Speaker 1: School of Humans. After the Russian flu epidemic in the
Speaker 1: early eighteen nineties, some survivors described odd and oddly lingering symptoms.
Speaker 1: One of them, the English feminist Josephine Butler, wrote to
Speaker 1: a friend, I am so weak that if I read
Speaker 1: or write for half an hour, I become so tired
Speaker 1: and faint that I have to lie down. That was
Speaker 1: more than three months after she'd gotten the flu. Twenty
Speaker 1: five years later, just before the start of the Spanish
Speaker 1: flu pandemic, the Austrian neurologist Constantine vent Economo described a
Speaker 1: series of patients who had unusual and unusually sustained symptoms.
Speaker 1: These patients had symptoms that range from meningitis to delirium,
Speaker 1: from extreme tiredness to weakness in the hands or feet,
Speaker 1: are almost the complete opposite, involuntary twitching and jerking, and insomnia,
Speaker 1: and even more unsettling, A lot of these patients died
Speaker 1: because so many patients had unbearable exhaustion. Economo named whatever
Speaker 1: these patients had and cephalitis lethargica. The disease seemed to
Speaker 1: center around Vienna at first, but when the Spanish flu
Speaker 1: came and spread throughout the world, the mysterious disease seemed
Speaker 1: to follow its footsteps to other parts of Europe and
Speaker 1: the United States. It affected at least one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people in Western Europe. Its precise cause and relationship to
Speaker 1: the Spanish flu is still a mystery today. Fifteen years later,
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty four, an outbreak of atypical polio struck
Speaker 1: one hundred and ninety eight people, most of them doctors
Speaker 1: and nurses, at a Los Angeles hospital. The authors of
Speaker 1: a paper about this outbreak at LA Hospital wrote that
Speaker 1: the polio was so variable that no syndrome can be
Speaker 1: described which accurately portrays the clinical picture. Instead of the
Speaker 1: more typical symptoms of polio like these patients had all
Speaker 1: sorts of other symptoms nausea, vomiting, muscle twitching, constipation, vertigo,
Speaker 1: and double vision. Any sort of exercise or exertion caused
Speaker 1: them debilitating fatigue. They had trouble sleeping and memory lapses,
Speaker 1: and the symptoms lasted. Even six months later, more than
Speaker 1: half of the afflicted staff couldn't go back to work,
Speaker 1: and more than a decade after that some of the
Speaker 1: patients were still suffering. Which is all to say that
Speaker 1: long haulers are not unique to COVID nineteen. In fact,
Speaker 1: they are not unique even to this coronavirus. Chronic symptoms
Speaker 1: have been documented in patients with stars Wan and Mers.
Speaker 1: What is unique about long COVID, which is a term
Speaker 1: created by patients for patients, is that many millions of
Speaker 1: people have it all at once, and these long haulers
Speaker 1: are resourceful, driven and speaking aloud about it in unison,
Speaker 1: in the news, on social media, and to each other.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's unique about long COVID is that
Speaker 1: if it's still a mystery and understudied and misunderstood, it's
Speaker 1: not being swept completely under the rug. This podcast is
Speaker 1: about the history of vaccines, but maybe I don't talk
Speaker 1: enough about why we even need vaccines. It's about preventing mortality,
Speaker 1: of course, but it's also about preventing morbidity, the suffering
Speaker 1: from illness and chronic disease. And that's what we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in this episode about long COVID, or
Speaker 1: rather that's what two long COVID patients are going to
Speaker 1: tell us about. It's not always pretty or upbeat, but
Speaker 1: these conversations will open your eyes. He had another reason
Speaker 1: you don't want to get COVID nineteen. Because there's no
Speaker 1: guarantee that you'll ever recover from My Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: School of Humans. I'm sean review and this is long shot.
Speaker 1: Let's just start from the beginning. So when did you
Speaker 1: start feeling ill? This started back in February twenty, twenty twenty. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that's Dave Hackaday. He's forty eight years old, lives in
Speaker 1: Oxford in the UK. He's married with a couple of kids.
