‘Long Covid is like being on a rollercoaster you never wanted to get on’
HULL NURSE REVEALS TWO-YEAR STRUGGLE WITH VIRUS
LIKE thousands of others across the country, Julie Taylor woke up one morning in May 2020 with a soaring temperature.
The NHS nurse from Hull had been working directly with Covid positive patients and at first had not thought about it much when she developed nausea. But after a test confirmed she had caught the virus, she self-isolated and focused on getting better.
Except the mum-of-three noticed she wasn’t getting better. Weeks on, she was still experiencing different symptoms - from her voice deteriorating, low oxygen levels and a high heart rate, to headaches which she describes as “beyond belief”.
At a time when scientists and doctors were still trying to find out everything they could about this new virus, the idea of “long Covid” wasn’t even part of our rapidly growing virologic vocabulary. Yet two years on, Julie, 43, is still battling her illness, suffering days when she can barely even move.
“Long Covid is like being on a rollercoaster you never wanted to get onto in the first place,” she told Hull Live. “I can have days where I can’t get out of bed and others where I can go outside for a short walk. There are some people who aren’t able to do that at all.”
After realising she wasn’t getting any better in Summer 2020, Julie sought help from her GP who wanted to check her illness wasn’t something else. “It was kind of becoming a thing of why isn’t this getting any better?”
Physio to help with her recovery led to Julie beginning to feel better initially, before then crashing and relapsing. “I felt like I’d gone right back to the beginning.”
Her condition has turned the mum’s life upside down, from taking on a different job away from the frontline to being completely unable to make plans in advance. “I used to go the gym all the time before Covid,” she said.
“I was at my fittest and always loved going on really long walks, being with my family. Now I just can’t do that.
“My children and husband, Andy, have been amazing and I’ve been very lucky, but their lives have changed too.”
Approximately 1.8 million adults in England have experienced long Covid symptoms, according to the most recent data available. One charity said this month it had seen the number of people seeking help for it double in the last six months.
Despite this huge figure, relatively little is still known, and Julie has now taken to launching a podcast to document her experience of the illness in hopes of battling some of the loneliness experienced by sufferers. She’s also become involved with the UK group, Long Covid Nurses & Midwives.
“Towards the end of 2020, I’d joined a couple of support groups and I could see that people were very lonely in this journey. It was a way I thought I could reach out more people going through this.”
Julie’s podcast, Life With Long Covid, discusses issues from brain fog - one of the most commonly reported symptoms - to how her illness has affected her mental health. She says she remains positive and is hopeful that research will continue to shine a light on the condition.
“For people living with this, it feels like a really, really long time, but in the eyes of research it’s still too early on for us to know about this in more depth,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important we’re still talking about this.”
Living With Long Covid is available to listen to at www.buzzsprout. com/1939141