“Swing of a nightmare”: strange symptoms returned to those who have undergone coronavirus

Honestly, I thought I was so alone. You can’t even imagine how relieved I experienced reading a study by Professor Paul Garner.

8.5 weeks. That is how much time I live with coronavirus. From a medical point of view, I transferred the infection quite easily – I was not on mechanical ventilation, with normal saturation, oxygen fullness, and even the final lung lesion CT-1 less than 25% against the background of many tragic stories seems like a complete trifle.

Nevertheless, I continue to feel that something is wrong with me, even two months after the onset of the disease.

“Maybe you wind yourself up?” – mildly interested relatives when, in response to another attendant: “How do you feel?” instead of the long-awaited: “Everything is in order,” they hear annoyed every day: “No way.”

Swing. Today is good. Tomorrow is bad. It’s full of energy, I can’t get out of bed. An hour ago, the temperature is 36.4 – and suddenly jumps to 37.1. One night I can’t fall asleep from a cough. And the next he disappears, as if he was not there.

This is never like the flu. It doesn’t look like anything at all.

It is as if in some science fiction novel the virus-alien got into all the systems of the body and rebuilds, modifies, debugs them for itself, for its own needs.

You wake up from nasty, stretching muscle pain that moves throughout the body during the night: first your hands hurt, then your neck, left half, right, shoulder blades, right and left, and … back. The pain lingers in one of the limbs, calms down and begins its quiet journey again.

“I feel like a transformer,” writes Muscovite Elena, who also has strange symptoms after recovery. – It seems that the details are the same, but the feeling that the body as a whole now lives according to other, previously unknown rules. What if this virus remains inside us forever? Well, like herpes, for example. If he once got into the body, then he sits there, having integrated himself into our DNA and does not manifest himself in any way during the analysis. ”

And I, too, no longer know that from the rest – “I”, and that – “it”.

This is not like recovery, but rather a short-term remission. Because there are days when nothing hurts me at all. But I do not have time to get used to it and rejoice.

I jerk when, early in the morning, a friend in misfortune sends the usual SMS: “Well, how is the smell?” What will happen to him during the night? What a month ago was perceived as a funny joke: let’s sniff everything, now it’s wildly enraging: barbecue (specially bought) doesn’t smell anything, ammonia immediately gives to the back of the head, alcohol – like water, perfume – only if you splash it in your nose and hard.

The aroma of uncontrolled chlorination is most pronounced, it is almost daily washed by the neighbors’ floors, there are only 5 or 6 cases of the disease in the house, of which I know one death.

Professor Garner, the first to describe this atypical course of COVID-19, suggested that his illness, like many others, would go away in 14 days.

Instead, the symptoms returned again and again. Altogether, Garner spent 7 weeks as if “riding a roller coaster of ill health, emotional extremes and extreme fatigue,” as he wrote about this in his blog for the British Medical Journal. It was a frightening experience.

Almost every day – “just like an Advent calendar” – he discovered new signs: from arthritis to tinnitus. Whenever he felt better, the disease returned.

Garner began to look for like-minded people: “I found a participant in marathons,” the scientist describes in his publication. “She tried to run 8 km in the second week of illness, after which she fell down with chills and slept for a whole day.”

After his publication, Garner says, he received many letters and phone calls from grateful readers who thought they were crazy since no one else openly describes this. “I am a public person, so this is understandable. As for the virus, it clearly causes many immunological changes in the body, many strange pathologies that we still do not understand. “

According to the latest research, approximately every 20 sick COVID-19 suffers for quite some time in the same way as Professor Garner – “on-off”. It’s not clear how long this can take. The professor himself believes that it is best to draw a parallel with dengue fever, which he also suffered from at one time. “Dengue comes and goes. It’s the same as driving with a handbrake not removed for 6–9 months. ”

Already 15 different types of symptoms have been identified, and the general pattern is periodic improvement and deterioration of well-being. “I studied about a hundred diseases, and covid is the strangest thing I’ve seen in my entire medical career,” admits Tim Spector, professor at King’s College London, who leads the research team.

There are no scientific explanations of what is happening, why in some everything goes almost asymptomatically, while in others the disease is delayed, so far. A possible cause is an overstrain of the immune system and the resulting prolonged reaction. In any case, relapse is possible …

My brothers unfortunately gather in groups where they are trying to somehow support each other and understand how to deal with it. True, this is not in Russia. We have a special attitude towards people like me: “There is nothing to whine, survive and rejoice.”

Survived – and then what?

Yesterday I read that coronavirus, like seasonal flu, can come back every year again and again …

Please, not this, I just can’t stand it.

Prayers of the last days: let them only exist! Antibodies!

Read the material “Immunity to COVID-19 was developed six years ago from other” colds “