Speaker 1: He works in humanitarian ed I've worked in war zones,
Speaker 1: civil conflict zones, and there's been bombs and shooting around,
Speaker 1: so I'm fairly used to crisis and managing anxiety. And
Speaker 1: in February twenty twenty he started feeling a little sick,
Speaker 1: extremely heavy running nose, which is quite grim. Actually, I've
Speaker 1: never had anything like that before, but the usual, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of mild fever, aches and pains, feeling a bit
Speaker 1: dizzy and a bit unwell, just in bed for a
Speaker 1: couple of days. Nothing serious, just a fairly heavy cold
Speaker 1: or fever. By the time Dave starts feeling symptoms, he
Speaker 1: and his family are already aware of the virus spreading
Speaker 1: in China, but there are only a dozen or so
Speaker 1: cases in the UK over the following weeks. Novel coronavirus
Speaker 1: cases are reported in Japan and Thailand, South Korea, France, Australia, Brazil, India, Egypt,
Speaker 1: and Italy. There are tens of thousands of cases in China,
Speaker 1: but very low numbers elsewhere in the world. A person
Speaker 1: here and there, nothing to cause panic. In Oxford. Dave
Speaker 1: continues living his life, but he sees the writing on
Speaker 1: the wall and cuts back on some activities. He mostly
Speaker 1: works from home borders his groceries online. One of the
Speaker 1: few things Dave continues doing like normal is going to
Speaker 1: the gym. He's a really active person, likes to do
Speaker 1: high intensity interval training and things like that. I was
Speaker 1: pretty fair and I had a good diet, no underlying comorbidities.
Speaker 1: The only thing I was doing was going to the gym,
Speaker 1: and I'd heard about some people started complaining of coughs
Speaker 1: and fevers and stuff, so you know, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: I picked it up from the gym. He gets sick
Speaker 1: at the end of February, feels like a pretty bad cold,
Speaker 1: but he isn't overly worried. But since he knows about
Speaker 1: this coronavirus, he calls one one one, which is direct
Speaker 1: line to the National Health Service. Basically, someone in the
Speaker 1: UK might call one one one if they're sick, but
Speaker 1: it's not really an emergency. They were saying, well, look,
Speaker 1: if you haven't got a cough or a high fever,
Speaker 1: and you haven't been to China or been with anyone
Speaker 1: who's been in Italy, then it probably isn't probably just
Speaker 1: a seasonal cold and that's been That was their position
Speaker 1: at the time. Even though the NHS is telling Dave
Speaker 1: he doesn't have coronavirus, he quarantines himself for a few
Speaker 1: days as he recovers. And so what happened after that,
Speaker 1: I kind of got a typical virus that kind of
Speaker 1: felt better. Within four or five days, I was back
Speaker 1: on the bike, you know, cycling around Oxford again, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of staying fairly low, not really going anywhere there's
Speaker 1: lots of people. The only reason I went out was
Speaker 1: to go back to the gym again. Really maybe popped
Speaker 1: into the office once or twice. Dave thinks he's in
Speaker 1: the clear, even though he doesn't know if he even
Speaker 1: had coronavirus. The symptoms are gone, but then it comes
Speaker 1: back even harder. Than before. It was actually much the ninth,
Speaker 1: that's March the twenty twenty. I was starting to feel
Speaker 1: a little bit weird, quite unusual levels of fatigue. And
Speaker 1: this isn't just kind of like feeling a bit tired
Speaker 1: at the end of the day. It was starting to
Speaker 1: feel a bit jet laggy, you know, if you've been
Speaker 1: on a long haul flight, maybe really quite a deep,
Speaker 1: deep tiredness. Dave thinks maybe he's run down from work,
Speaker 1: just needs some time to relax, but the symptimes get
Speaker 1: worse and weirder. I remember writing a Skype message to
Speaker 1: a work quality around about that time, just saying, God, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I just had a really bad night. I
Speaker 1: couldn't sleep, I was having nightmares, couldn't breathe properly. The
Speaker 1: worst thing was probably the chest pain and the compression
Speaker 1: that gradually each day got slowly worse and worse, and it,
Speaker 1: you know, I can describe it as like you know,
Speaker 1: having an anvil on your chest, suffocating feeling, and they're
Speaker 1: also sharp pain sort of radiating down the left hand
Speaker 1: side of my chest and arm, which you know, I'm
Speaker 1: a middle aged man, and these warning signs that you
Speaker 1: don't ignore, so it's just getting worse each day. And
Speaker 1: then of course the fatigue was building, that was getting worse,
Speaker 1: and there was just generally feeing, starting to feel really
Speaker 1: unwell inflamed hots, getting chills at night time and night sweats, insomnia,
Speaker 1: dreadful nightmares. My god, the nightmares were horrific. By this time.
