Indefinitely Ill – Post-Covid Fatigue

[boxofdelights]

If you or anyone you know gets covid-19 and doesn't recover completely and immediately, I think you would be glad to have read this essay, about "What to do when your body forgets how to be well."

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/05/18/indefinitely-ill-post-covid-fatigue/

Comments

[sonia]

Thank you for this link! Lots of food for thought there. I hadn't yet thought to link an extended illness from COVID-19 to other post-viral syndromes.

[pameladean]

That is a remarkable essay. Thank you for sharing it. P.

She captures both the feeling and the practicalities

[jesse_the_k]

I felt hollow, physically, like I had no substance inside and my outside was brittle porcelain. Or like that dream when you can fly without wings, but only until you notice it.

I've been living with post-viral fatigue since 1989. I've made a pretty good life with disability pride. YET I'd give anything to go back and pummel that earlier self who kept trying to exercise my way back to recovery, and give her permission to rest goddamn it for a year.

[siderea]

Thank you very much for this.

One of the things I've been noting, all along, is how often it has turned out that when present medical science disagrees with the medical science of 1918 of the Spanish Flu, it's present medical science which has been wrong.

Things it turns out they were right about include: universal mask wearing as a curve flattener, subways as a major vector, that six feet is not far enough, and the role of fresh air/air circulation in reducing contagion (and implicitly the dose-response relationship).

One of the remaining things – maybe the last now – that we are screwing up, per the 1918 perspective, is that back then, the standard medical advice repeated in all the news papers was, at the first sign of a symptom, take to your bed and stay there. And this wasn't just about getting people to quarantine. It was that it was believed important not to exert yourself while you were sick.

I seem to recall an item in the Boston Globe or Post, that had a tragic cautionary tale of a patient who got out of bed to get up and close the window, who collapsed and died. Regardless of what he actually died of, it was clear that the writers thought this was illustrative of (then) common medical sense and the perils of defying it.

I have no idea if this advice was generally given to the recouperating in that day and age, or given just to all ill (but not injured), or to all ill with respiratory illness, or if it was medical advice specific to the Spanish Flu.

But it was apparently a standard medical belief in 1918 – the standard of care among physicians – that people sick with (at least) the Spanish Flu were endangered if they exerted themselves, and should not merely rest "enough" – such that they felt rested – but rest until completely well. And maybe then some.

[muninnhuginn]

Thank you for sharing this.