As of April 2022, over 514 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with Covid-19, with over 6.23 million deaths reported, according to the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Many people who are diagnosed with Covid-19 may not become severely ill and will often get better within weeks of illness. With new treatments and regulations for Covid, the odds of becoming ill enough to need hospitalization have severely lowered, and many people can return to their lives rather easily after a 10-day quarantine. However, this doesn’t mean their battle is over.

It is estimated that 10% to 30% might experience Long Covid weeks after recovering from Covid itself (ama-assn.org). This means that even if your experience with Covid was very mild and easy, like it was for me back in November, it doesn’t mean that your experience with Long Covid will be anything less than terrible.

My Covid-19 symptoms first showed up on Thanksgiving night, barely 20 minutes after my uncle left our home after dinner. Suddenly, my entire body felt fatigued. A few minutes later I had a 100 degree fever and was wrapped like a burrito under my comforter and sleeping bag as shivers ran down my body. I was freezing under two thick blankets. That was the first 48 hours of my Covid-19 experience. The next 8 days of quarantine, however, were super easy. I felt fine, aside from a mild scratchy throat. I then returned to school for the next 3 weeks before Christmas break.

Christmas break was just a regular two weeks at home for me, but by the 1st of January, I began to have gut pain and constipation that became so severe I would not return to school for another several weeks. As the weeks of pain and absences began to pile up, so did my symptoms. Four months later, I continue to have gut pain and nausea we now know to be caused by blockages and inflammation in the gut. However, no matter what we try, nothing works.

I also have severe headaches that are much worse than the normally-manageable migraines I was already diagnosed with several years back and have become accustomed to. When I am in the worst of my pain and nausea, I begin to hyperventilate and cough, which just recently lead to my first experience with an asthma attack that lasted just under an hour and required my mom to call the nursing hotline so they could help instruct me on how to properly breathe into a paper bag. While I had also already been diagnosed with asthma several years ago, it was never too big of an issue, only requiring the occasional use of a steroid inhaler when my throat became dry in exhaustion from that day’s activities. So it seems like, on top of symptoms that I’ve never experienced much of, like the gut pain, symptomatic conditions that one already has experienced, however mild, can be made worse with Long Covid.

In my worst moments, I’ve spent up to an hour in the bathroom, nauseous and feeling like I’m going to throw up, my body flipping between being constipated and having diarrhea by the moment. The day after I started writing this, I threw up for the first time since 5th grade and spent my entire day with debilitating nausea. I live with these symptoms every day and am forced to continue to do so until more treatment options are made accessible to the public. Looking back at how quickly the world adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic, it baffles me that nobody is reacting the same to Long Covid, a disease that anyone who experienced Covid-19 can live through. So I’m doing what I can to advocate in the hopes that someday soon, this invisible disease plaguing so many will have a visible resolution.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anja McBride is a junior this year, and loves to read and play tennis.

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