Long Covid - a growing problem

I’ve read that pre biotic/pro biotics can help greatly with long covid.

Worth trying Maybee for those with Long Covid.

I wonder whether the drugs used in hospital to treat Covid may be partly of even wholly responsible for these ongoing effects: the fatigue, muscle pain, poor sleep and breathlessness.

Corticosteroids were used in the treatment of Covid to damped the immune system which was going into overdrive as the body tried to fight the virus.

Anyone who has an inflammatory auto immune condition and has or has had to take high doses of corticosteriods will know the effect they can have on the body - all of the above symptoms - both while taking the drug and during the long reduction period. The side effects can be acute if withdrawal is done too quickly. Once off the drug altogether it can still take months to feel well again.

Trouble is severity of illness doesn’t necessarily equate to more chance of having long covid. You can have it quite mild but get long covid and be very ill with it but make a full recovery.

I have had Covid twice,both times I was asymptomatic but now I do have aching legs which I didn’t have before so is that long Covid?

Possibly some covid patients are suffering from the recognised Post Intensive Care Syndrome. At the height of the pandemic high numbers of covid patients required ventilation in ICU. Any patients, not just covid, who spend a prolonged period in ICU are at risk of suffering long term after effects including muscle weakness, poor balance, anxiety and depression etc. These symptoms can persist for many months after discharge from hospital.

I read that a high percentage of people who were hospitalised have long Covid. I don't know why there's a continual refusal to acknowledge the numbers.

I think it's because acknowledging long term issues would mean dealing with them.
Supporting people, helping them, ensuring they aren't financially impacted, and dealing with the fall out.
Far easier to sweep it all under the carpet.

I took a while to recover after I had Covid (I was hospitalised) but I did recover gradually. When I got home from hospital I couldn’t walk up the stairs without several stops to get my breath. I didn’t go outside the house for about a month after I got home. I gradually did more and then more and I gradually felt better. Now I’m okay although I don’t like to walk fast as it makes me breathless and I get more tired than before. However it’s difficult to know if that’s just getting older or Covid. The one long change is the scars on my lungs, still there a year later. Next X-ray is in June, so we’ll see then if there’s been any improvement.

I only had a mild dose of Covid compared to many, no drugs had to be taken, just normal over the counter pain killers, but it’s taken until this week for my energy levels to come back to normal. I’ve spent 6 weeks or so just pottering with frequent rests.
I feel so sorry for those who have been hospitalised and now have long Covid.

I agree with you all. I had a fairly mild case 3 weeks ago but I am still not right and get tired easily and out of breath. It is a truly foul illness. What is more, it has affected my memory- I was always good with words but find I am searching for names and words which were just second nature before.

It's a massive problem FarNorth. Two years on for me and many others in my long covid support group.

The medicos are flummoxed by it with many studies ongoing but no resolutions at the moment. It's such a mad assemblage of symptoms that I can't see it ever being treated formally, it's all DIY to see if anything works as Maybee's suggestion of probiotics.

It does help me when people share their experiences as it makes me feel less like I'm losing it. The fatigue and brain fog are the worst and also the feeling when, after a few good days when you think you're winning, the symptoms reoccur, it's so disheartening. I feel like I've aged 10 years in the last two!

Nanna8 you're so right when you say it's a foul illness. All we really can do is support each other.

It still, to me, sounds identical to the symptoms the people I’ve known with ME suffer from.

They all overlap, these issues caused by viruses.

There was a thread on here a while ago, where people wondered if perhaps they may have had covid before it was known about.
A lot of the problems they have had since are similar.

Nannee49 the people I've heard of, irl, with long covid had not been in hospital.
Do you know whether those in your group had mainly been in hospital, or not?

I hope that long covid is taken seriously, unlike the dismissive approach usually taken to M.E. and similar illnesses.

FarNorth

Nannee49 the people I've heard of, irl, with long covid had not been in hospital.
Do you know whether those in your group had mainly been in hospital, or not?

I hope that long covid is taken seriously, unlike the dismissive approach usually taken to M.E. and similar illnesses.

Having known several people with ME I’m not holding my breath on that one. Even when people say how poorly covid has left them without it actually being long covid they seem to be ignored.

FarNorth & MayBee it's mainly the unhospitalised in my group, a rough ratio of 60-40%. Some have been completely asymptomatic then gone on to develop some of the wide range of symptoms.

Some are only months in, some, like myself, a couple of years. It is heartening that, although I'm having a flare up at the moment, there's longer inbetween recurrences and that seems to be true of most of my group.

The main takeaways really are to accept LC as a recognised condition, not to push yourself no matter how frustrating it is on a good day when you feel on top of things and want to do too much and keep doing your own research with threads like this being super helpful to help normalise the often frightening feelings it churns up. The physical aspects are rotten but it's the fearful, what I imagine are dementia like symptoms which are the worst when they kick in and it's good to know you're not suffering alone.

That sounds exactly what my friends with ME have said. They aren’t taken seriously because on a good day no one would believe they had a problem but if they push themselves they suffer for it afterwards.

I have a relative whose ME has improved a lot but who was originally told by doctors, about 20 years ago, to push herself. Doing that caused huge worsening of her condition.
I hope doctors no longer tell people to do that, in these types of illness.

Does anyone know if Long Covid has a symptom that is awful acid reflux? Or worsening acid reflux ( if you have it already)?

Yes Pepper59 that was one of my main symptoms. It came with a funny little persistent cough which I thought at first was respiratory but turns out to be caused by acid reflux exacerbated by covid...I'd very, very rarely suffered with it before.

For me, apple cider vinegar is the way forward - half a tablespoon in a tumbler of water in the morning or when sypmtoms start (maybe after not chewing food sufficiently or eating stuff like pastry). It may work for you. If you do try it, it's recommended to drink through a straw.

I'd be wary of taking the PPI type of medication such as Omeprazole as it reduces stomach acid production when apparently what we need as we age is to be producing more stomach acid not making even less but that's only my research and experience, I'm sure there was another thread recently about PPIs and some people had a different opinion.

It does ease up long covid wise as I don't have the cough any more and bouts are fewer in between now. Hope this post helps as it's a bloody miserable thing to be constantly dealing with.

We had Covid at the very beginning of the pandemic and like Nannee49 it was two years before the cough finally went.I also had bouts of breathlessness and we both still have aching legs but that could just be us getting older.We have also noticed that we seem to catch every bug/virus doing the rounds which we never did before.As DH says it’s lucky we are retired so can go with the flow.I feel so sorry for people suffering these symptoms and trying to keep working.

Pepper59

Does anyone know if Long Covid has a symptom that is awful acid reflux? Or worsening acid reflux ( if you have it already)?

I suffer from chronic acid reflux, but since having Covid three weeks ago and requiring an infusion of anti virals, the reflux has been horrendous. There is no respite from the hacking cough and it isn't responding to my usual strong medication.

As for the anti virals, they have made me feel very unwell, sometimes the cure is worse than the illness. I am already on a biologic drug for RA, which is being used in Covid ICU and the anti virals are from the same family, so I can empathise with those suffering from the long term effects of being medicated in ICU.

I agree with the comment about steroids, as a lifetime user of large doses of Prednisolone or Kennilog, you can feel great on them, but once you come off, its hellish!