{"id":2170,"date":"2021-04-23T01:10:39","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T01:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/?p=2170"},"modified":"2021-04-21T14:30:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-21T14:30:58","slug":"the-fight-to-get-back-to-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/the-fight-to-get-back-to-myself\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fight to Get Back to Myself"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I\u2019ve talked before about my suspected case of Covid-19 in March, 2020. I say suspected because I\u2019ve never had a test to confirm it. Testing wasn\u2019t available at the time unless you were in the hospital and I wasn\u2019t that sick. An antibody test done six months later was negative. So I can\u2019t prove I\u2019ve had it. I wrote about it at the time here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I know I have had Covid-19, just as I know I now have Long-haul Covid, current officially designated as PASC (Post Acute Sequellae of SARS-Cov-2). I\u2019ve blogged about that as well here.<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m more than a year post-Covid now and I\u2019m not back to what was normal before. Worse, I\u2019m not really any closer than I was two weeks post-acute-Covid. And I\u2019m tired of it. Literally and figuratively. I\u2019m tired of being tired too much of the time. I\u2019m tired of having to be extremely careful every time I go out for a walk to be sure I don\u2019t go too fast or too far, lest I bring on a collapse that will make me useless for the rest of the day and possibly the next couple of days. I\u2019m tired of the relapses that bring on another round of coughing, pain, extreme fatigue and set me back to square one on the recovery process.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m tired of trying to nurse myself along, thinking that I\u2019m making progress, only to have another setback push me right back to square one. After a year of trying to recover myself, I\u2019ve realized I need help.<\/p>\n

Which is easy to say but hard to put in practice. The search for medical help has been frustrating. I\u2019ve been to my regular doc twice now when symptoms were bad. He was sympathetic but really had no idea how to help.<\/p>\n

When I heard that my local hospital system was starting a dedicated clinic for Long-Haul Covid, I was thrilled and set up an appointment right away. Sadly, the visit didn\u2019t go well. The person I saw seemed to concentrate entirely on my symptoms at the time. I was in a relapse phase and had a cough but did try to make it clear that I wasn\u2019t really bothered by the cough itself. It would go away once the relapse cleared again. (As, in fact, it did.) But I came away from that visit with a bunch of prescriptions \u2013 most of which I didn\u2019t get filled or didn\u2019t take \u2013 and, thank goodness, a referral for a pulmonary evaluation.<\/p>\n

The person I saw didn’t even think it was necessary for me to come back for a follow-up exam. That’s how seriously they took my problem.<\/p>\n

But I do believe that pulmonary evaluation referral is going to prove extremely helpful, even if the Covid clinic wasn\u2019t. Stay tuned\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve talked before about my suspected case of Covid-19 in March, 2020. I say suspected because I\u2019ve never had a test to confirm it. Testing wasn\u2019t available at the time unless you were in the hospital and I wasn\u2019t that …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid19"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2172,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions\/2172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}