Long Covid has ruined me, says sports coach
A “FIT and active” sports instructor now struggles to climb a flight of stairs months after a suspected coronavirus infection, so-called long Covid.
“The brain fog is something else, it’s not just a little bit of forgetting – I’m looking at one of the my kids and thinking ‘which one are you? It’s scary,” said 46-year-old mum-of-three Sarah Wakefield, from Bridgend.
Before starting to show signs of the virus in March, Sarah said she was “very, very fit”, ran a mountain bike guiding business and worked as a watersports instructor.
A normal working day for Sarah used to involve her riding a mountain bike up and down the Afan Valley for up to five hours.
Nine months after showing symptoms of coronavirus, she said she “can’t imagine doing that”, is unable to work and is dealing with symptoms including 40% hearing loss, arthritis and shortness of breath.
“I went for a walk for the first time in weeks yesterday and I was really struggling with pain my knees and my heart rate went right up. I’m not convinced I’ll ever get back to how I was before.”
Sarah now wears hearing aids after developing Meniere’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear that can lead to dizzy spells, vertigo and hearing loss, as well as using a number of inhalers for her breathing problems.
She attributes her symptoms to long Covid, the name given to the ongoing health impact of a Covid-19 infection that up to 10% of people who contract the disease are believed to experience.
A list of more than 100 symptoms of long Covid has been compiled and they include anything from fatigue, muscle pain and fever to hallucinations.
“It’s ruined me, absolutely ruined me. The more and more time that goes by, the more I become housebound,” Sarah added.
A week after the first lockdown in March, Sarah said one of her daughters had “a bit of a cough” and Sarah then had “a week of headaches from hell”.
After her chest started to hurt and she developed breathing problems, Sarah was prescribed several courses of antibiotics by her GP but she said they “didn’t work”.
Her breathing became shallower and more painful and Sarah was sent to hospital with a suspected clot in her lungs, but no evidence of this was found.
“I was the strictest person around and everyone said, ‘how on Earth did you get it?’. I was being very careful. I’m seeing more and more people that I know now saying they’re having lasting symptoms,” she said.
Although long Covid is not yet a diagnosable medical condition, Sarah said the Long Covid Wales support group, which she founded, has been accepted as a stakeholder in the formulation of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines for the treatment of long Covid.
The group believes that effective diagnosis of the condition is the best way to support the growing number of people who are reporting serious long-term effects from a Covid-19 infection.
“It may be too late now to show a positive antibody test and I couldn’t get a test when I showed symptoms in March because they were only testing people admitted to hospital then,” she said.
“What else could it be? I was the fittest person around.”
Together with the other members of Long Covid Wales and sister organisations across the UK, Sarah is calling for specialist centres for the diagnosis and treatment of the condition.
The group is asking for something similar to the 40 clinics planned for England to be rolled out across Wales.
A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “We want people with post-Covid syndrome to be able to access the majority of the services they need as close to home as possible or via remote services, only having to travel for more specialised services, which have to be provided in an acute hospital setting.
“Each health board is responsible for planning and organising the response for their area, taking into account local needs and circumstances.”