Speaker 1: In the UK, schools are closed, restaurants and pubs are closed,
Speaker 1: Parliament is closed, even the Church of England is closed.
Speaker 1: The entire country is on lockdown as thousands of Brits
Speaker 1: have tested positive for COVID nineteen, including Prime Minister Boris
Speaker 1: Johnson and Prince Charles. In April twenty twenty, the Queen
Speaker 1: gives a rare televised address to the nation. While we
Speaker 1: have faced challenges before, this one is different. This time
Speaker 1: we join with all nations across the globe in a
Speaker 1: common endeavor, using the great advances of science and our
Speaker 1: instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed. By then, these
Speaker 1: symptoms are scaring the shit out of him. I remember
Speaker 1: waking up in a cold sweat, having had a nightmare
Speaker 1: that I couldn't actually breathe, And I woke up and
Speaker 1: I couldn't actually breathe. It was the most terrifying thing.
Speaker 1: This time he calls, like calling nine one in the US.
Speaker 1: An ambulance comes to the house. And that was the
Speaker 1: first point I kind of realized I was in the
Speaker 1: middle of something quite unusual because they did all the
Speaker 1: usual vital signs. So they took oxygen, they did blood pressure,
Speaker 1: and they took some blood. They took temperatures and they
Speaker 1: found nothing. Nothing. They said, you're absolutely you know, as
Speaker 1: far as we can see from a triage perspective, there's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with you. Take some paracetamol and go to bed.
Speaker 1: What did you think at this point? I thought I
Speaker 1: was dying. The problem was Dave didn't know what illness
Speaker 1: he had. It was so early in the pandemic in
Speaker 1: the UK that getting tested was no easy task. Even
Speaker 1: after calling an ambulance and telling the EMTs he feels
Speaker 1: like he's going to die, he can't get tested. It's
Speaker 1: mind blowing. Yeah, you know a lot of US first
Speaker 1: waivers people who came down with it in January February March,
Speaker 1: there were no tests available. You had to be dying
Speaker 1: or admitted to hospital to have a test. His symptoms
Speaker 1: are bad, but not typical COVID nineteen symptoms as they
Speaker 1: were known. Then another time, when he calls one one
Speaker 1: one this happens. I remember as clear as day. I said, look,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling really unwell. I can't breathe properly. I really
Speaker 1: I think I need help. And the person says, it's
Speaker 1: nothing we can do for you. Our hospitals are full.
Speaker 1: If you know, if you're not dying, then there's nothing
Speaker 1: we can do about it. I said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: how do I know that I'm not dying? And she
Speaker 1: and blessed their you know, fair play. He just said,
Speaker 1: you know, don't call back unless a your lips tone
Speaker 1: blue or be you pass out unconscious. And I remember
Speaker 1: just thinking, you know, if I've passed out unconscious, how
Speaker 1: can I'll call you. It's not a criticism at all.
Speaker 1: It's indicitous of the state of crisis that the country
Speaker 1: and many countries were in at that point. We just
Speaker 1: did not know what was going on. Dave doesn't know
Speaker 1: what to do with a surge of really sick people.
Speaker 1: Hospitals in the UK are doing their best to help
Speaker 1: coronavirus patients, but Dave doesn't check the normal COVID boxes.
Speaker 1: Most patients if they recover, do so within two weeks
Speaker 1: or maybe a month if they have a severe case
Speaker 1: and need hospitalization. His case is severe, but in a
Speaker 1: totally different way. Dave doesn't need a ventilator, and the
Speaker 1: thing is he doesn't know what he needs. Nobody does.
Speaker 1: I felt really alone, you know. I just thought there's
Speaker 1: something wrong with me in my head. Maybe there's some
Speaker 1: anxiety in there, you know, I just did not know
Speaker 1: what was going on. He keeps a log of his
Speaker 1: illness that he eventually turns into a blog. April twenty second,
Speaker 1: day forty five. Breathing, restricted, heavy headache, insomnia, anxiety, claustrophobia,
Speaker 1: extreme fatigue, pins and needles and weird joint pain, sleep, apnea.
