Long COVID is Real.

Dawn Vickerstaff
6 min readSep 15, 2021

My story about my admittedly, fairly mild experience with COVID-19 and its aftermath.

Common long COVID symptoms include (I’ve italicized all the ones I’ve experienced):

  • extreme tiredness (fatigue)
  • shortness of breath
  • chest pain or tightness
  • problems with memory and concentration (“brain fog”)
  • difficulty sleeping (insomnia)
  • heart palpitations
  • dizziness
  • pins and needles
  • joint pain
  • depression and anxiety
  • tinnitus, earaches
  • feeling sick, diarrhoea, stomach aches, loss of appetite
  • a high temperature, cough, headaches, sore throat, changes to sense of smell or taste (initial symptoms of active infection as well as long COVID. I only experienced these when first I was ill.)
  • rashes

I live in Britain with my British husband. But I travelled back and forth to my home state of Oregon quite a bit to see family and maintain the stretched and fraying ties. I don’t travel now or rather won’t travel anymore until the US decides that British citizens are welcome on American soil again. I may miss another grandchild’s wedding, I may miss milestones that can never be recovered but my husband has suffered enough. We both have.

I spent 18 months, barring some few weeks sprinkled here and there, connected to my husband only via social media. A face on a screen is no substitute for loving arms wrapped tight around you.

Ironically, it was during a short Christmas and New Year return that I likely contracted COVID, probably on a flight, when no one knew anything about this new disease.

Let’s go back just a bit.

In 2019 my youngest daughter divorced her husband. That’s her story and I won’t repeat it here except to say that she felt she needed her mother’s help to navigate the sharpened ice-shard strewn landscape that resulted and to ease the transition for the children. I came willingly in August 2019.

The plan was also to work on the unfinished house my husband and I hoped to move into, in the same town where my daughter lived, and for my husband to join me sooner rather than later. I was looking forward to coming back to America.

We eased into a routine that autumn and things seemed to get a bit easier all around, enough so I decided to return to Britain just after Thanksgiving for a long visit. I was scheduled to return to Oregon again in Mid-January 2020.

Shortly after arriving in Britain I got quite ill. It was the worst flu I’d had in years, or so I thought. I lost my sense of smell and taste, I had a constant headache, a fever and a cough that took me in its teeth and shook the daylights out of me. I never felt the need to go to hospital though my heart, never steady, raced and did backflips, held it’s breath and then raced again. It’s never comfortable to be constantly aware of your heart’s antics. But, I just thought ‘Well, this is a nasty little bug!’ and got on with it.

I was finally driven to the GP by the cough that wouldn’t let go and was told that basically I just had to live through it. This was before anyone had really put any evidence together that suggested the new COVID variant that would eventually be named for the year it first appeared; COVID-19.

I flew back to Oregon feeling less than wonderful, worn-out really and still coughing though that was diminishing. I was certainly no longer contagious by any previous measures of such illnesses. I had no fever, my cough wasn’t productive but all I wanted to do was sleep.

I got back to the routine in Oregon but I felt as though I were wading through hip-deep mud. Then in April of that year I was struck down with a horrendous rash. By this time there had been publications about this new, lethal disease, about the weird and seemingly unrelated symptoms that lingered after the main event, if you survived. A rash and pictures of that rash, found in children apparently, plunked into my feed. They were calling this collection of weird symptoms seen in people who’d been diagnosed with COVID-19 ‘long covid’. But I had never received such a diagnosis. I had my suspicions but the time to test for anti-bodies had long passed. Besides, where would I go to get that done? Things were not terribly well organised. But the rash pictured sure seemed a lot like my rash.

Nevertheless, I spent a fruitless and frustrating few weeks seeking an answer for my swollen left leg with its itchy blisters and circles (coronas) of rash without ever being allowed inside a doctor’s office. Lockdown was in effect. And no one had a clue as to what it was. Not even the dermatologist who saw me over my laptop and laughed that she just didn’t know.

Countless creams did nothing. When the rash healed itself away from an area I was left with scars while it traveled to fresh flesh. It began to appear on the right leg as well as the left. First a red spot that morphed into a blister and then spread, opening an area inside the circle that looked as if it were healing, developing another crown of blisters. And so on. It drove me crazy with the itching. Then one day my daughter came home with some tea tree oil. ‘Try this’, she said. ‘Our pharmacist says it really calms irritated skin.’

I was skeptical but the effect was miraculous and in less than two weeks the evidence of the rash was erased. All except the white scars left behind. I promptly forgot about the rash but I didn’t forget about its probable beginning. I felt as if strangely, I harbored a malevolent passenger.

About two weeks ago I notice the rash rising again over a year later, this time on my right leg. The right leg had escaped the worst of the rash the first time through, back in April 2020. Like Shingles harbored in the nerve endings of people who contracted Chicken Pox as a child, this possible remnant of a COVID-19 bout was sneaking back for a return engagement. My GP, meeting with me over the phone, suggests mildly that it is a symptom of Long COVID.

I am back in Britain now. The house in Oregon is sold and my life has flowed back into English time and place. It was hard to let go of the dream of reuniting with my family but the events of the past two years has worn that dream away and left me with the easy reality of being united with my husband. I am happy here and accepting of what is a relatively minor slap from COVID-19. So many others did not escape so easily. But this rash…

I have tea-tree oil in the cupboard and I nap when I need to. I often need to. It isn’t just that I am getting older. It’s more like the fatigue takes me in its jaws and gnaws until I grow limp and unconscious. Another long covid symptom. It isn’t always that way but it is often enough that I’m ‘negatively impacted’. My quality of life suffers.

I lost friends, people I admired and acquaintances to this disease. I’ve seen others struck down and get away with a relatively mild few days of misery to some that feared they would never recover. I’ve heard of others with strange symptoms that they are convinced — and seen that conviction born out by evidence and later research — are a result of the initial infection. We know hardly anything about COVID-19 but we’re learning.

Meanwhile, our best defense remains the vaccinations. Please get yours like I got mine, regardless that it was after the fact of my unvarified COVID-19 bout, and keep yourself and others safe.

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