One woman's two-year odyssey with long-covid shows how the medical system fails many patients.
is exploring possible dysfunction in the body’s autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious functions such as breathing, heart rate and digestion.
Polega’s primary-care doctor had wondered whether some of her symptoms might point to rheumatoid arthritis or another condition in which the body’s immune system misfires and attacks itself. The possibility made sense based on Polega’s medical history, too. She was allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, sesame and pollen, and recent research had suggested a potential link between allergens and the development of autoimmune disease.
The doctor prescribed heart medication — 25 milligrams of eplerenone, twice a day, to lower her blood pressure. She cautioned Polega that she shouldn’t get pregnant on the medication, which is typically used after heart attacks, since it is associated with low-birth-weight babies. That was not Polega’s situation, as it turned out. Her kidney readings were “just a touch out of normal,” she remembers the nephrologist explaining. “It’s probably more that your body is just still ‘angry’” from the covid infections. He asked Polega to come back every three months to run labs to make sure things were improving.
The second infection was milder than the first, like a bad cold. But her long-covid symptoms roared back — and she started noticing another odd symptom. When she woke up her hands were numb. At first it was just a few times a week, but then it started happening every day.The tests administered by the neurologist, meanwhile, showed nothing obviously amiss in her brain. The MRI had come back “unremarkable,” her doctor wrote in her notes.
“We had to adjust to the new reality that these patients are chronically ill, and the answers will not be there today,” said Fernando Carnavali with Mount Sinai’s Center for Post-COVID Care in New York, which has seen more than 4,000 patients so far. “This is a very difficult and shocking concept to adapt to, especially for a previously healthy person.”
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