SURVIVING CORONAVIRUS: A COMPLETELY ANECDOTAL AND UNSCIENTIFIC OVERVIEW OF RECOVERY FROM COVID-19

The coronavirus has spread throughout the world for most of the year, with the United States the worst hit country. As of this writing, there are approximately 350,000 dead, with no signs of abatement, and failures of leadership at all levels of government exacerbating the problem.

The death toll for the virus, while shocking, doesn't tell the full story. In the military, casualty reports include those who have died, as well as those who have been injured. That should also apply to this virus, since recent reporting indicates that those who survive this disease often suffer continuing medical issues, the extent of which is still unknown. But lingering brain, heart, lung, and nerve damage, as well as mental health problems, have all been reported by those who have recovered.

I have several friends, acquaintances, and former co-workers who have contracted COVID-19, and I wanted to get a sense of their experiences with it, and how it continues to affect them and their health. I conducted interviews with folks in Los Angeles, New York City, Austin, Texas, and my hometown of Oxford, Ohio, and here is what I learned.

“I felt 100% fine until the first evening when a fever came on all of the sudden. It kept getting worse and worse and by the time I went to sleep I had full chills and was sweating profusely.”

The fever is the first thing. You feel your face, your forehead, and they feel hot. You take your temperature, and it's over 100. Then the other symptoms come on: chills, nausea, a sore throat, weird poops. And the cough, a cough that makes you feel like you're going to break your ribs.

“I felt like someone had put me in a gunny sack and beat me senseless.”

It keeps getting worse and worse and you feel like all you want to do is pass out and you either sleep 20 hours a day or you can't sleep at all, then the insomnia overtakes you. You sweat through your sheets, chills so bad your bed moves across the room. You start to hallucinate, not knowing what's a dream and what's real.

“I knew I wasn't an emergency patient and didn't want to spend 6-8 hours sitting around a hospital catching something worse.”

You're so tired. It's hard to think, but you think you have coronavirus. If you do have it, wouldn't it be worse to be stuck in a hospital waiting room, getting other people sick? If you don't have it, isn't that the most likely place to get it, stuck around sick people in a poorly-ventilated room?

You scroll Twitter, check medical websites, see Chris Cuomo talking about his symptoms on CNN. You decide you have it, but that, fortunately, it's (comparatively) mild so far. Your doctor on the tele-health call you've scheduled says you should just stay home and manage it with over-the-counter drugs. Call 911 if you find yourself suddenly unable to breathe, or if your lips turn blue.

“My symptoms change constantly.  Every day is a new day and there's always something I'm going to have to deal with.”

So you just isolate and manage it, but it lasts longer than any other illness you've ever had, and the symptoms are so varied and change so often that you're never quite sure what you're even treating.

When you look back later, the pattern seems to be:

High fever

Fatigue and lack of breathe – even when sitting still, you feel like you've run up a flight of stairs

A slight recovery, which is just a tease

The initial symptoms returning, but worse

A crest in the wave, with the symptoms slowly reducing, much too gradually until, almost imperceptibly, they are gone.

“Be vigilant even with people closest to you, and don't hang out with people outside of your household indoors.” 

You hole up in the guest room, because you don't want to infect your family. You only leave the room to go to the bathroom for those weird poops and to the kitchen to try to eat something. You text your family before you open the door so they can give you space. You wear a mask indoors, the whole time you're in the common areas. Your family talks to you from across the room. A few friends visit, wave through the living room windows.

“You have to keep your sense of humor about these things, and my boyfriend and I made a lot of jokes about not being able to smell each other's morning breath or farts LOL.”

The weirdest symptom is the combined loss of sense of smell and taste. You try to eat something and you realize you are putting more and more butter on your toast, more and more salt in your soup, more and more sugar in your coffee. One day you realize it just feels like you're chewing cardboard, drinking the feeling of heat.

“I felt stupid for a month.”

Due to your lack of sleep, you can't think clearly. All the information is no good or changes daily anyway, so even though you're a smart person with good judgement, you realize you're falling victim to quack cures, unscientific treatments.

There was all this talk about hydroxychloroquine, a malaria medication. You know what else works on malaria? Quinine! You know what else has quinine? Tonic water!

In the throes of insomnia, you are now 100% certain that tonic water is your panacea, and you find yourself up at 2AM, the blue screen of your phone illuminating your face as you order a case of it from Amazon.

“You feel like total shit, but then you're also terrified you're going to get worse, you don't feel like you're getting any sort of reliable medical information, you worry you've given it to someone else who might get really sick. It's psychologically terrifying as much as it's physically awful.”

As bad as it hurts physically, sometimes you think the psychological aspects of the virus are worse. For one, you've read that it might actually be damaging your brain. But also, you're isolated from everyone, so you're basically in self-imposted solitary confinement. Then, everything you read online seems to contradict the last thing you read.

Then there’s your constant state of anxiety. You have hours-long panic attacks, which only make your breathing troubles worse.

In your endless late-night doom-scrolling, you read an article that says that new medical information suggests that even if you recover from COVID-19, there's a good chance that it's not like chicken pox and that you don't get immunity and you can get it again. You read about people's blood thickening, about heart attacks and sudden strokes.

You turn off your phone.

“My doctor didn't believe I had covid, and prescribed me meditation!”

One morning, you wake up to discover pus under your toe nails. Your toes themselves are discolored: black and blue. Purple.

It doesn't hurt, so you ignore it. But by the end of the day, your feet are swollen and itchy, painful. There are raised bumps and patches of rough skin.

Then it spreads to your hands.

“I kept thinking about having to make arrangements for my stuff in case I died.”

There is a time, a few weeks in when the symptoms have come back and come back worse. Now even your bones throb, and you decide that there is a good chance, 50/50 at least, that you aren't going to make it.

Walking hurts, breathing hurts, you keep looking on the forward facing mirror on your phone to see if your lips are turning blue yet.

You make a list on the notes app on your phone, making arrangements for your possessions in case you die.

“Every day there are more and more people in situations like mine and I wish there were more resources for us.”

It takes about a month or six weeks to return to normal, or at least a new version of normal. You slowly realize as your sense of smell and taste return, as your fever subsides, as your hands and feet retain their previous color, that you're going live. You're going to survive this virus.

Some issues linger longer. Months later, you still get so fatigued that you have to sit down after a short walk or a bike ride, but you're basically yourself again.

“You don’t want this. It isn’t a hoax. This isn’t the flu. Most people live.”

Coronavirus is deadly. Coronavirus kills. Thousands and thousands of Americans have died this year from this disease, and many of them needlessly.

You are lucky. You have survived. You will live.

But you still don't know what the long-term effects are, or how they will manifest in the future. Is your heart permanently damaged? Your lungs? Your brain? Even a vaccine won't alleviate the future health complications of those who got it and survived it, or those who have yet to get it.

The virus has left you. The uncertainty remains.