For Long-Haulers, Covid-19 Takes a Toll on Mind as Well as Body
Forty hours after treating her first coronavirus patient, on March 30, Angela Aston came home to her family with a cough. “Gosh, your throat is scratchy,” her husband told her. Right away she knew she had likely been infected with Covid-19. As a nurse practitioner, Ms. Aston, 50, was confident she knew how to handle her symptoms, and disappeared to her bedroom to quarantine and rest.
By day 50 of her illness, that confidence had disappeared. In late May, she was still experiencing daily fevers and fatigue. She went to bed each evening worried that her breathing would deteriorate overnight. Particularly frustrating was the difficulty she felt explaining to her colleagues, friends and family that after eight weeks she was still sick.
“I felt this stigma like, ‘I’ve got this thing nobody wants to be around,’” Ms. Aston said. “It makes you depressed, anxious that it’s never going to go away. People would say to my husband, ‘She’s not better yet?’ They start to think you’re making it up.”
Ms. Aston found psychological comfort in an online support group, founded by the wellness organization Body Politic, where more than 7,000 people share their experiences as Covid-19 “long-haulers,” whose sicknesses have persisted for months.
Along with sharing their physical symptoms, many in the support group have opened up about how their mental health has suffered because of the disease. Dozens wrote that their months of illness have contributed to anxiety and depression, exacerbated by the difficulties of accessing medical services and disruptions to their work, social and exercise routines.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/for-long-haulers-covid-19-takes-a-toll-on-mind-as-well-as-body/ar-BB18N8K3?li=BBnb7Kz
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