For Nicole, isolation is made worse by other people doubting long COVID is real.
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 so at one point I just gave that up and, you know, I was trying to be very transparent and spread the word about long COVID and warn people. And you know I didn’t want to come across people anymore saying, “Oh, what’s long COVID?” You know, “I’ve never even heard of it,” you know, a year and a half in and so I tried to be really transparent and spread the word. But there were times when that was affecting my health, so I would have to take a step back. And it’s been really difficult collectively to spread the word, because like people who have chronic fatigue syndrome and have been suffering with that for decades and being gaslit.
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