Without going into too much detail, I am a Long Covid sufferer.
I contracted Covid-19 at the end of December last year, and although I was never sick enough to require medical treatment or hospitalization, I have been impacted since mid-January by an array of medical conditions and symptoms, none of which I have previously encountered. While none of the issues has been remotely life-threatening, the fact that I am now suffering from at least 4 conditions that I never previously suffered from is, at the very least, concerning, and on a practical level, worrying or worse. Quite simply, I am having to face the possibility that my quality and duration of remaining life may have been shortened by exposure to Covid-19. That is forcing a re-appraisal of what I want to do on several different levels.
One of my frustrations is that it is clear that the medical profession currently has no effective process for dealing with Long Covid. At the moment most medical professionals seem to treat the symptoms as disconnected from Covid, as if they were somehow random events. When I explain to medical professionals that I was infected by Covid in December 2020 the reaction is “meh”. There seems to be no willingness to take seriously the concept that a seemingly transient viral infection can cause numerous medium-term (and possibly long-term) symptoms. The medical process of observe–> investigate –> determine –> treat breaks when exposed to Long Covid patients, since in many cases there is no obvious root cause, and the possible culprit (the Covid-19 virus) seems to have disappeared from the body. As a result, many Long Covid sufferers are reporting that doctors are deciding that their symptoms have mental causes, so they are being referred to psychologists and psychiatrists. When you have a physical ailment, being referred to a psychologist is going to be seen by most people as a rather unsubtle message of “I don’t really believe you”.
Can I prove that my medical issues since January 2021 are caused by exposure to Covid-19? Maybe, maybe not. I am in my mid-60s, so my body is getting older, and with age comes deterioration in some fundamentals of the operation of the human body, especially the immune and circulatory systems. Could this deterioration have coincided with my exposure to Covid? That is possible. However, when a formerly very healthy person like me suddenly suffers from at least 4 different medical conditions that I previously never suffered from, I start to regard coincidence as a low-probability explanation.
