Risks of complications after recovering from COVID?
May 5, 2022 1:39 PM Subscribe
Just had COVID, feeling better but having periodic panic attacks about post-COVID health effects. I’m triple vaccinated but I know that doesn’t mitigate all the risks and I’m having trouble functioning day to day.
I have some pretty severe health anxiety, which has been nasty to deal with during the pandemic. I avoided catching COVID until last month, when I had a mild case— a couple of days of low fever, and a lot of congestion, but it followed the normal course of a shitty cold. I’m mostly recovered now, if a bit tired.
Unfortunately I’m paralyzed by fear of post-COVID complications. For instance, I know COVID increases the risk of pulmonary embolism, and that this risk increases whether you have COVID symptoms or not, whether they’re mild or not. In the past I’ve stopped taking birth control pills due to fear of blood clot risk, and having a similar risk now that I can’t control is very scary and difficult for me.
I would like some actual data about how likely these complications are (any life-threatening complications) and comparison of how these map to other flu & respiratory viruses (so I can understand the risk compared to contracting something pre-pandemic), but the longer I look for the hard data the more I end up marinading in fearmongering speculation, since so many clickbait articles have been written since 2020. I know the facts aren’t necessarily rosy, but I’d like to know what they are so I know what to look for symptom-wise (so I can tell myself I’m doing everything I can) and can stop my searching reassured that I know what we know so far and don’t need to keep digging.
While I know COVID is “not the flu,” please try not to ratchet up the rhetoric at least in this post just in the interest of me regulating my anxiety. The more anxious I feel, the tighter my chest feels, the faster my heart beats, the more I worry I’m dying and the more I neglect my day job which I feel I can barely handle at this point. Thanks for understanding.
Risks that will not manifest in an acute health risk are somewhat outside of the scope of this question— I know there can be impacts on the brain, for instance. Stroke would concern me, brain fog would not. (I mean, it does, but that’s not where the anxiety is centered.)
I have some pretty severe health anxiety, which has been nasty to deal with during the pandemic. I avoided catching COVID until last month, when I had a mild case— a couple of days of low fever, and a lot of congestion, but it followed the normal course of a shitty cold. I’m mostly recovered now, if a bit tired.
Unfortunately I’m paralyzed by fear of post-COVID complications. For instance, I know COVID increases the risk of pulmonary embolism, and that this risk increases whether you have COVID symptoms or not, whether they’re mild or not. In the past I’ve stopped taking birth control pills due to fear of blood clot risk, and having a similar risk now that I can’t control is very scary and difficult for me.
I would like some actual data about how likely these complications are (any life-threatening complications) and comparison of how these map to other flu & respiratory viruses (so I can understand the risk compared to contracting something pre-pandemic), but the longer I look for the hard data the more I end up marinading in fearmongering speculation, since so many clickbait articles have been written since 2020. I know the facts aren’t necessarily rosy, but I’d like to know what they are so I know what to look for symptom-wise (so I can tell myself I’m doing everything I can) and can stop my searching reassured that I know what we know so far and don’t need to keep digging.
While I know COVID is “not the flu,” please try not to ratchet up the rhetoric at least in this post just in the interest of me regulating my anxiety. The more anxious I feel, the tighter my chest feels, the faster my heart beats, the more I worry I’m dying and the more I neglect my day job which I feel I can barely handle at this point. Thanks for understanding.
Risks that will not manifest in an acute health risk are somewhat outside of the scope of this question— I know there can be impacts on the brain, for instance. Stroke would concern me, brain fog would not. (I mean, it does, but that’s not where the anxiety is centered.)
Unfortunately, you're going to have trouble finding a lot of meaningful data at this point. Most countries are deliberately fudging - hell, fucking - the numbers, putting up roadblocks to consistent testing and reporting so we can declare that everything is great. No attempts are being made at collecting centralized data in any country that is especially willing to share that data.
