Breathing difficulties, pain & intense fatigue — the long tail of Covid-19
When Suzanne Campbell tweeted about her slow recovery from coronavirus, she was contacted by others whose experience mirrored hers. Research backs up the anecdotal evidence that many who have ‘recovered’ are far from well
It was a Friday morning and I lying on a bed in the Covid tent outside St Vincent’s hospital. This was a large white marquee, the type you normally see at food fairs and country shows. On a white board in the aisle between cubicles ‘Welcome to St Vincent’s A&E’ was written in happy colourful lettering. The woman in the cubicle next to me was weeping. She was a doctor and this was her second time in hospital with breathing difficulties. She’d had a positive Covid test a month before. The nurses thought she had a blood clot in her lungs and wanted to admit her. The woman was exhausted and scared.
In the cubicle opposite, a young mother was told she also had a suspected clot in her leg. Blood clots were something that were just being recognised at that time as one of the hallmarks of the Covid virus. Many of my relatives and my husband’s relatives work as nurses and doctors. All of them were seeing blood clots. One told us clots were messing up dialysis machines, and that the virus was also attacking kidneys. I had pains in my kidneys throughout the time I was sick. What I didn’t expect was that these pains in my kidneys would come back weeks and months later.
Looking back, I probably got the virus in mid-March. I felt fluey for a few days, with aches in my lower back and in my legs. My husband had the same symptoms around the same time and I remember both children being very tired and one heading to bed in the afternoons. We had no cough and no temperature. I didn’t think much of it