'This is real torture': the story of a woman living with COVID-19 symptoms for six months - ForumDaily
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'This is real torture': the story of a woman living with symptoms of COVID-19 for six months

Monique Jackson is confident that she caught Covid-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, but almost six months later, she is still sick. Realizing that her case is rare, she keeps an illustrated diary of her symptoms and futile attempts to get treatment. Air force.

Photo: Shutterstock

About a year ago, Monique Jackson watched a Ted talk about mushrooms and was shocked. As the speaker said, the first World Wide Web is mushrooms; their developed network runs under entire forests and allows trees to help each other if they get into trouble.

Now that she's been battling the coronavirus for the sixth straight month, she often thinks about mushrooms.

She suspects that she has “protracted coronavirus disease,” a specific reaction to the virus that doctors are just beginning to study. She got sick in March. At first it seemed to her that the disease was going away easily, but the symptoms did not disappear. Six months later, she still doesn't understand what's happening to her body.

Monique is an extrovert, she says she is almost hyperactive. Before her illness, she trained in Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu and rode her bike 12 miles every day to and from work. She works in an art gallery in central London.

But the last few months have dramatically changed her life. She now has a reminder on the wall in her bedroom that she must conserve energy to brush her teeth.

“I'm not a lazy person,” she says. Some days, however, that's all she can do.

While her body refuses to cooperate, she has found an outlet for her energy on Instagram. There she keeps an illustrated diary of what happens to her. With the help of it, she wants to tell people about the new disease, as well as find others who have been sick with coronavirus as long as she has.

The coronavirus puzzles doctors in many ways, but the long-term symptoms of Covid-19 are one of the pandemic's biggest mysteries. Why in some people the disease does not seem to go away at all? And why does this happen in those who had mild symptoms at the beginning?

Monique fell ill at the same time as her friend after they rode the train together. At first they kept in touch, their symptoms were almost the same, but then they stopped communicating for a while.

“We had to stop because it was getting crazy,” Monique says.

The first two weeks passed in a blur - she felt so tired that she could barely get out of bed. It was still cold in London, but she lay with little clothes on and kept ice balls on her head to cool off. All the thermometers have sold out, but she assumes she had a fever.

After a week of illness, it became difficult for her to breathe. An ambulance arrived, but the doctors said that her oxygen level was normal.

“They told me that based on the symptoms, I was most likely having a panic attack,” Monique says.

She was not tested for Covid-19. In March, tests were scarce in the UK and were kept for severe cases.

Monique tried folk remedies. But when she ate raw garlic or chili peppers, she was surprised to realize that she couldn't taste it. She was very, very tired: “I barely had the strength to text several people.”

After two weeks, some symptoms disappeared, but others took their place: “I felt a tightness in my chest. Unbearable burning pain on the left side. I thought it was a heart attack."

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She called the emergency services and they advised her to take paracetamol and that it helps relieve pain for some people, although why is not clear.

Paracetamol helped, but almost immediately her throat and stomach began to burn “like fire” after eating. Doctors assumed she had an ulcer. It was only later that they realized that gastritis was also a symptom of the virus.

After about six weeks, Monique began to experience burning sensation when urinating and pain in her lower back. The doctor prescribed three different rounds of antibiotics for her until he found out it was not a bacterial infection.

“It was pure torture,” she says. “And then suddenly everything went away.”

Monique quit all social networks. She could not even listen to podcasts, any mention of Covid was anxiety and it was difficult for her to breathe. And although she herself admits that she cannot live without news, now they have become unbearable for her.

She was afraid that if she went to social networks, she would see messages with the bodies of the dead. Online shopping was a bit calming, but even the introduction of dress size in the search gave out new horrors about the symptoms of the disease.

“I was really afraid to go on Google,” she says.

After some time, she asked her friend to tell her about what was happening in the world. She learned that the deaths included a significant proportion of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Monique is mixed race and she was scared.

“It was like a horror movie where all the black people died,” she says.

One day she was lying in the bathtub listening to a podcast when two white hosts remembered that many African Americans are dying from Covid-19. She jumped on the spot, grabbed the phone and began writing letters to her black relatives in the United States.

And she reflected on the fact that most of the people she relied on lately were from minorities. Uber drivers who took her to the hospital, nurses, shop assistants in the neighborhood who delivered food to her.

“Everyone I saw during my Covid journey,” she concludes.

It wasn't like that in her ordinary life.

As the weeks passed, some symptoms were replaced by others, becoming more and more whimsical. The pain in the neck was accompanied by a strange sensation in the ear, as if someone were crushing a bag of chips.

