A 25-year-old woman who has been suffering with long covid for two years has revealed the treatments she found helped her condition, and the ones that didn’t.
Last month it was revealed close to one million people in the UK have been living with long Covid for at least a year, estimates show.
Lily Seibert, 25, first tested positive for Covid-19 on 24 March 2020. She started suffering with flu-like symptoms but expected them to disappear after a few days.
Her flu-like symptoms went away after three weeks, but shortness of breath, lightheadedness and an increased heart rate for eight months meant she couldn't walk more than 15 minutes without feeling exhausted. Just climbing up the stairs left her feeling like she had done a nightshift.
She started trying inhalers, antibiotics and breathing exercises for shortness of breath - but they didn't work. She had a breakthrough eight months in with some acupuncture - and slowly got better and better for a year, before it stopped working.
Now she says that "it's better than it was" but she's still got symptoms.
The account executive from Brooklyn, New York, said she feels "deflated" but is learning to make peace with the new her.
“At the beginning, it was a loss of identity for me. For so long I had been someone who played sports and worked out, that was how I connected with people in the past and that completely changed,” she said.
"Early on I suffered from chest pain, breathing difficulties and fatigue. Around three to four weeks around the time I figured I should be getting better, those symptoms weren't going away.
"It wasn't necessarily the strong discomfort we would associate with an acute illness but over time the symptoms would go away and then come out - it's been a rollercoaster."
The long covid symptoms have made a lot of usual activities harder for Lily. Before contracting covid, she described herself as an active person but since covid, she has been unable to return to full fitness.
"It was an overnight shift for me,” she said. “I was living a normal life and then the next day I had no ability to do what I did before. It has been a slow progression trying to get back to where I was and it has been up and down."
Over the last few years, Lily has had a number of therapies and medications and said while some of them have been helpful in managing symptoms, none of them has succeeded in getting rid of them entirely.
She said: "In terms of therapies, that has changed a lot in the course of the last two and a half years. In the initial stages, I was given inhalers, antibiotics and breathing exercises for my shortness of breath.
I then did acupuncture eight months after covid and I did that for around a year. I found it successful and it got me to a level of normality as I noticed some improvements but over time it plateaued.
"I have been to a lot of different doctors, initially it was a primary care provider who gave me medication and from there I saw a cardiologist. In New York there is a post covid client and I have been seeing a doctor there who has been seeing post covid patients."
She said it has been an “ongoing process” of seeing doctors: “I have tried to scale back over the past year as I feel like I wasn't getting a ton of benefits, I just don't feel one doctor holds the magic to know what the specific issue is."
Reflecting on the last two years, Lily said it has been a process of rediscovering herself.
She said: "It has been a long process of realising my own self-worth, anyone who has been through something like this, it is hard to communicate what the experience has been like and not getting the same level of understanding from people.
"There is a constant up and down feeling of being hopeful one day and feeling deflated the next day. It is hard to keep a stable mood or mindset as you never know how you could be feeling on any given day."
SWNS