Speaker 1: April twenty seventh, day fifty symptoms persist, Call local GP
Speaker 1: for advice, request X ray, ECG and blood tests declined.
Speaker 1: Signed off work for May April thirtieth night chills and sweats,
Speaker 1: extreme fatigue, worsening, cough, fever, and breathlessness. May first woke
Speaker 1: up feeling slightly better, first headache free day since late February. Okay,
Speaker 1: so at this point he's feeling somewhat hopeful, But then
Speaker 1: May second relapse overnight, chess pain returned quite severely, shortness
Speaker 1: of breath acute again. Advice from doctor is that this
Speaker 1: is recovering COVID nineteen and to readjust recovery expectations from
Speaker 1: weeks to months. May sixth, significant improvements and symptoms following
Speaker 1: an incredibly deep sleep, one of the deepest night's sleep
Speaker 1: I've had in years, like being under anesthetic. May seventh,
Speaker 1: day sixty Continued recovery, like coming out from underneath heavy, dusty,
Speaker 1: suffocating old rug. May eighth, relapse, But that day, on
Speaker 1: May eighth, Dave reads an article by a professor of
Speaker 1: infectious diseases in Liverpool who describes his own roller coaster
Speaker 1: of unexplainable symptoms, and for the first time, Dave sees
Speaker 1: that he's not alone. He starts finding Facebook groups with
Speaker 1: thousands of people sharing their unusual and harrowing COVID experiences.
Speaker 1: I just stole ban guy, God, I'm not alone, you know.
Speaker 1: And then none of this darkness and mine of this
Speaker 1: weirdness and quite frankly terrifying experience. I found my people.
Speaker 1: What they are going through doesn't even have a name yet.
Speaker 1: But on May twenty of twenty twenty. Doctor Elisa Pedigo,
Speaker 1: an archaeologist, coins the term long COVID as a hashtag
Speaker 1: on Twitter. Dave finds a community of people willing to
Speaker 1: take his illness seriously. One of the most mysterious symptoms
Speaker 1: that long COVID patients describe as brain fog, and Dave
Speaker 1: got it one time. He was in the middle of
Speaker 1: a conference call with twenty people and just couldn't remember
Speaker 1: what he was supposed to be saying, just at one point,
Speaker 1: being in the middle of the sentence and just forgetting,
Speaker 1: just forgetting what I was talking about, what we were
Speaker 1: talking about, what it was I was supposed to be summarizing,
Speaker 1: and I just couldn't, could not remember. And I just thought,
Speaker 1: oh my god, there's this big black hole where my
Speaker 1: memory should have been and where the decision should have been,
Speaker 1: and I just couldn't. I couldn't summon it up. Dave
Speaker 1: was really freaked out. And it doesn't even like to
Speaker 1: use the term brain fag because it sounds cartoonish. It
Speaker 1: sounds kind of quite cute, and what people are witnessing
Speaker 1: experiencing is not in any way cute or funny. It's
Speaker 1: you know, it's dementia like symptoms, you just forget what
Speaker 1: you're doing, you forget words, you forget where you are.
