More long COVID

Following reference 1, reference 2 popped up in my in-box yesterday, with the author giving herself the splendid description of 'professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine at University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio'. She must also be something of a minor celebrity as she has a large Internet footprint, including the snap above.

Someone in good health, who knows all about health, who had taken all the jabs and who had barely had Covid short at all. But who, nevertheless, fell prey to Covid long.

It was interesting to read the story of a doctor's experience of being ill. It seems likely that she will be a better person and a better doctor when she comes out of it; she will know first-hand what it is like to sit on the other side of the desk. The sort of human interest storyline exploited from time to time by the writers of detective fiction, making their pet detective the suspect for a while, or perhaps just a member of the public, without privileged access. Both Colin Dexter and Georges Simenon, for example, do it.

Not forgetting the down sides of her being ill and maybe being off work for more or less protracted periods.

The figure offered here is that 1 in 5 people who get short COVID will go on to get long COVID, not the 1 in 3 of reference 1.

One of the tests described at reference 3 is just standing up for 10 minutes, without moving about, and seeing what happens: '... A 10-minute stand test, in addition to a thorough examination of the cardiovascular and neurological systems, is recommended. The procedure for a 10-minute stand test is as follows: Have the patient lie down quietly for 5 minutes. Obtain the blood pressure and heart rate using a sphygmomanometer on the upper arm. Then with the patient standing quietly without moving or talking, obtain... Caution should be exercised for highly symptomatic patients who are unable to safely stand for 10 minutes due to... '. A test you can do on yourself at home. Maybe I will try it, having had some odd symptoms myself over the past few weeks.

On the up-side, reference 3 is accessible enough, but at 16 pages far too long for me to read. Hopefully I will not become an obsessive reader of such stuff - and start telling my doctors their stuff...

It seems that in the US, you can hire people to come and give you intravenous transfusions at home. A service said to be mainly used by people with hangovers who need hydration. 

Finally, I learn of the terms microaggression, gaslighting and gatekeeping. Terms which had passed me by, despite Bing knowing all about them. See, for example, reference 4. Perhaps I need to spend more time with mainstream social media.

PS: the Blogger grammar checker is becoming tiresome, blue flagging all kinds of things which look OK to me, along with all the typos which do need to be corrected.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-long-and-short-of-it.html.

Reference 2: I'm a Physician Battling Long COVID. I Can Assure You It's Real - Monica Verduzco Gutierrez, Medscape - 2022.

Reference 3: Multi-disciplinary collaborative consensus guidance statement on the assessment and treatment of autonomic dysfunction in patients with post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) - Svetlana Blitshteyn,Jonathan H. Whiteson, Benjamin Abramoff, Alba Azola, Matthew N. Bartels, Ratna Bhavaraju-Sanka, Tae Chung and others - 2022. Open access.

Reference 4: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microaggressions-gatekeeping-gaslighting-felecia-freely.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Lozano_Long. Rich people in the US seem to be much more into public philanthropy of the sort described here than rich people in the UK. But maybe one just gets that impression because there are so many more of them.