A Valley teenager is still struggling with the symptoms of COVID-19 more than a year after contracting the virus.
Lydia Pastore, a 16-year-old junior at Red Mountain High School, became incredibly ill in February 2020. Over the past year, she has experienced intense fatigue, body aches and a host of other symptoms ranging from burning eyes and from face to hand trembling.
“It was the worst illness I’ve ever had in my life,” Lydia said. “It was just constant muscle aches and fatigue where I just could not grasp it. If I walked to the end of my driveway, I would recover for two days.
Lydia has been plagued by chronic fatigue all year and has slept an average of 15 hours a day. After several doctor visits, she started a journal as therapy for her handshakes that turned into a detection method for her own symptoms.
“I did a monthly symptom detection just because there were so many symptoms to stop,” Lydia said. “I wish I had such a resource at the beginning of my infection, because every specialist I visited asked me, ‘What has changed? What’s new? What are the symptoms you are experiencing?’ And it was always frustrating trying to remember it all. ‘
Lydia has decided to give her ailments a chance to connect with other teens fighting the long-term effects of COVID-19. She created the website fronicconnections.org, where teens can share their personal journey with COVID-19, and request a symptom-tracking journal that Lydia can send to anyone in America for free.
“I would hope this would be a place for teens to connect with others who are going through the same thing as them. To find comfort in agreements,” said Lydia, who has received all four letters from teens about their struggles. “I’m already so happy with these four stories I’ve had so far, and I’ve given these magazines, but I just feel like there’s so many more teens out there.”
What is “long COVID?”
Lydia said that months after her illness, she saw eight different health specialists as to why she was still experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. Her tests for false fever come back negative. Although she has never been tested for COVID-19, her doctors believe that Lydia had ‘long COVID’ when a person experienced COVID-19 symptoms long after he contracted the virus.
“This post-viral syndrome occurs when you are done with the initial infection, but for some unknown reason we still have some of the symptoms you had before, which are not really meaningful scientifically,” the dr. Gary Kirkilas, spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
For doctors, Lydia is considered a ‘long haul’. Dr Kirkilas said that once the virus is removed in the long term, there is a residual effect of COVID-19 that can be caused by the remaining low amounts of the virus that cannot be detected by COVID-19 tests, but still need a response from the immune body. system. Another reason could be that the initial virus caused internal organ damage that was still not healed.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Tuesday announced a new initiative to study ‘Long COVID’ to identify but not repair the causes and ultimately the means of prevention and treatment of individuals affected by COVID-19 not fully over a period of several weeks. ‘
According to the NIH, symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, ‘brain fog’, sleep disorders, fever, gastrointestinal symptoms, anxiety and depression.
“The thing that separates them from each other is this brain issue, this brain issue of this fog,” said dr. Frank LoVecchio, ER doctor at Valleywise Hospital, said. “In the hospital, we call it encephalitis (or encephalitis). They can’t concentrate either. They’re more forgetful.”
In December, the US Congress provided $ 1.15 billion in funds to the NIH to study the long-term effects of COVID-19.