Except maybe South Korea. Even that data is still catching up, though - we haven't actually had much time to study post-covid impacts, in academic time - plus the data tends to be not-sufficiently differentiated between hospitalization-grade COVID and COVID From Home, and is poorly differentiated between adverse outcomes during the actual having of COVID versus post-COVID.
It's also hard to find data that's looking at people who were relatively healthy at onset and were never sick enough for hospitalization. For the kind of concerns you are specifically targeting any number you find right now is going to include a population of people who already had serious pulmonary or vascular disease (already identified or not) AND people with severe COVID who underwent the kind of hospital stabilization treatment that has serious risk of causing things like clots and organ failure that would be impossible to pin to either the treatment or the virus.
In other words: we don't know. We may never know.
But also the handling of the situation is so incompetent that massive organized coverups are just not a thing, not in the Anglophone countries anyway. Word on the street is that these things do happen but are not happening on a scale anywhere comparable to, for example, road-related injuries. You are still safer having COVID than riding in a car (I understand that's not 100% helpful with health anxiety, but it is a perspective point that I use to remind myself of scale on a regular basis) or walking near roads.
It may be helpful to you to enumerate the number of people you know of first or second-hand who have suffered stroke or PE or similar from having COVID - and I'm going to say stretch a little and don't include the elderly because that risk naturally increases over time. I am 50 years old (and white and female) and I have a huge mesh of internet friends and a fair number of IRL ones and the number of first-degree people I lost in that population from COVID or post-COVID is 1, second-degree (mostly people over 60, parents of friends) is about 8. Plus two people I didn't know well enough to know what happened but I suspect it was one or the other. But in the same timeframe there's been two first-degree losses to cancer and half a dozen to mental health crises (and that second-degree number is well into the teens). I do know a couple dozen people struggling with the things you're not so worried about, but the fatality and obvious severe injury rate is about what I'd expected in young-to-middle-age Americans who are not deeply impoverished or severely marginalized.
Medical sources that I have been able to trust through all this do suggest that you should continue to convalesce for six weeks after resolution of symptoms, so that if you do suffer viral myocarditis (remember that you can get this from any virus, from chicken pox to flu to the entire herpes family) it can self-resolve as it generally does in 99% of healthy people. Rest, hydrate, no exertion.
Know the symptoms of blood clots: stroke, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis. Know the symptoms of not being able to breathe, and as a person with severe anxiety do like I do and own a pulse oximeter so you can tell the difference between actually not being able to breathe and just feeling like it. There is your due diligence. That is all you can do. You cannot do the research yourself and you cannot read research that has not been done, but also you don't need to have that information to know what symptoms to watch for - and everyone should know how to identify clot emergencies, since your quick response to someone else's emergent event can save their life.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:50 PM on May 5, 2022 [4 favorites]
Except maybe South Korea. Even that data is still catching up, though - we haven't actually had much time to study post-covid impacts, in academic time - plus the data tends to be not-sufficiently differentiated between hospitalization-grade COVID and COVID From Home, and is poorly differentiated between adverse outcomes during the actual having of COVID versus post-COVID.
It's also hard to find data that's looking at people who were relatively healthy at onset and were never sick enough for hospitalization. For the kind of concerns you are specifically targeting any number you find right now is going to include a population of people who already had serious pulmonary or vascular disease (already identified or not) AND people with severe COVID who underwent the kind of hospital stabilization treatment that has serious risk of causing things like clots and organ failure that would be impossible to pin to either the treatment or the virus.
In other words: we don't know. We may never know.
But also the handling of the situation is so incompetent that massive organized coverups are just not a thing, not in the Anglophone countries anyway. Word on the street is that these things do happen but are not happening on a scale anywhere comparable to, for example, road-related injuries. You are still safer having COVID than riding in a car (I understand that's not 100% helpful with health anxiety, but it is a perspective point that I use to remind myself of scale on a regular basis) or walking near roads.
