Nicole explains how hard it is to raise awareness of long COVID when you're living with it.

Transcript

It’s been really isolating. I mean we were all – the whole world was in isolation and everyone knows how difficult that was. But to have this on top of that was really difficult. To be invalidated and people not even believing that you’re sick is really something difficult to go through. When you’re trying to conserve your energy and you’re spending a lot of your energy trying to convince people that you’re sick, it’s exhausting … And we’re not a very vocal group, because we can’t gather right now. Some of us are bedridden, some of us are in wheelchairs. I was talking to – or texting with a woman who lives in Ontario, who has lost the ability to speak. So she crashes if she speaks and this is someone who was an athlete beforehand. So as a patient group it’s really difficult to spread the word and to speak up for ourselves, because we have to conserve our energy. And so I think that’s a big reason why a lot of people don’t believe that long COVID exists or they don’t realize how bad it could be, because the people that are really sick are at home in bed right now.

---

Go back