(somber music)
- Pre-COVID, I was really out there
with the people, with my family,
just staying involved.
Loved to entertain, loved to have people over.
I'm a mother of four, grandmother of two.
Beautiful family, I love my children and my grandchildren.
I got ill, it was March 18th.
I got really scared because I realized then
this stuff was in my body
and we didn't know anything about it
and the only thing that I was hearing about COVID
was that people were dying from it.
And I didn't want to die.
My expectation when recovering was
I would get better and I would be done with it.
And that's been furthest from the truth for me.
- I'm in a wheelchair going anywhere more than five feet.
I'm pretty much bedridden.
I still have heart issues, digestive issues,
headaches, dizziness, low blood pressure.
- I couldn't walk three or four feet across a room.
Full onset of asthma symptoms
where I was having two or three asthma attacks a day.
- I was athletic most of my life prior to COVID.
I was working out and doing high-intensity workouts.
I'm just standing still talking
and my heart rate's up.
And this kind of goes in waves.
It waxes and wains.
- The medical community thought that this was one and done,
meaning if you survive the infection
that you would become normal
and this is definitely not the case now.
The other thing that I think is surprising
is how many organ systems that this virus
is actually effecting.
Pulmonary, meaning the lungs,
cardiac, the heart, neurological,
and also psychological.
- I can faintly smell it.
My post-COVID symptoms that I've been experiencing
are loss of hair, loss of smell,
of course memory fog, memory loss,
joint pains in different places.
- We're at a loss as to what to do
for some of these patients and their severe symptoms.
- What worries me the most is the brain fog
because my father, he had Alzheimer's.
I hoped and prayed that I never would have to
go through that experience,
because I watched my father go through that experience.
Not being able to speak as fast
and be as sharp as I used to,
that is definitely something that is concerning to me.
- I was very fit and healthy before I contracted the virus.
Before the spring I was with my partner's family
in Norway and we were hiking up mountains on the west coast.
The most worrying thing through all of this has been
they haven't been able to find a reason
for why I've been so poorly.
- I'm about to get on Zoom with Pastor Robert Dixon.
Post-COVID symptoms, how's everything going with that?
How are you making it through?
- It's been a pleasure just knowing somebody else.
Like, you're not on an island by yourself.
- When I saw you put your Facebook post up
about you dealing with COVID and just the extent
of how you went into details,
it was really good to hear
and then it helped me to be able to share more
about what I was dealing with.
- [Robert] If I'm in the middle of a thought,
I can be thinking of a word and just not get it.
- That's me, yes!
- In regards to preventing further decline,
I don't know if there's anything that we can do,
mostly because I don't think we understand enough
about the time course and the ideology,
or the cause of these symptoms.
I fear that they will never get back to baseline.
We can't tell for now whether that's a possibility or not.
- Just had a heart episode coming down the stairs.
My heart hit 150 beats per minute.
I'm out of breath.
Another trip to urgent care.
Waiting to find out if we're gonna have to
go to the ER or not.
Had another heart episode yesterday and this morning.
- Everything that I'm doing now
is to get my body, my mind back to where I was before.
I don't want to stay in the place that I'm in right now,
because it's not a good place
mentally, emotionally or physically.
I exercise in the mornings.
I may not be able to do the full 30-minute workout,
but I'll try to do something just for the sake
of saying that I am continuing working on my body.
- [Physical Therapist] Add some resistance.
Breathe in and then breathe out.
- I have retrain my lungs how to breathe correctly.
Instead of taking shallow breaths,
I need to use my diaphragm and my diaphragm's really weak,
so PT is helping me.
- There will be more patients with long-term symptoms,
so the need to understand the disease
is not only to treat the patients we have now,
but also the patients for the future.
- The future for me with the side effects that I'm having
is tomorrow, it's not a year later,
five years or 10 years later.
I'm trying my best to do what I can within my power
with prayer, my faith in God, to get better.