that involves breaking challenging elements of your life into smaller, more manageable ones. The idea is to learn coping strategies to help improve quality of life and stabilise your health.

    But Jade struggled to understand how to apply the idea of pacing to her life. Keeping to a routine felt almost impossible, as she often woke up exhausted and just fell back to sleep again.
    "When I did speak with the doctor regarding my dizziness, the fact I have fainted, and also about my fatigue, he openly stated that he did not know how to support me and that the virus is still so new. This of course left me feeling even worse."

    "If the doctors cannot help, then who else can?" she asked.

    Etc.

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