Long Covid: “I have been feeling myself for a year” | Long Covid

Today is a birthday George Hencken never imagined. It’s been exactly a year since she caught Covid-19. But unlike most people who have suffered from the disease, she remains ill.

“It’s been a year since I feel like myself,” she says. “It’s been a year since my life as I knew it came to an end. And I don’t know if I will get it back again.

Hencken’s life before the virus was that of an archetypal film producer: working 12 hours a day on films such as Edgar Wright’s new documentary The Sparks Brothers, juggling a hundred tasks, relaxing by hiking and swimming in the wild rivers near her home in Dorset.

She hasn’t swam for months. She spent three months in bed after falling ill. Changing the sheets is a day’s work. And she’s got a brain fog that won’t let go.

Long Covid doesn’t quite describe the depths of his fatigue. “It’s not fatigue. It’s like having a jet lag and a hangover. I feel like I’ve been poisoned, ”she says.

The problem for Hencken and the thousands of people who are still suffering from the virus months later is that Covid doesn’t describe much at all.

The umbrella term covers people who are short of breath and tired, or have brain fog, headaches and tingling in their arms, or have chest pain and heart palpitations, or all of these and dozens of other symptoms. .

Support groups such as LongCovidSOS have fought for the disease to be recognized and taken seriously – people with the disease say they don’t believe and doctors initially had little information, support or even funding.

Last week the government announced £ 18.5million through the National Institute for Health Research to fund four major studies aimed at understanding exactly what Covid means, why it affects so many apparently healthy people health and how they can be helped. Research from University College London will monitor the health of 60,000 people, including people with long-term Covid and a control group who will wear a Fitbit-style bracelet to measure heart rate, breathing and blood levels. ‘exercise.

The goal is to map and identify symptom clusters, Prof Nishi Chaturvedi said. “I have the impression that the multiplicity of symptoms reported by people suggests to me and many others that it is not one thing, but several syndromes. We’re not even at the starting point of knowing what it is yet, ”she said.

Not only do people have different experiences with Long Covid, but some, like Chelsie Hoxby, appear to be suffering from progressively different symptoms. The 37-year-old, a dedicated runner, contracted the virus at the end of January last year.

It started with a cough that lasted for three months and turned into wheezing and shortness of breath in the chest, with intermittent stomach pain followed by severe muscle pain six months later, as well as dizziness, weak legs. and back pain.

“What bothers me the most is that I felt better,” she says. “I had Covid, I was pretty bad, but I was improving. And then in November, all of a sudden, I wasn’t too good. And what I find quite difficult is that I think I have Covid for a long time, but no one has confirmed it.

Hoxby has been referred to a long Covid clinic at University College London hospitals, which was the first hospital to start treating patients when the clinic was established last May. NHS England has now put more than 70 similar clinics into operation.

The clinic began after doctors made follow-up phone calls to people who had gone to the UCLH emergency room but were doing well enough to be sent home.

“We found that four weeks after Covid, around 40% of them still had difficult symptoms, and that really surprised us,” said Dr Melissa Heightman, clinical manager of the Covid monitoring service at UCLH.

What started as an ad hoc, unfunded service has grown into a full-fledged clinic that has welcomed over 1,000 people, with a team from many disciplines, from respiratory specialists to cardiologists, neurologists and physiotherapists.

The experience led Heightman and his colleagues to consider Covid for a long time in three broad categories.

“The dominant symptoms in outpatients are fatigue and shortness of breath,” she says. “And we’re starting to recognize different symptom patterns in different patients against this background of shortness of breath and fatigue.”

Some have neurological symptoms: headaches, migraines, tingling or weakness in the arms or legs. “And problems with cognition, what we call brain fog, problems with multitasking – it’s like brain fatigue, and doing too much can make them worse brain fog and worse physical fatigue.”

Another group seems to be centered around the nervous system. “A lot of our patients tell us that when trying to be active, they experience difficult palpitations, dizziness, and sometimes chest pain,” Heightman said, adding it was related to standing. Some patients have responded to beta blockers and a heart inflammation drug called colchicine, she said.

Often patients appear to have no obvious damage to the heart, lungs or kidneys, but some appear to have suffered damage to blood vessels in the lungs, she said.

The good news for some patients with long-standing Covid is that things are improving. “I think there was real, genuine improvement in at least a third of our patients per month, eight or nine,” Heightman said. “We certainly didn’t expect to be 12 months old and that such a proportion of patients still have so many difficult symptoms.

“For patients with more severe forms of long Covid, more than half of them seen in the clinic have symptoms that last up to a year.”