Long Covid: ‘I don’t know if I have recovered from Covid-19 since I got sick in May 2020’

Liadh’s Covid symptoms

Liadh had no symptoms other than exhaustion when she tested positive. “I had no cough, no temperature, no loss of smell or taste, I was just completely flattened.” She describes the exhaustion, not like tiredness, but like the unplugging of a drain that left her feeling “jellyish”, weak and dizzy.

Spending about two weeks in bed, she did not require hospitalisation but this was only the beginning. Recovery has been painfully slow and is still ongoing a year on. Liadh has had recurring bouts of exhaustion (all while testing negative for the virus), some of which have been worse than the initial infection period. 

Through much of last summer, Liadh’s energy was low and she began experiencing severe pain in the lower back, groin area and down her right leg. “I had never suffered from injury or anything but as I got back to work and was driving a lot, it was just getting worse”. Her symptoms perplexed her physio, even after a run of appointments. “She said, ‘this is not your joints, it’s not your muscles, it’s not your tendons.’ It was as if the virus was still making its way through my body,” says Liadh.

On top of the physical pain, Liadh was also experiencing recurring waves of exhaustion. “I‘d get these moments where things just felt a bit wrong and I need to chill for a second,” she explains. Sometimes they passed, but other times they lingered. In October, she felt the wave hit her again, pulling her back the steps forward she had taken over the summer months. “I just had a sense there was something still lingering and then in January it came again, I was out for a few days.”

In February 2021, Liadh said she crawled into bed on a Thursday and stayed there for two weeks. “Again the feeling was fatigue. I could sleep for 12 hours, have breakfast and then need a nap. I wasn’t able to go anywhere, I couldn’t even go for a walk.”

In April 2021, almost a full year since she first contracted the virus, symptoms reoccurred for the fourth time and more forcefully than ever. Liadh experienced severe dizziness and feeling like her heart was racing all the time, even as she lay in bed too exhausted to move. 

These issues continue to persist to this day, Liadh says that she finds most shoes uncomfortable and suddenly has a range of twinges and pain that were not there before she contracted Covid. Admitting she feels “completely different” now to how she felt before, she says she needs a lot more sleep, she struggles to get out of bed in the morning, when she exercises it takes a lot more out of her. “Things like walking up the stairs, my heart will race a lot faster.”

Above: During her slow recovery in the summer of 2020, Liadh documented the experience in photos. “They are small details of moments within my 5k, close to home, that express a lot of emotion from that time.”

Taking back control

While medical advice for Long Covid has been to simply rest, the inaction is also having a detrimental effect, “It feels like giving in,” says Liadh. Since her latest bout of exhaustion in April, she has decided to change tack. “I’m trying to flip it now and put mind over matter,” she explains. “I feel like if it were to come over me tomorrow, I wouldn’t just get back into bed now. But then you have to ask, ‘can I live my life while feeling sick?’”

Looking forward, Liadh feels it’s important to accept what we have all been through. People getting in touch with her about work are now checking in, seeing how she is feeling and whether she is up to it. “That is so important, we can’t go back to this busy mentality,” as though the world is a machine back up and running again.

As Liadh puts it, “we are going into a post-Covid world, not a pre-Covid one” and we will all bear scars of some kind from the experience. Just some will be more obvious than others.

Thanks to Liadh for her sharing her experience, you can read her full blog post about her recovery here.