RT @RogueVictorian@twitter.com
I am going to post how this virus has destroyed me as a HCW. I have a Dr. in pharm, with a specialty in infectious disease. I worked on the critical weird cases. I have practiced for 18 years. I knew about #covid on 12/29/19. This was me the week before I knew is was airborne 🧵
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/RogueVictorian/status/1619884508115013632
I've read this a few times now, and it really burns me up how it was ignored and downplayed every time. I was "that guy" too. When school closed in 2019 for winter break I'd already been watching news out of China and I told everyone I knew to be vigilant. By New Year's I warned everyone that it was inevitable and wasn't being properly monitored.
I had no idea that we'd(probably) already had it. Looking back all of the signs are there, but we were in the dark at the time.
The school had spent two weeks before winter break sending home notices that a "weird flu"(their words) was circulating and they were having a hard time getting it under control so we all needed to be vigilant about keeping sick kids home.
My older child's best friend's dad got sick and died suddenly of "pneumonia" in late December 2019. As an aside, they don't believe COVID exists even today. Drives me insane...
We all had this lingering sickness for most of December and all of January. Looking back I'd texted with my dad and my best friend talking about how I just couldn't shake it and it was making it hard to breathe when I worked out, so I'd given up on that for the time being. "Getting fat over the holidays!" haha so funny...My Apple Watch shows that I had statistically significant heart rate changes at the time, too. Never put it together in the moment because we were being told it wasn't here.
By the time it was getting more attention and the schools were going to close imminently in March I had a molar tooth suddenly rot and fall out. My dentist was shocked as I'd had perfect teeth just months earlier.
Anyway, I think about all of this every time I read this.
@BE thanks for your share. So all of these have been happening ever since. This is just nuts.
Have you recovered since? Am also going through LC now.
Used to be extremely active and engaged in physical activities like boxing, spinning, swimming, badminton, etc
Can't even walk a block most days now without experiencing palpitations and my heart race.
Am surprised to hear about the tooth because anecdotal reports have been coming out just now.
Covid has really so many curve balls to throw.
I generally don't speak of myself and LC, although it certainly meets the strict definition, for no other reason than I see a lot of people struggling way more than I did. I also am not 100% sure I had COVID, although everything leads me to believe I did. It was obviously before testing or anything like that.
That said, I really did struggle for a while, with absolutely no idea why. My lung capacity was probably the biggest thing that I noticed and that probably took well over a year to where I was able to make our favorite hike, from start to finish, again. At first I was absolutely like you, and without a frame of reference about COVID I just thought that I'd been sick, wasn't working out and was out of shape.
I had heart palpitations out of nowhere and I can say that at this point it's been a pretty long time since I've had that happen and I exercise without fear of having chest pains now, which was not always the case. Those are scary.
The only thing I can really tell you on timing on that was that when I look back at my Apple Watch heart data it was different in terms of resting heart rate and walking heart rates being high from December 2019 until they spiked in September 2021 then came back down. I have a history going back to fall 2017 and that time frame sticks out.
Once I started hearing about LC I pretty obsessively read every scientific paper that came out about it, dosed myself with things that I could buy without a prescription like nattokinase and quercetin. Honestly no idea if anything that I did helped and of course I worry if it's a ticking time bomb in me, my wife or the kids. I know I'll do everything I can not to get it again.
I wish there were more of a map and timeframe of what to expect, because I know it sucks going through it. I keep up with the reddit long haulers group(r/covidlonghaulers) and so many have it so much worse, so many have been there actively since 2020, and also some feel better and move on with things sooner. All I can say is hang in there as best you can.
@BE thank you so much. Same goes for me. I've been taking nattokinase now FWIW.
Research is slowly moving and heaven knows what other damage can happen with persistence.
I, too, often wonder if this is just a ticking time bomb. The uncertainty, more than anything, is what drives the anxiousness.
Now that you've mentioned this, I remember a friend who also had just recovered from a cough late 2019. She couldn't eat much after due to persistent throat infection and altered taste perception.
Anytime. I'm no doctor, but I'd be willing to bet I've read more COVID papers than about anyone else lol
I hope the nattokionase helps. From my perspective it's pretty low risk, definitely works on blood clots, and may help. I had my dad start taking it, too, after he started showing brain fog and we found out he'd had COVID.
I swear I read a report that they had pushed back the first known incidence of COVID in the US to November of 2019 from blood samples, but I might be misremembering because I'm seeing December when I look it up now. Either way, I'd bet that anything that really stands out as unusual around that time frame and now with what we know looks like COVID, probably was.
