My ‘Long Covid’ Nightmare: Still Sick After 6 Months - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/magazine/long-covid-nightmare.html
The coronavirus affects each person differently, and what I’ve learned these past nine months is that my recovery is singularly my own. I live alone and, after lockdown began, worked from my home at my job as a visual editor at The New York Times. I left my apartment only a few times before I got sick to go to the grocery store and to the Post Office. Five days after my trip to the Post Office (where I was wearing a mask but few others were), I had a fever, and my body shook with chills. Initially, my doctor expected I would have a quick recovery given that I was in my 50s and in good health and had no pre-existing conditions. I regularly walked four miles a day and swam laps at the gym. But few people truly grasped the invasiveness of Covid last spring. It would be seven weeks before I returned to work, and when I did, I still didn’t feel right. I assumed the fatigue, cough and chest pain that lingered would fade. I just needed time to mend. Medical tests showed that the markers of inflammation in my body were elevated, which meant I was still fighting leftover remnants of the virus. And my D-dimer level, which measured the possibility of a blood clot, was elevated, too. Some people have inflammation after a virus, which can present itself as fatigue, chills, memory issues and headaches. But Covid has other unique attributes. Recently, a study by the National Institutes of Health linked Covid and the body’s inflammatory response to microvascular blood-vessel damage in the brain. This idea — that Covid affects small blood vessels — could explain why many parts of the body are impacted by the virus.