Despite taking precautions, I caught covid in Feb/March 2023. Compared to viruses I’ve had in the past it was bad, but not bad enough that at any point I thought I might need to go to hospital. But then I just never recovered.

Long covid can have a really wide range of symptoms due to Covid 19’s ability to target the vascular system. Anywhere that has blood flow can be affected. My most obvious symptom is headaches – it’s rare to go a day without one, and they’re exacerbated by using screens. My 13″ laptop screen is usually okay but anything bigger (such as my gaming PC or literally any computer a business might expect staff to use) is absolutely horrid.

I also experience:

• Fatigue; I get tired very easily, both in terms of physical exhaustion and tiredness. Some days I’ll get up only to go back to bed for a nap a couple of hours later.
• Brain fog; this is hard to quantify but I definitely feel like I think and react slower than I used to.
• Visual changes; I didn’t even realise this was linked to long covid until fairly recently. Most notably I sometimes wake up from sleep or a nap or even just having my eyes closed for a while to find that things have changed colour. Blacks and greys turn vividly blue, my purple blanket turns red, etc. I’ve also seen things like line shapes on my plain white walls so that they look like a fresh paint by numbers.
• Heart palpitations, etc; I did have problems with high blood pressure and rapid heart rate changes before which was significantly improving with medication, but long covid certainly hasn’t helped.
• Light-headedness; particularly on standing.
• Auras; in the past I’ve had distinct periods of dissociation where nothing feels real at the tail end of a migraine. Now I get them without the migraine (though admittedly sometimes it’s hard to tell my normal headaches from a migraine).

So far we still don’t know the exact risk factors for long covid, but it seems to be more common in females of any age and people who had cardiovascular disease before getting sick, as I did.

Unfortunately one side effect of New Zealand’s fantastic early covid response is that people didn’t start getting sick en masse until late 2021, meaning that the medical profession here has much less experience with long covid than elsewhere in the world. I’ve cycled through a lot of GPs over the last 2.5 years due to them constantly moving to other practices or retiring and so far none of them have had any real knowledge of the condition.