<
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/02/were-losing-decades-of-our-life-to-this-illness-long-covid-patients-on-the-fear-of-being-forgotten>
"ƒOn 20 March 2020, Rowan Brown started to feel a tickle at the back of her
throat. Over the next few days, new symptoms began to emerge: difficulty
breathing, some tiredness. By the following week, the UK had been put under
lockdown in a last-minute attempt to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2, or
Covid-19. No one else she knew had yet been infected, so she posted updates on
Facebook to keep people informed: “Oh, guys, it feels like a mild flu.
Tonsillitis was definitely worse.”
Brown didn’t know then she was at the beginning of a condition that did not yet
have a name, but which has since become known as long Covid. After two weeks,
she had a Zoom with a friend, and at the end of the conversation it was as if
all life force had drained out of her body. Her doctor advised her to stay in
bed for two weeks. Those two weeks turned into three and a half months of
extended Covid symptoms: nausea, fevers, night sweats, intense muscle and joint
pain, allodynia (a heightened sensitivity to pain), hallucinations, visual
disturbances. By the end of the three months, she had noted 32 different
symptoms. “I didn’t recognise the way my body felt at all: my skin, my hair,”
she remembers now. “It was like being taken over by a weird alien virus, which
I guess is what happened.”
A busy secondary-school art teacher in Oxfordshire and mother of two, she was
convinced she could defeat the virus by sheer force of will. At the time of
infection, she had been doing Olympic-style weightlifting four times a week,
deadlifting more than 100kg and doing CrossFit competitions. Every time she
felt a little better, she tried to get up and be active. Every time, she would
crash. For 18 months, she was confined to her bed with the curtains drawn. “It
disrupted my autonomic system so severely, there were times when my body would
forget to take a breath, and I would have to lie there and manually breathe.”
Brown never went back to work. She lost the feeling in her hands and was unable
to grip a pencil or a paintbrush, losing all muscle memory. “I had to relearn
how to draw again. So while you’re dealing with these physical symptoms, you’re
dealing with the compounding trauma that you have lost your entire identity:
your job, being a parent, being creative, being fit, being a friend – gone. All
of it. I was an empty shell.”
Brown, 48, is one of 2 million people in the UK thought to be experiencing long
Covid symptoms; according to a study published last summer, roughly 400 million
people worldwide have been affected. Often, long Covid patients experience mild
primary infections, are never admitted to hospital and only realise there is a
problem later, when the symptoms persist well beyond the usual two weeks. Some
make a full recovery, some see improvements over time; others, like Brown, have
seen little progress since being infected five years ago."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Covid: March 6, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/covid-march-6-123755414
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
