Though she wasn’t hospitalized, her recovery was slow. Kristen Englund, an infectious disease specialist and now the director of the ReCOVer clinic, was inspired to launch one of these clinics in August 2020, not long after she had endured a bout of COVID-19. Hinda had her first appointment there on July 14, 2021, seven months after she first contracted COVID-19. Hinda’s mother saw a story about one of them-the Cleveland Clinic’s ReCOVer Clinic-and urged her daughter to check it out. To respond to this new disease, universities and hospitals around the United States have created multidisciplinary clinics to offer patients a centralized hub of clinicians who assess their condition and refer them to appropriate specialists. Many patients, including Hinda, bounced from emergency rooms to internists to specialists, each physician looking at just his or her piece of the picture.
While long COVID is hard to define and diagnose, addressing it within the traditional medical structure has added more confusion. “It may be thought of primarily as chronic disease affecting tens of millions.” “COVID may not be remembered primarily for the full hospitals, unpredictable variants, mask and vaccine controversies, or even the massive loss of life,” Slavitt tweeted in April. I thought, Am I dying?”Īndy Slavitt, who served temporarily as a senior advisor to the Biden administration’s COVID Pandemic Response team, recently warned that long COVID will soon eclipse the impact of acute COVID-19. “It just came out by the handful,” Hinda said, showing me a photo on her phone. Hinda’s long COVID felt much the same as her acute COVID-19 symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, sudden rapid heartbeat, headaches, numbness. One of them still doesn’t believe COVID is real.” Another friend said to her, “You’re always sad. “I was isolated for a month,” she told me. She played basketball and volleyball, volunteered as a Big Sister, went to church, went to the gym to run, lift weights, and take aerobics classes, and spent time playing cards with a group of friends.ĬOVID-19 changed everything. from the University of Dayton, and she loved her job as an office manager for an insurance company. Hinda appeared dejected, slightly annoyed, and just plain tired of dealing with a condition she has come to know so well she can quote statistics from medical journals and rattle off the scientific terms for multiple disorders like a veteran clinician.īefore COVID, she had a full and active life. She looked over at Hinda, slumped in the wheelchair. The next morning, she pushed her once-vibrant 35-year-old daughter in a wheelchair through the ever-growing medical center to her first appointment in the neurology department. On April 13, 2022, Eva had driven from her home in Dayton to Hinda’s apartment in Cincinnati, and then back north to Cleveland the night before her first day of appointments at the reCOVer Clinic. “And maybe because I’m Black.” Overhearing, her mother, Eva Abdullahi, told me, “Her father is Somalian.” “Yeah, I felt it was because I’m a woman,” Hinda said. The symptoms, which a report in The Lancet says number 203, often debilitate patients, keeping them in bed and unable to work, go to the gym, see friends, or make meals.ĭiagnosis has been particularly frustrating for Hinda and thousands of others because no blood tests, or any other definitive tests, exist for long COVID, leaving medical professionals to diagnose cases and run tests based on symptoms and the very loose CDC definition: “new, returning, or ongoing health problems that people experience after first being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.” It’s a path that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, will take, according to the National Institutes of Health, which estimates that up to 30 percent of the more than 83 million Americans who have had COVID-19 will suffer from long COVID.
This is a story about Hinda’s arduous journey through the medical system to conquer long COVID and reclaim her life.
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