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Ever since having COVID back in March 2020 I haven't been the same. I still have regular fatigue but my biggest issue is chest pains. For the past few months I

Ever since having COVID back in March 2020 I haven't been the same. I still have regular fatigue but my biggest issue is chest pains. For the past few months I have had worsening discomfort/pain in my chest. It was so bad a few weeks ago I ended up going to A&E thinking I was having a heart attack. They did an ECG, sonogram of my heart, chest x-rays, bloods, etc. My heart was fine so not a heart attack. They put it down to either a panic attack (possible) or a gastro problem so I am going for an endoscopy next week however I have a feeling I will end up needing a CT scan or MRI as I had high lipase levels in a blood test a few weeks ago that makes them want to look at my pancreas in my detail. It isn't urgent as two blood tests since them have shown normal levels and it isn't getting worse. Plus random abdominal pains all over yet an abdominal scan shows nothing out of the ordinary. Basically COVID has fucked me up long term. When I actually had COVID it didn't feel like a big deal, just a bit of a cough for two days and a little drained. But two months after COVID I started getting a shit load of problems and over a year later it is no better. 37 year old male in France fyi.

dragontamer 5y ago
I hear these stories and it makes me wonder if I somehow caught SARS way back in the early 2000s. Because these long symptoms people talk about were exactly what I felt back then. There was some dramatic respiratory illness I got that took took months before I felt "like normal" again. I was a young teenager so I never felt like I needed to go to the emergency room. But the amount of time it took to recover back was insane. I know I recovered by 6 months, but... yeah. That incident scared me for life. Sickness can be scary, not knowing if you'd ever get better from something... I can't imagine the stress I'd feel today if some illness afflicted me for more than 6 months.
- timr 5y ago
  From personal experience, the symptoms being described by all of the posts on this thread overlap substantially with depression and anxiety. It's notable that the GP went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a possible panic attack. Panic attacks frequently cause your heart to race, skip, etc. Depression causes "brain fog" and fatigue, body aches, etc. So far, ~all of the reports of "long covid" are anecdotal and post hoc. Which is not to say that they aren't real, but that there's no way of knowing what is causes by the virus, and what is caused by a year in which a significant portion of the population was isolated from contact and systematically terrified. I've personally had "brain fog", insomnia, fatigue and distraction for the last year, and never had Covid. It's been a difficult, depressing, scary year, and a lot of people have these symptoms.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Oh, I know when I was depressed (also as a teenager, but a few years after that). That was a different time and I can talk about that if you like. But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time. A mental depression is... different. I know because I've been through both. In particular, depression doesn't have chronic multi-month breathing issues normally associated with it. ------------- I only bring it up because the timeframes line up. SARS hit in 2003, roughly the time of my mysterious illness (though I never went to the doctor for it back then. I only knew about SARS because of COVID19 studies today). Given that SARS and COVID19 have many similarities, I really do wonder if the experience I felt back then is anything like what people with long-COVID19 feel today.
    - timr 5y ago
      > But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time. Sure. Pneumonia can easily cause that. It takes a long time to recover from it, even if you're young. Fundamentally, "covid" is pneumonia caused by a particular virus, so it's not surprising that people (esp. people who had serious cases) might have similar kinds of lingering symptoms.
  - satysin 5y ago
    All valid points. However as someone who was diagnosed with C-PTSD back in 2009 and spent 4 months in hospital for treatment of panic disorder, depression and anxiety this is different to what I experienced back then. It is a near constant discomfort in my chest. I am wondering if it is perhaps costochondritis or something similar to it? Perhaps costochondritis and anxiety that is making the whole thing worse? I wish I had answers. Hopefully I will next week.
  - 5y ago
disabled 5y ago
You may want to take a look at this: https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/files/2021-04/Long-COVID-19-Clinical-Guidelines-English-April-21-2021.pdf https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/files/2021-04/Long-COVID-... It's basically a cheat sheet to long hauler's clinical presentations, along with the diagnoses that they get. It's all classified and stuff. I am pretty sure that I got COVID-19 in March 2020, and it messed me up severely. But, your heart problems could be dysautonomia. I had dysautonomia prior to getting COVID-19, though, and I have a rare form of it. Anyways, according to that cheat sheet that I referred to, the palpitations could be: "Arrhythmia related to myocardial, pericardial disease or PE, dysautonomia with POTS" The chest pain: "Chest wall pain, GI source, pericarditis, myocarditis, established CAD, thromboembolic disease, etc." This is the ultimate site on fatigue. Unfortunately it is in Norwegian, so you have to use Google Translate for the website (and the PDF documents--which are great): https://www.kognitiv.no/psykisk-helse/ulike-lidelser/utmattelse/individuell-behandling/ https://www.kognitiv.no/psykisk-helse/ulike-lidelser/utmatte...

