By Akilah Johnson, The Washington PostJeanine Hays and husband Bryan Mason perform her daily physical therapy exercises. They count from 1 to 10 in Mandarin while stretching to help with brain fog.
It has been four years since COVID began burdening people with lingering symptoms often dismissed by mystified medical providers who were dubious and unwilling to help — especially when treating patients of color, according to clinicians and public health researchers.experts and medical Papers that helped Chimére Sweeney keep track of her daily routine in 2020, when her symptoms were worse. MUST CREDIT: Yehyun Kim for The Washington Post
who is believed by their provider, who can doctor-shop until they are taken seriously and who has the language to describe their symptoms to medical personnel. “Who gets diagnosed with long COVID, it’s socially and economically skewed,” said Sprague Martinez, who now runs the Health Disparities Institute at UConn Health in Connecticut. “If we are only engaging White, middle-class, English-speaking America in treatment, we don’t yet understand the full impact.
“We’re not where we want to be,” Zimmerman said. “We should be trying to reach rates of enrollment within the Black community and within the Hispanic community that are consonant with COVID rates. We have not reached those targets.”journey began in March 2020 when they got COVID about the same time. Back then, Mason was the sicker of the two. His lungs filled with so much fluid that one “was pushing the other one out of alignment,” he said. Meanwhile, his wife thought she had just a stomach bug.
tongue and lost the ability to eat and speak. “There’s still parts that are missing for me because of brain fog,” she said. can cause, with some people getting very sick while others show no symptoms at all. Now, Hays is able to walk again. Physical therapy keeps at bay the immobilizing feeling of “bees inside your body buzzing all the time,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said, her symptoms worsened, leaving her unable to drive, barely able to see and 30 pounds lighter. Things improved, she said, onlyHer long-COVID diagnosis arrived“I cried that day because I was like, ‘Thank you, God!’” she said. “Having that diagnosis got the ball rolling on everything else for me — Social Security, this retirement. Because I was poor. I went from making $65,000 to nothing.
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