The Experience of Chest Discomfort and Shortness of Breath after Corona

I fell ill on the 2nd of April 2020. My initial symptoms were extreme body ache, headache, tiredness and fatigue that would put the first 6 months of being a mother to a baby to shame. This was followed by a low-grade fever and a sore throat that made swallowing very difficult. I live in the Netherlands and have training in public health. My training and instinct told me that it could be the dreaded virus. However, when I called up the physician's assistant at the GP practice I am registered with (this is what you are advised to do in the Netherlands if you have Covid-19 symptoms), she said it was unlikely because I did not have a fever that exceeded 101 degrees Fahrenheit and I didn't have a dry cough.

I believe her (a little) because I desperately didn't want it to be Covid-19. I had a toddler at home and a husband but no friends or family nearby. We are newish to the country and I was very worried about what would happen if both of us got sick at the same time. We had some groceries but like all responsible citizens, had done our civic duty by visiting the grocery store infrequently and not stock-piling food.

Even so, I self-isolated, from my husband. It was impossible to do so from my toddler daughter. Very often, experiences of individuals with Covid-19 leave out what happens when a mother falls ill. Mothers do not have the 'luxury' of being sick, that's par for the course. But sick, I was. Lifting my relatively petite toddler out of the bathtub became an impossible orderal. Rocking her to sleep required me to walk around with 11 kilos strapped to me and seemed like a task that required Herculean strength. My muscles felt like jelly. I would wake up from 2-hour naps in the afternoon, feeling like I had run a marathon. I was on a steady diet of tea, soups and paracetamol. The first seven days I felt more ill than I had ever felt in my life.

As I assiduously noted my symptoms each day, listening to my body, watching out for signs that might confirm what I knew in my gut to be true, on day seven, I developed breathing trouble. This is when I became really worried. So worried, that I wondered for a brief moment whether I would live to see my 40th birthday. I am not a hypochondriac - far from it. My training and a usually rational mind always kick in with empirical data when I tend to err on the side of being dramatic. But I knew from reading on Covid-19, that breathing troubles were a bad sign and I didn't want to end up on the ventilator.

I was relatively healthy - I walk almost every day for 45 minutes, I have normal weight, no underlying conditions and though I am not uber-fit, I tend to have a decent immune system. I am not in the age group that would put me at a high risk of developing complications. Still, when you cannot sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to your daughter without feeling like someone has pumped all the air out of your lungs, it is worrying.

I called up the doctor's office again and asked whether it was okay for me to take an inhaler. I was prescribed one-two years ago post a lower-respiratory tract infection. I don't have asthma, but it was a rare occasion when I needed one to reduce the inflammation in my lungs. The doctor agreed that it was a good idea and the pharmacy even sent me a Salbutamol inhaler since neither of us could get out of our home.

So long as one person is showing signs of a possible Covid infection, ideally, no one in the family should get out. This is not always possible, but we tried to do it to the best of our abilities, at least until I continued to be symptomatic. Even now, they couldn't tell me whether this was a garden variety flu or Covid-19. And I wasn't sick enough to be hospitalized, so in the Netherlands, no test could be done on me.

By days 11, my muscles felt less sore, though fatigue and the discomfort in my chest had become my best friends. I had coughed up blood at some point during the infection and was worried about developing secondary pneumonia, but thankfully, my immune system was able to resist that. My recovery was going at a turtle's pace. Most days I was able to do about 50% of what I could do before I had this illness.

By week 4, I had continuous tightness and discomfort in my chest. My chest hurt- the pain seemed to be emanating from somewhere deep inside my chest, not superficial like with heartburn, where you feel it in your esophagus. I felt like there was an Incubus on my chest at night, and no amount of inhaler was helping me. Swallowing was difficult and I felt I had a hard toffee stuck in my throat, that was too lazy to descend into my stomach. I had not been seen by a doctor and had only received instructions on the phone. I called the medical practice again and asked for advice. They recommended that I should be seen by a doctor, but not in their usual clinic, but a special clinic (drum roll) for Covid patients or those with a respiratory tract infection.

I was with a competent and calm doctor. He waited patiently as I fumbled for my phone in my jacket pocket. Like a performer awaiting her turn, I was awaiting mine so I could spell out the timeline of my infections with painstakingly detailed symptoms. On the nth day, I had malaise, fatigue and headache. On n + 1 day, I had a sore throat with fever and so on. With his white boiler suit, and protective glasses, the doctor seemed like he was preparing himself for dealing with an alien invasion, and in some ways, this pandemic has caught us unaware, like a scene out of Independence Day. He heard me and after taking copious notes, he took my ear temperature, measured my oxygen saturation, heard my lungs and sat down to make more notes.

The good news was I didn't have pneumonia. The even better news was that I most likely had Covid-19. He was sincere when he said he wished he could test me to confirm his diagnosis but he can't. The Netherlands has a limited number of tests (like most countries) and very strict criteria for who can be tested. You need to be hospitalized and classified as being seriously ill by the public health authorities to get a test. He said the discomfort, pain and pressure I felt was a classic symptom of patients who had recovered from Covid-19 but were still afflicted with this and fatigue that refused to go away. It would take up to two months for these symptoms to disappear. Like all Dutch doctors, he prescribed me a course of paracetamol for the pain and this time the paracetamol was indeed the right medicine for what ailed me.

I felt relieved. There were moments when I did not know whether I was articulating my symptoms properly. Where they real or was I imagining them? Perhaps the combination of being ill and quarantined had altered my sense of reality? I struggled to believe myself and listen to my body closely because the medical system so far had been telling me that I most likely didn't have Covid-19. But now, I had as close to a diagnosis as I was going to get one. There's so little we know about Covid-19 right now. We know even less about people like me who have a so-called “mild” infection and recover without any medical intervention. And one of the big reasons for that is that they are not testing people like me. Healthy people who get the infection, recover but have persistent symptoms that cause physical and mental anguish. Perhaps, South Korea is the only country that succeeded in testing to the extent they should have. It's week six now and I am almost back to my normal self, though the discomfort in my chest reminds me that not all is / was well. 

Nearly 2 months after the infection, I have discovered my Haemoglobin has crashed to 6.5. My Huisart doesn't know why this is the case. I wonder if it's Corona related, or something else? Have other patients experienced the same?