"I Caught COVID in Sihanoukville...in 2019"
Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2021 12:18 am
Opinion piece.
My textbook symptoms of long COVID: crushing fatigue, type 2 diabetes
By Michele Nayman
April 7, 2021 — 5.30am
I caught COVID-19 before it had a name, in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, December 2019. After treatment for “an acute respiratory infection”, I flew to Siem Reap, where I was living, and went to the international hospital. Doctors did extensive tests. A Cambodian neurologist trained in Vietnam held up a brain scan, pointed at what he called “white matter” and told me I also had dementia.
I certainly felt demented. I had a high temperature and a hacking cough. I cupped my ears in my hands to try to stop the headache threatening to explode my skull. I lost my sense of taste and smell. I just wanted to sleep. Fortunately, I had moved from my apartment to a hotel with airconditioning and its own generator, so I was able to escape the muggy heat.
Three weeks later, I knew I had to return to Britain. Vietnam Airlines insisted I fly business class because I couldn’t sit up properly when I booked my ticket at the Siem Reap branch.
At least a third of the business class passengers coughed, sweated and moaned all the way to London, including during the stopover in Hanoi, where a doctor gave some of us oxygen in the business class lounge.
I arrived home in bad shape and went to bed, where I remained, in between hospital stays and visits, for most of 2020 and into 2021.
The virus known as COVID-19 affects people differently. Many have no symptoms. Many die. Headlines at first dealt with infections and deaths. There have been more than 130 million cases worldwide, with 74 million people having recovered and nearly 3 million having died.
Increasingly, however, the talk is of long COVID (or post-COVID syndrome). Long COVID is not the virus itself, but the facets of the disease that the virus causes in people who neither recover nor die.
My experience of long COVID is typical. I have been sluggish, disoriented, confused, nauseous and in constant pain. Worst has been the crushing fatigue. Doctors found nodules on my lungs. Scans and blood tests showed liver and pancreatic disease.
Personal accounts began to appear in mainstream media, including from patients who were doctors themselves. I waved those articles around like flags of credibility.
For months, I slept up to 18 or 20 hours a day. Friends in Britain and Europe who hadn’t died were having similar experiences. Mercifully, my diagnosis of dementia was reversed, but I had to learn that, in the poetic words of a Dutch friend with long COVID, “all this belongs to me now”.
Full article: https://www.smh.com.au/national/my-text ... 57gfn.html
My textbook symptoms of long COVID: crushing fatigue, type 2 diabetes
By Michele Nayman
April 7, 2021 — 5.30am
I caught COVID-19 before it had a name, in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, December 2019. After treatment for “an acute respiratory infection”, I flew to Siem Reap, where I was living, and went to the international hospital. Doctors did extensive tests. A Cambodian neurologist trained in Vietnam held up a brain scan, pointed at what he called “white matter” and told me I also had dementia.
I certainly felt demented. I had a high temperature and a hacking cough. I cupped my ears in my hands to try to stop the headache threatening to explode my skull. I lost my sense of taste and smell. I just wanted to sleep. Fortunately, I had moved from my apartment to a hotel with airconditioning and its own generator, so I was able to escape the muggy heat.
Three weeks later, I knew I had to return to Britain. Vietnam Airlines insisted I fly business class because I couldn’t sit up properly when I booked my ticket at the Siem Reap branch.
At least a third of the business class passengers coughed, sweated and moaned all the way to London, including during the stopover in Hanoi, where a doctor gave some of us oxygen in the business class lounge.
I arrived home in bad shape and went to bed, where I remained, in between hospital stays and visits, for most of 2020 and into 2021.
The virus known as COVID-19 affects people differently. Many have no symptoms. Many die. Headlines at first dealt with infections and deaths. There have been more than 130 million cases worldwide, with 74 million people having recovered and nearly 3 million having died.
Increasingly, however, the talk is of long COVID (or post-COVID syndrome). Long COVID is not the virus itself, but the facets of the disease that the virus causes in people who neither recover nor die.
My experience of long COVID is typical. I have been sluggish, disoriented, confused, nauseous and in constant pain. Worst has been the crushing fatigue. Doctors found nodules on my lungs. Scans and blood tests showed liver and pancreatic disease.
Personal accounts began to appear in mainstream media, including from patients who were doctors themselves. I waved those articles around like flags of credibility.
For months, I slept up to 18 or 20 hours a day. Friends in Britain and Europe who hadn’t died were having similar experiences. Mercifully, my diagnosis of dementia was reversed, but I had to learn that, in the poetic words of a Dutch friend with long COVID, “all this belongs to me now”.
Full article: https://www.smh.com.au/national/my-text ... 57gfn.html