Speaker 1: To learn more about brain fag, I turned to someone
Speaker 1: who studies brains. So I'm Athena Acrammy and I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist at University College London. I have my own lab
Speaker 1: studying various aspects of learning memory, specifically related to a
Speaker 1: kind of unsupervised learning in human rodents computational models. Athena
Speaker 1: has her own lab to study brains, and one of
Speaker 1: the best universities on earth to do so. In other words,
Speaker 1: she's brilliant. But in March twenty twenty, she gets sick,
Speaker 1: and she, like Dave Hockaday and millions of other people,
Speaker 1: starts getting weird symptoms that won't go away. At first,
Speaker 1: she thinks she has a normal COVID. It sounded as
Speaker 1: a bomber, But at the same time I was quiet,
Speaker 1: kind of happy, maybe in a sense that Okay, in
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks, I will be over it. Really,
Speaker 1: I had this mentality, and now that I got it,
Speaker 1: it's fine. That's not what happened. Two weeks became three
Speaker 1: weeks became four weeks, and my initial symptoms day were
Speaker 1: very classic. I had cough and fever and fatigue, shortness
Speaker 1: of breath, but then it just slowly slody. New symptoms
Speaker 1: started to appear. Her cough is almost resolved after four weeks,
Speaker 1: but the new symptoms are bizarre. But I had a
Speaker 1: lot of joint pain, kidney pain, shortness of breath, slip
Speaker 1: up me pins and needless started to appear. And I
Speaker 1: had this kind of a specific extreme episode of sugaring
Speaker 1: that it started one day around noon and then continued
Speaker 1: until morning the day after. So I was just like
Speaker 1: completely paralyzed. I was just like shaking. I was not
Speaker 1: sure it is this really? Am I having some seizure? Maybe, well,
Speaker 1: what is this? She goes to the hospital, But in
Speaker 1: the hospital doctors really didn't know what's going on. What's
Speaker 1: wrong with me? Right that he didn't have anything to
Speaker 1: comment on except saying that, well, it seems like the
Speaker 1: first indications, like taking X ray, chest X ray, it's normal,
Speaker 1: you're blood indicators, they're not really that off. So maybe
Speaker 1: you're stressed out. Maybe you're just like and I would
Speaker 1: just like, you don't know me. I'm not stressed out.
Speaker 1: I'm not a person that just I can't easily get
Speaker 1: it stressed out. The next time she goes to the
Speaker 1: hospital is even worse, and the second time again, I
Speaker 1: had another episode of delirium, so I was I had
Speaker 1: a really high fever, and I think I went through
Speaker 1: a patch of like more than forty eight hours of
Speaker 1: no sleep. Even if I was completely dead and tired,
Speaker 1: I could not sleep. And then either the insomnia introduced
Speaker 1: some kind of induced some delirium and hallucination. You're confused,
Speaker 1: you're disconnected, you don't know where you are, you can't
Speaker 1: really kind of ground yourself into into reality. And I
Speaker 1: had a lot of really weird sleep at me. I said,
Speaker 1: up to this point, I still get them. They're just
Speaker 1: like whenever I'm like, I just wake up gasping for air.
Speaker 1: Right whenever I was just like becoming unconscious falling asleep,
Speaker 1: I was just like waking up gasping for air. And
Speaker 1: that was really kind of exhausting and scary. I would say,
Speaker 1: like Dave, she's very active, she go to the gym
Speaker 1: three times a week. Now she can barely take a
Speaker 1: walk without crashing and having to spend days in bed,
Speaker 1: and the worst part for her is the brain fog
Speaker 1: before really kind of learning and hearing about the term
Speaker 1: brain fog. I was describing that to my husband as
Speaker 1: just like my mom is so cloudy. I can't I
Speaker 1: can't access information easily. I just don't remember things that
Speaker 1: happened maybe half an hour ago. I used to have
Speaker 1: a very sharp memory and that was gone. The obvious
Speaker 1: sort of weirdness here is that you know, you're a
Speaker 1: brain scientist who's experiencing brain fog. Is, how has that
Speaker 1: made you feel? It's a difficult question. I think it
Speaker 1: kind of motivates me more to understand it. And I
Speaker 1: was pretty scared by it, to be honest, because most
Speaker 1: of my contribution to into basically my job is comes
Speaker 1: from my active thinking, right, and that was disrupted, and
Speaker 1: it was difficult to come in peace with it. Right.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to pretend that things are normal. I
Speaker 1: wanted to pretend that I can sit on meetings and
Speaker 1: just like you know, kind of go on with my
Speaker 1: with my science and with my activities as usual. But
Speaker 1: they were extremely taxing. Around the same time that Dave
Speaker 1: finds the Facebook groups, Athena finds a Slack support group
Speaker 1: called body Politic started by journalist Fiona Lowenstein. On body
Speaker 1: Politic Athena finds much of the same validation that Dave
Speaker 1: finds and the Facebook groups. She isn't exaggerating or just stressed,
Speaker 1: and she is far from a loan on one Slack channel.
