One morning in early March 2020 I got up, got ready and then walked down to the Lawrence Hill train station in Bristol.
It was a Thursday and I was heading into London to work from my firm’s office for a couple of days while staying with my parents just to the north of the city.
On the weekend I stayed in London with kiwi friends and we would all go to a friend’s engagement party.
When I left my apartment in Bristol that day with my backpack and laptop, it turned out that it was for the last time.
I would never live there again.
On the train to Paddington, I began to get a headache and feel a little rough.
During that day at the London office, this got worse and I began to have what I will draw a veil over by calling it ‘gastrointestinal symptoms’.
I had a small tickle in my throat but no real cough.
But the ‘slightly rough’ feeling became worse and, by the time I left work early to get to my parents, I was beginning to have that intense ‘get me out of this poisoned body’ feeling so characteristic of the proper flu.
The next little while is a bit of a blur.
I was off work for a couple of weeks and the second week was worse than the first.
This was when the cough appeared – and moving around became more difficult.
In the meantime, my office switched to remote working and the UK (eventually) went into lockdown. And I had given my parents Covid and taken up what turned out to be permanent residence with them.
There was a dicey couple of weeks when none of us was well and food was in short supply, but a kind neighbour brought us shopping and we felt very grateful that we had a safe refuge and could be together.
My recovery was very slow.
It took weeks to be able to walk a few blocks to the park and I couldn’t really taste or smell.
Months later my cough still lingered and I was often quite fatigued. I needed an operation for endometriosis in November and hoped after that that I would be in a better position to get better properly.
After the operation, I’d been trying to gently increase exercise to help get some fitness and condition back.
And then, one day in May 2021, just over a year after I first came down with COVID, I overdid it.
I had what I imagine an asthma attack must feel like.
I could barely talk and I just couldn’t seem to get enough air into my body.
After an hour or two of lying on my front to take the weight off my lungs, I began to feel a bit better.
But this was really just the beginning of what I thought of as The Great Decline.
My heart rate began to spike at over 120bpm just walking across the room.
My shortness of breath became more extreme and I became dizzy and unsteady on my feet.
I fainted waiting in line at the pharmacy and then discovered that I had to lean on my parents to get from the car to a building.
Even sitting down to work, I began to have heart palpitations and was having huge trouble focussing.
Increasingly, halfway through a sentence, my mind would be wiped blank, leaving me hanging like a train on a half-completed bridge.
This was one thing at home but disastrous at work in front of clients or when slowing my team down in design workshops.
Even working independently, I found I couldn’t read the material let alone write text for reports or emails.
Eventually, I realised that I couldn’t do my job anymore.
I went to my GP and at one point had to go to A&E. Both declared they could find nothing wrong, anxiety was likely at the root of it, and I should consider talking therapy.
Therapy is great and I think that if it were normalised and made free-of-charge to everyone, the world would likely be a better place.
But there are limits to what therapy can achieve and repairing a body is beyond it.
Luckily, I had private health insurance through work and found a cardiologist who had been working with Covid and long-term Covid patients throughout the pandemic.
He recognised my symptoms and quite simply believed me. When I mentioned that previous doctors had thought that this was largely psychological, he replied: “Not understanding a pathology is no excuse for bad medicine.”
After many tests and visits to electrophysical, respiratory and rheumatology specialists I was diagnosed with:
- a heart arrhythmia (Supraventricular Tachycardia — SVT)
- a form of autonomic dysfunction, Vasis Type 3 (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome — POTS)
- Fibromyalgia
- Laryngopharyngeal Reflux (LPR)
Long Covid has radically changed my life.
But it has also given me a new perspective on my previous life and my body. I am frequently amazed when I contemplate what I used to be able to do in the past. Continue reading
- Charlotte Murphy is a New Zealand-born landscape architect of proud Irish heritage. She has been living in the UK since 2017.