Her hands turned blue, and she had to keep them under warm water to restore blood circulation. Later, the doctor asked her to take a photo of her hands, but that was the last thing she could think of.

“I kept calling about new symptoms and people started asking me how my mental health was,” she said. “That is, doctors began to suspect that the problem was not with physical pain.”

She had strange eruptions all over her body, her toes were reddened. Sometimes she woke up with acute pain in various parts of her body.

One day, talking to her friend on the phone, Monique felt her right side of her face sink down. She went straight to the mirror, but her face looked normal. She feared it might be a stroke, but the doctors found no signs.

She also had strange sensations throughout her body. Sometimes it seemed to her that someone was grabbing her leg with their hands or tickling her face with hairs - sometimes she even felt it in her mouth.

She tried many times to explain to the doctors what was going on. And it was difficult to keep within a 5-10-minute conversation on the phone.

“If they had told me, ‘Look, you have coronavirus disease and we have no idea how to treat it,’ it would have been easier,” she says.

Monique does not complain about the NHS staff, many of whom were attentive and provided her with wonderful care. But she believes that the system as a whole doesn't work for people like her.

She was tested for coronavirus only after 9 weeks, and she was afraid that she might infect others.

The government advised to self-isolate either for 7 days or until symptoms disappear.

“But what if they don’t go away at all?” - she thought.

Her flatmates developed a contact avoidance system. Each had a separate place in the refrigerator. Everyone dined in their own room.

One day she went with a friend to get some air in the park near her house. A small child ran up to her. Monique jumped back, but the child's mother was outraged.

“She wasn’t even close!” - said the mother.

Monique tried to explain that she was afraid not for herself, but for the child. If you are sick, you must stay at home, the woman replied.

She hopes her diary will help people understand that things are not always that simple.

Although friends tried to help her, Monique felt that other people were fed up with all this. They just didn't understand what was happening to her. One person told her that she just went crazy due to the coronavirus.

Eventually the UK government allowed testing for anyone with symptoms of the disease. Monique was happy, but there was one problem - the only center where she could get a test could only be reached by car, and she didn’t have one.

“Most of my friends don’t even have a license,” she says.

One acquaintance nevertheless agreed to take her. The fact that he was not afraid of risk did not go unnoticed by her.

She expected to see nurses and doctors in the laboratory to calm her down, but there were military personnel. Their uniforms were wet with sweat on a hot June day. They were all very young, Monique noticed as they stuck a Q-tip in her nose.

The test results were negative. This meant that she did not have the virus, although it could have been earlier. She felt immensely relieved that now she could not infect her friends and family. But getting used to it was not easy.

“The feeling of being contagious does not go away immediately,” she later wrote in her diary.

It was also alarming that she did not get better.

Four months after she fell ill, Monique decided to move out of the house she shared with other people in East London. Even such simple things as cleaning the apartment were hard for her. And she wanted to be close to a family that could help her.

Her breathing improved. If at first she could not get up without a break, in July she already did it easily. But one day she tried to clean her room with a vacuum cleaner and after 4 minutes collapsed exhausted from shortness of breath. After that, she spent 3 weeks in bed.

Monique doesn't know if she will recover at all. She may never know if it was coronavirus disease, but many Londoners were sick in March and loss of taste is a serious sign.

She recently did an antibody test that was also negative, but the National Health Service notes that some people who have had the virus may not have them.

"A lot of people tell me, 'Monique, you'll be able to ride your bike and box and go out again when you get better.' But that doesn’t give me much comfort,” she says.

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Doctors still don't know how to help people whose symptoms persist.

“I'll have to accept that there are some things I can do and some things I can't do, and be flexible. Because sometimes you make some plans for the day, but your body may have completely different plans,” she says. “I can get stuck in emails or conversations with doctors, talking with friends, and suddenly feel so exhausted that I can’t even brush my teeth.”

She managed to undergo psychotherapy, which showed her how to live in a new reality of feeling unwell. Now Monique advocates that such assistance from the state could be received by everyone.

The only thing she could not imagine was that the disease would tie her to other mushroom advocates. Mushrooms have antiviral properties, she explains in one of the posts. But they are also part of something bigger and more beautiful.

They are the fruit of mycelium - a network of underground threads that contact the roots of neighboring trees. Mycelium is a conductor of nutritious things. Many experts also believe that they help trees communicate with each other, transferring nutrients from one healthy tree to a sick one.

It reminds her of friends who brought food to her door every month. The people she was totally dependent on from the moment she got sick.

“Isolated in my room,” she wrote on her Instagram page, “I felt connected to others more than ever.”

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