Speaker 1: People are collecting data by the types of symptoms that
Speaker 1: long COVID patients like themselves are experiencing. She joins and
Speaker 1: starts helping. At this point, we want to just like
Speaker 1: try to aggregate data, collect data to understand it. And
Speaker 1: that was a kind of a temporary I hope that
Speaker 1: offered the group, but that was the beginning of their
Speaker 1: really whole journey. They put out a report on May eleventh,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, that includes a survey of hundreds of long
Speaker 1: COVID patients. It's the first of its kind, a patient
Speaker 1: lead analysis of the long COVID experience, and this is
Speaker 1: just three months or so into the pandemic, so the
Speaker 1: results are very preliminary, but they are still shocking. They
Speaker 1: find that respondents who haven't recovered have been experiencing symptoms
Speaker 1: for an average of forty days, and the chance of
Speaker 1: full recovery by day fifty is less than one and
Speaker 1: five most weeks, brain fog is more common than coughing
Speaker 1: for these COVID patients, and two thirds of them describe
Speaker 1: their lives since getting long COVID as sedentary. But this
Speaker 1: survey is just an appetizer by July Athena and a
Speaker 1: team of long COVID patients SLASH researchers realize this isn't
Speaker 1: going away and their symptoms aren't going away. They embark
Speaker 1: on a larger study, a global survey of long COVID symptoms.
Speaker 1: At that point, I think around more than eight thousand
Speaker 1: people on the slack they were sharing experiences, and the
Speaker 1: slab group at that point I think had around sixty
Speaker 1: different channels dedicated to different symptoms right neurological symptoms, respiratory symptoms,
Speaker 1: size intolerance, to productive symptoms, GI issues, valuous things. For
Speaker 1: the second survey, they get nearly four thousand long COVID
Speaker 1: patients from fifty six countries who speak a bunch of
Speaker 1: different languages to fill out a questionnaire. They ask them
Speaker 1: to describe their symptoms in detail and the effects the
Speaker 1: illness has had in their lives. They release the report
Speaker 1: on that survey in July this year, twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: and the results are astonishing. More than ninety percent of
Speaker 1: the respondents have not recovered after nine months and are
Speaker 1: still suffering at the time of the survey, and more
Speaker 1: than eighty five percent of patients still have relapses triggered
Speaker 1: by exercise or other stressors. Nearly seventy percent have reduced
Speaker 1: their work schedules or stopped working altogether, and almost ninety
Speaker 1: percent of patients have cognitive dysfunction or memory issues like
Speaker 1: Dave and Athena. Just seeing the numbers like them an
Speaker 1: average number of symptoms that long COVID patients had. Out
Speaker 1: of these two hundred, the average the number of symptoms
Speaker 1: is that more than fifty. Just like seeing that number that,
Speaker 1: like one person can experience fifty different symptoms was kind of,
Speaker 1: I don't know, shocking, just at the complexity of the
Speaker 1: symptom profile. Another thing that we're surprising and interesting and
Speaker 1: hopefully we'll give us some queue to understanding the underlying
Speaker 1: path of physiology is that these symptoms are not just
Speaker 1: like limited to one or two organ system. On average,
Speaker 1: out of ten organ systems that we have studied, patients
Speaker 1: have symptoms in nine point something. Each patient has problem
Speaker 1: in various almost all organ systems that we studied long
Speaker 1: COVID is not simply a respiratory illness. Whatever is attacking
Speaker 1: these patients is attacking them head to toe. No, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of ashamed that it as a scientist that I
Speaker 1: really didn't before this whole personal experience, I didn't know
Speaker 1: much about other postel complications. Right, So we knew that
Speaker 1: like post viral complications exist, but unfortunately they are extremely understudied,
Speaker 1: and due to the kind of a scale of the
Speaker 1: pandemic this time, all these small bubbles they come to
Speaker 1: the surface and now they are just undeniable. Right, we
Speaker 1: cannot deny these millions of people now that at the
Speaker 1: same time in this past year, that they are developing
Speaker 1: various type of conditions due to these post viral complications.
