LIVING WITH LONG COVID

• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Publication title: Herald on Sunday

He got his three doses of Pfizer. He seldom took his mask off

And when coronavirus finally found him in June 2022, the 43-year-old medical technician isolated in the apartment he’d bought three years earlier.

The apartment’s gone now, as has his independence, with debilitating health problems forcing him to sell up and move in with his parents for daily support.

Once someone who enjoyed yoga classes, working out and walking an equivalent 8km most days, Freeman now struggles to haul himself out of bed.

“The dreams and goals I had for my future are now uncertain,” he says.

“There isn’t a single aspect of my life that hasn’t been impacted by the illness.”

His boss is keeping his job open for him, but it’s been months since he was able to work.

Instead, his daily routine consists of a morning round of medications; an exhausting shower; perhaps another appointment; a long sleep after lunch; and then evenings spent doing online research.

He figures he’s seen mates four or five times since mid-winter; instead, he’s more likely to be catching up with his GP, physiotherapist and counsellor.

Unlike plenty of others left with long COVID, Freeman’s lucky to have clinicians who take him seriously and acknowledge his symptoms, of which there are almost too many to list.

There’s fatigue, a racing heart and shortness of breath.

There’s appetite loss that saw him shed 16kg, and dizziness and vertigo that once left him vomiting on his parents’ living room floor, before he collapsed and his dad called an ambulance.

He’s often forgotten his phone number and own age because of constant brain fog; other times, he writes sentences that make no sense when read back.

Sleeping pills and hypnosis haven’t helped his insomnia; neither has the tinnitus that leaves his ears ringing loudest when he’s lying down.

He suspects a prolonged inflammation response is what sometimes makes his body feel like it’s on fire, and why he’s developed an itchy scalp condition that has made him scratch so much, chunks of hair have tumbled out.

Eventually, he shaved his head.

Then, there’s severe anxiety that he describes as terror striking from nowhere.

“On my final day at work, I was trembling with each patient I saw and had to go to the bathroom several times to throw up,” he said.

“At this stage, I hadn’t connected my other symptoms with being long COVID. I thought that everything going on was ‘in my head’ and that I was having a mental breakdown.”

To the trolls and anti-vaxxers he encounters online, Freeman is either a liar or victim of the vaccine.

To Dr Anna Brooks, however, his case represents one of the most worrying legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s important to understand that long COVID can impact people at any age, including those previously healthy,” the University of Auckland immunologist explains.

“We continue to hear stories of athletes succumbing to long COVID and failing to recover.”

She’s spent much of the past three years trying to unravel the complex causes of a multi-system illness capable of affecting nearly every organ, with no treatment or cure in sight.

There’s a range of hypotheses. Many involve the immune system going haywire and leaving people with a frighteningly wide spectrum of ongoing symptoms.

“We know that it can cause damage to our blood vessels, disrupts our clotting pathways, and impairs our immune system — yet the trajectory of a ‘return to a healthy baseline’ is not yet known,” Brooks says.

“Research is uncovering that our ability to fight off infections, or our general immune control, may be disrupted following COVID-19, even when mild.”

It’s possible that infection can also “re-awaken” dormant viruses within us that we normally control with a healthy immune system.

And any reinfection is a long COVID gamble.

For long-haulers like Freeman, another bout can worsen lingering symptoms — as shown among eight in 10 such cases in a landmark US study — or cause fresh flare-ups in people recovering.

All the while, a rampant Omicron, with its ever-growing tree of tricky subvariants, is finding new ways to side-step what...