For me it actually started with heart arrhythmia, my heart beating erratically at times and scaring me. Then my lungs grew swollen so much that I could barely breathe for a few days.

It took months before heart and lungs were both back to normal.

Is this a three year old post?

I got it about three months ago. At first it was just like having a cold and I didn’t really care, also it was impossible to tell if it was COVID-19 or not. That was the first week, but in the second week I felt more seriously sick, and one night I woke all shaky and short of breath. We went to the hospital, where they suspected COVID-19 and prescribed medication for pneumonia and to to help with breathing. My oxygen level was 91 which is below what’s considered healthy. Had to come in the next day for a chest X-ray, which showed lung infection, but were told it’s not dangerous as long as I feel I’m improving. That day oxygen was 93, and by the following week tested normal.

After going to the hospital I started feeling better relatively quickly, but then it did something weird where it seemed to move from my lungs to my nose, where it came on strong. I nearly completely lost my sense of taste and smell (I could only tell if something was salty or sweet), which returned in a few days. The congestion was probably the worst I’ve had, and then it returned to my lungs again but worse than before.

One of the bad things about it was that it was difficult to sleep; I was generally uncomfortable and kept waking up during the night. I was physically sick with COVID-19, but it was also seemingly complicated by anxiety. A doctor prescribed medication for that but it didn’t seem to help much. I tried an anti-depressant later, but the benefits were slight and the side effects were horrible.

My antibiotic course was 10 days and I stopped taking the breathing medication after that because I felt I didn’t need them anymore. Three or four weeks in it was as if I had mostly recovered, but suddenly I was struck with nausea, threw up one morning for no reason it seems. There was also a bout of diarrhea, maybe a week’s worth?

Fatigue, anxiety, nausea / loss of appetite, aches and pains around the chest, upper back, and neck. Some mild headaches. Just feeling shitty, and I thought it would never end because it all lasted two months total. Individual symptoms would last a few days, get better, and then something else would bother me. Around the end of the two months I either caught something else like a cold or had a brief relapse of cold-like symptoms with coughing, trouble swallowing, and then that was it.

I’m thankful that I seem to have made a full recovery. Eventually I regained my appetite, the pains are gone, I can sleep normally, I feel that I breath well, anxiety has subsided, and so on. The thing that I still have is mild neck pain, but I don’t know the exact cause. I read as much as I could about the disease, and it seems that long-term symptoms can be fallout due to damage the virus has done to your body, which can take several months to a year to heal. Knock on wood, I don’t appear to have developed any bad complication.

The worst part is that it lasted so long and I didn’t know if I was going to get better or worse. The whole thing was scary and frustrating. People think staying in home quarantine, wearing masks, and social distancing is a drag, but those things are fun and games compared to the disease. Any way to avoid it is totally justified in my opinion.

I was sleepy one day. I had three naps that day instead of one. That was about it. Wouldn’t have even suspected covid if I hadn’t done the test.