In December 2019, I had an eight-hour bought of vomiting and I’m still not well. I spent a week feel not great and very picky about what I ate (mostly ice cream thank to a neighbor who was going to the store for me). I rested, drank plenty of fluids and worked my way back up to soup and salads. I thought I was on the road to recovery. But my energy just wasn’t coming back.
In January 2020, I was at a full moon celebration with a doctor friend and talked to him about winter bugs going around. He told me a lot of his patience were complaining about getting their energy back even three weeks after their symptoms had disappeared. I added going to bed early to my routine and waited to recover.
Image by Angelo Giordano from Pixabay
In February 2020, I spent a day at work so exhausted I stared at the wall all day and ended up going to Urgent Care with a cough that would not go away, exhaustion that no amount of dark chocolate would erase, and a brain that had no thoughts.
Then the pandemic hit. It’s now April 2021 and I’m still unwell. Blood work, heart problems, nuclear stress test, physical therapy, scans of all sorts, diagnoses that lead to medication that cause side effects worse than the problem they medication was intended to fix. I don’t blame the health care industry for enacting protocols to protect against the spread of COVID-19 but getting every appointment is a battle because of COVID-19. It took me five months to get an in-person appointment with my primary care doctor, seven months with a cardiologist, eleven months with an endocrinologist. I have a friend with mental health issues who can’t have in-person appointments with his health care providers and is dying from loneliness due to the pandemic and his inability to navigate things like Zoom, online websites, etc.
The doctors tell me I’m old and will loose my physical abilities but a person doesn’t go from surfing to barely able to stay awake in six months without something causing the issue. After all, I had slowed down. In my thirties, I rode my bike seven miles on a gradual uphill to Black’s Beach, climbed down the cliffs, surfed for an hour or two, climbed up the cliffs, and then rode home again. In 2019, before I got sick, I was driving to Black’s Beach, climbing up and down the cliffs, and only surfing for forty-five minutes or an hour.
The people sick with COVID-19, having heart attacks and battling cancer get priority and I understand that. People like me who can’t surf, swim, hike, or dance don’t factor high on the emergency scale. Yet it’s been almost sixteen months since I’ve been sick and almost fourteen months since I sought help from the medical industry and I’m the same or worse depending on the day. My primary care doctor is trying to warn me that this may be my new normal.
In the meantime, I’ve been seeing my acupuncturist and massage therapist. A few months ago, I even tried to find a naturopathic doctor without success. I’ve tried homeopathic remedies, changes in diet, herbs, and probably some other forgotten experiments.
Not being able to use my right arm, being so tired I can’t do anything, having trouble sleeping because my heart is pounding, and more is dragging down my mental health. Last summer they thought I was having mental health challenges but the latest tests have found physical issues with no easy solutions. Now I cry every time I go for a walk because I know one hour of walking will leave me so exhausted I can’t do anything afterwards. When I try to swim I last about ten minutes before my right arm runs out of fuel. I’ve been doing the same boring bike ride since last summer and can’t go any further or do anything more challenging.
I have an appointment with a surgeon in a few days to discuss options to address a congenital problem with an artery that apparently was fine until all this started and which may or may not be at the root of my collapsing health. Hopefully, he will have better suggestions than the ones I’ve found in my own research.
The calendar is ticking by and my life is running out. Every incomplete or misdiagnosis sets me back, takes time to recover from, requires a new mindset to circumvent. Only time will tell if I get my health back or not.