Speaker 1: We opened the episode with some major viruses from the
Speaker 1: past that cause limited and very understudied post viral complications
Speaker 1: Russian flu, Spanish flu, polio. But COVID, because of its
Speaker 1: sheer scale and with our ability to look closer at
Speaker 1: virus cells than ever before, offers a new opportunity, a
Speaker 1: chance to figure out what these post viral complications are,
Speaker 1: what causes them. With long COVID, it's still very much
Speaker 1: an unknown Athena is not a virologist or an epidemiologist,
Speaker 1: but her personal experience has driven her to study long COVID,
Speaker 1: all while continuing to recover from her own bout of it.
Speaker 1: We spoke in August twenty twenty one and she still
Speaker 1: hadn't recovered. So next week will be seventeen months, and
Speaker 1: maybe out of the seventeen months, I only had altogether
Speaker 1: thirty forty days of normal temperature. My temperature rarely goes
Speaker 1: below thirty seven point seven eight, right, so I am
Speaker 1: usually above thirty eight, which I think in firenheight would
Speaker 1: be like one hundred point two hundred point three. I
Speaker 1: asked Athena if she was optimistic or pessimistic about whether
Speaker 1: long COVID will be figured out. I really hope that
Speaker 1: with the amount of attention and resources that hopefully different countries,
Speaker 1: different governments, different organizations are providing, we will understand long COVID,
Speaker 1: and unders standing long COVID we will help us to
Speaker 1: understand other post viral complications that have been ignored so
Speaker 1: far in the medical history. That's my optims. My pessimism
Speaker 1: is that unfortunately we are very far from acquiring the
Speaker 1: knowledge that we need in order to provide treatment and
Speaker 1: cure long COVID. Meanwhile, with the existing trend right now,
Speaker 1: the current trend of increasing cases all over the world,
Speaker 1: especially due to the dental variant, we are just like
Speaker 1: accumulating so many long covides down like in a year,
Speaker 1: probably each country will have millions of people, most of
Speaker 1: them again previously young and fit that now they're just
Speaker 1: like really struggling to go back to semi normal life.
Speaker 1: I really don't know what we'll It's a crisis. It's
Speaker 1: a health crisis. Even today, Athenis still has relapses if
Speaker 1: she pushes herself too hard or sometimes for no reason
Speaker 1: at all. And there's also the social side effects of
Speaker 1: long COVID. One aspect of long COVID is that you
Speaker 1: become a very unreliable person because you are good one
Speaker 1: day and then the next day just like kind of
Speaker 1: collapse or you become unfunctional. So that unreliability makes planning
Speaker 1: very difficult. I have to figure out a way that
Speaker 1: whether like these these relapses are going to be with
Speaker 1: me for the list of my life, or the relapses
Speaker 1: hopefully be resolved as well. That's that's completely unclear right now.
Speaker 1: But knowing that during those times that I am not
Speaker 1: experiencing brain fog. I know what a valuable, valuable thing
Speaker 1: it is, just like to be normal. Many months after
Speaker 1: getting sick, Dave Hockaday was still not one hundred percent anytime.
Speaker 1: He tried to exercise the way he used to with
Speaker 1: relapse and be back in bed. He tried, well, he
Speaker 1: tried basically everything. Yeah, gosh, I mean, I'm laughing because
Speaker 1: I've never really taken anything in the past. So what
Speaker 1: have I tried? Various antibiotics, amongst the sillin penicillin. I've
Speaker 1: tried breathing techniques, window breathing, diaphragm breathing. I've tried diaphragm
Speaker 1: released techniques, muscle relaxation techniques, vitamin D of cursitin what else? Gosh?
Speaker 1: I've tried acupuncture and tried shiatsu. I've tried reiki, I've
Speaker 1: tried osteo, I've tried reflexology. I've nearly bankrupted myself trying
Speaker 1: trying to get better. None of it really worked, but
Speaker 1: he did finally have people who understood what he was
Speaker 1: going through. He became a moderator for one of the
Speaker 1: bigger long COVID Facebook groups called covid nineteen support and recovery.