dragontamer 5y ago

I hear these stories and it makes me wonder if I somehow caught SARS way back in the early 2000s. Because these long symptoms people talk about were exactly what I felt back then. There was some dramatic respiratory illness I got that took took months before I felt "like normal" again. I was a young teenager so I never felt like I needed to go to the emergency room. But the amount of time it took to recover back was insane. I know I recovered by 6 months, but... yeah. That incident scared me for life. Sickness can be scary, not knowing if you'd ever get better from something... I can't imagine the stress I'd feel today if some illness afflicted me for more than 6 months.

timr 5y ago
From personal experience, the symptoms being described by all of the posts on this thread overlap substantially with depression and anxiety. It's notable that the GP went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a possible panic attack. Panic attacks frequently cause your heart to race, skip, etc. Depression causes "brain fog" and fatigue, body aches, etc. So far, ~all of the reports of "long covid" are anecdotal and post hoc. Which is not to say that they aren't real, but that there's no way of knowing what is causes by the virus, and what is caused by a year in which a significant portion of the population was isolated from contact and systematically terrified. I've personally had "brain fog", insomnia, fatigue and distraction for the last year, and never had Covid. It's been a difficult, depressing, scary year, and a lot of people have these symptoms.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Oh, I know when I was depressed (also as a teenager, but a few years after that). That was a different time and I can talk about that if you like. But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time. A mental depression is... different. I know because I've been through both. In particular, depression doesn't have chronic multi-month breathing issues normally associated with it. ------------- I only bring it up because the timeframes line up. SARS hit in 2003, roughly the time of my mysterious illness (though I never went to the doctor for it back then. I only knew about SARS because of COVID19 studies today). Given that SARS and COVID19 have many similarities, I really do wonder if the experience I felt back then is anything like what people with long-COVID19 feel today.
  - timr 5y ago
    > But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time. Sure. Pneumonia can easily cause that. It takes a long time to recover from it, even if you're young. Fundamentally, "covid" is pneumonia caused by a particular virus, so it's not surprising that people (esp. people who had serious cases) might have similar kinds of lingering symptoms.
- satysin 5y ago
  All valid points. However as someone who was diagnosed with C-PTSD back in 2009 and spent 4 months in hospital for treatment of panic disorder, depression and anxiety this is different to what I experienced back then. It is a near constant discomfort in my chest. I am wondering if it is perhaps costochondritis or something similar to it? Perhaps costochondritis and anxiety that is making the whole thing worse? I wish I had answers. Hopefully I will next week.
- 5y ago

disabled 5y ago

You may want to take a look at this: https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/files/2021-04/Long-COVID-19-Clinical-Guidelines-English-April-21-2021.pdf https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/files/2021-04/Long-COVID-... It's basically a cheat sheet to long hauler's clinical presentations, along with the diagnoses that they get. It's all classified and stuff. I am pretty sure that I got COVID-19 in March 2020, and it messed me up severely. But, your heart problems could be dysautonomia. I had dysautonomia prior to getting COVID-19, though, and I have a rare form of it. Anyways, according to that cheat sheet that I referred to, the palpitations could be: "Arrhythmia related to myocardial, pericardial disease or PE, dysautonomia with POTS" The chest pain: "Chest wall pain, GI source, pericarditis, myocarditis, established CAD, thromboembolic disease, etc." This is the ultimate site on fatigue. Unfortunately it is in Norwegian, so you have to use Google Translate for the website (and the PDF documents--which are great): https://www.kognitiv.no/psykisk-helse/ulike-lidelser/utmattelse/individuell-behandling/ https://www.kognitiv.no/psykisk-helse/ulike-lidelser/utmatte...