Speaker 1: He also participated in Athena's Big Survey, but after nearly
Speaker 1: a year, he was still really sick. I saw a
Speaker 1: lot of people on the social media groups saying, you know,
Speaker 1: ten or eleven months, they were starting to feel a
Speaker 1: bit better. So I was thinking, great, I maybe come
Speaker 1: out of the woods here. And then January and February
Speaker 1: kicked in and I had a massive relapse when I
Speaker 1: started to get these new symptoms in my stomach, and
Speaker 1: I was thinking, this is never going to end. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be like this the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't really understand chronic illness. We're
Speaker 1: not used to a nonlinear illness. In the West. You
Speaker 1: used to seeing people getting going well and then getting better,
Speaker 1: and that's just not the case and fair place of
Speaker 1: my wife and kids, they've been really understanding throughout this,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure there are points at which they
Speaker 1: just wanted to say, for God's sake, can you not
Speaker 1: just get better? But things did start to get better eventually.
Speaker 1: For Dave, it's just been rest and time, taking it
Speaker 1: easy and being patient. I mean, it's fair to say
Speaker 1: I'm a different person than I was in March last year,
Speaker 1: February March last year. I'm optimistic. I'm a half blastful
Speaker 1: kind of person. I believe I will get better. I
Speaker 1: got no reason to believe otherwise. I think it's just
Speaker 1: going to take time. For Athena, a sort of breakthrough
Speaker 1: came which took a course of steroids last October, though
Speaker 1: she's not really sure that's what helped. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, I'm not sure. Maybe they're just a natural
Speaker 1: course of recovery, right, just like also a time basically
Speaker 1: was another another contribution. However, I still have relapses of
Speaker 1: symptoms like for some of those I know the trigger
Speaker 1: like activity like I really cannot I cannot do much
Speaker 1: of exercise like that active life three times awakened dream.
Speaker 1: It's gone for an for now, and whenever I just
Speaker 1: like try to go back to that, I crash. It's
Speaker 1: unclear if the delta variant currently spreading throughout the world
Speaker 1: is going to cause more cases of long COVID or
Speaker 1: if the vaccines that work so well at preventing hospitalization
Speaker 1: and COVID patients will specifically stop long COVID two. What
Speaker 1: is clear is that you do not want to get
Speaker 1: long COVID that getting COVID nineteen, no matter your age,
Speaker 1: does not necessarily mean you will get through it asymptomatically
Speaker 1: or quickly or ever. Study has ranged quite a bit
Speaker 1: percentage wise, but a significant number of even really young
Speaker 1: children who get COVID, some of whom are initially asymptomatic,
Speaker 1: still report lingering symptoms months later, and a study out
Speaker 1: of China found that more than two thirds of hospitalized
Speaker 1: COVID patients they surveyed had at least one symptom six
Speaker 1: months later. One of the most frightening things that long
Speaker 1: COVID patients describe are the vivid dreams, the nightmares. I
Speaker 1: asked Dave to tell me about his, and the first
Speaker 1: one I remember, I think when I was probably coming
Speaker 1: down with the infection. It was I was dreaming I
Speaker 1: wasn't having a nightmare, that I was lying in bed
Speaker 1: and this kind of serpent popped up at the end
Speaker 1: of the bed and kind of stared at me, and
Speaker 1: I looked at it, and I kind of got a
Speaker 1: bit a bit worried about it, and it just disappeared
Speaker 1: into my foot and went in between the toes and
Speaker 1: started slithering around under my skin, and I could see
Speaker 1: it under my skins, slithering around all over my body,
Speaker 1: and then it started to multiply and you could see
Speaker 1: these snakes under my skin just going all around the
Speaker 1: body and in my face and him. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: at that point needing my subconscious, my immune system, and
Speaker 1: probably informed my subconscious that it was being invaded. And
Speaker 1: that's all that to me is the logical explanation. But
Speaker 1: I'm no expert on dreams. I've got no idea, but
Speaker 1: it was varied for me. I was being invaded. On
Speaker 1: the next episode of A long Shot, we'll learn about
Speaker 1: human challenge trails where people contract coronavirus on purpose. Long
Speaker 1: Shot is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Today's episode of long Shot was produced, written, and narrated
Speaker 1: by me Sean Revive. A co producer is Gabby Watts.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Noah Brown and iHeartRadio and George B.
Speaker 1: Stefano at Charles University in prov Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
Speaker 1: Brandon Barr, and ELC. Crowley. Long Shot was scored by
Speaker 1: Jason Shannon. The score was mixed by Vic Stafford. Sound
Speaker 1: design and audio mix was by Harper Harris with Tunewelders,
Speaker 1: School of Humans,