It may be helpful to you to enumerate the number of people you know of first or second-hand who have suffered stroke or PE or similar from having COVID - and I'm going to say stretch a little and don't include the elderly because that risk naturally increases over time. I am 50 years old (and white and female) and I have a huge mesh of internet friends and a fair number of IRL ones and the number of first-degree people I lost in that population from COVID or post-COVID is 1, second-degree (mostly people over 60, parents of friends) is about 8. Plus two people I didn't know well enough to know what happened but I suspect it was one or the other. But in the same timeframe there's been two first-degree losses to cancer and half a dozen to mental health crises (and that second-degree number is well into the teens). I do know a couple dozen people struggling with the things you're not so worried about, but the fatality and obvious severe injury rate is about what I'd expected in young-to-middle-age Americans who are not deeply impoverished or severely marginalized.
Medical sources that I have been able to trust through all this do suggest that you should continue to convalesce for six weeks after resolution of symptoms, so that if you do suffer viral myocarditis (remember that you can get this from any virus, from chicken pox to flu to the entire herpes family) it can self-resolve as it generally does in 99% of healthy people. Rest, hydrate, no exertion.
Know the symptoms of blood clots: stroke, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis. Know the symptoms of not being able to breathe, and as a person with severe anxiety do like I do and own a pulse oximeter so you can tell the difference between actually not being able to breathe and just feeling like it. There is your due diligence. That is all you can do. You cannot do the research yourself and you cannot read research that has not been done, but also you don't need to have that information to know what symptoms to watch for - and everyone should know how to identify clot emergencies, since your quick response to someone else's emergent event can save their life.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:50 PM on May 5, 2022 [4 favorites]
Hi, fellow health anxiety sufferer. This is not a problem that can be remedied by more research, I'm sorry to say. This is a problem you can only ameliorate (not eliminate) by actually addressing the anxiety. Can this be your catalyst to speak to your doctor about managing it?
posted by praemunire at 3:51 PM on May 5, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 3:51 PM on May 5, 2022 [17 favorites]
I will point out also that at this time, nobody knows nothin' about post-COVID syndrome in a 3/4x-vaxed population, it's just so soon still. It seems like the promises are pitched deliberately low at this point and mostly the conversation is about hospitalization, but it is within the realm of reason that getting COVID in 2022 is an entirely different animal than having it in 2020 or 2021 thanks to the vaccines. Being very vaccinated is unlikely to make it any worse, so please at least reassure yourself that you have done everything you can to optimize your outcomes.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:07 PM on May 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Lyn Never at 7:07 PM on May 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
In California, we have a Covid-specific warm line. Are you perhaps in CA/could there be a similar line in your area?
CalHOPE Peer-Run Warm Line: Call 833‑317‑HOPE (4673) 24/7 for non-emergency support specific to COVID-19 stressors.
posted by assenav at 7:39 PM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
CalHOPE Peer-Run Warm Line: Call 833‑317‑HOPE (4673) 24/7 for non-emergency support specific to COVID-19 stressors.
posted by assenav at 7:39 PM on May 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yes, just want to add my voice as a fellow sufferer of health anxiety. What helps me most is to recognise when I'm trying to find reassurance and control outside of myself.
Beyond a certain point, gathering information just makes me *more* anxious. Especially in a situation like this where the information simply doesn't exist, and I inevitably stumble across some new scary "fact".
What helps me is to accept that I don't know what might happen, but to trust that whatever happens, I know I will meet it with courage.
Things that help me when the anxiety becomes overwhelming: spending time with other people and talking about something other than my fears. Doing something routine but useful. Making something. Going outside and looking at something far away,like the clouds.
And ultimately, reminding myself I am only responsible for getting through today. The future will happen whether or not I worry about it.
Also, I found that I was way more emotional and sensitive after having Covid. It takes longer than I thought to really recover. My friends who have had it, had the same experience. Even a mild case leaves one vulnerable to depression and volatile emotions.
I hope you find ease. It's a tough, harsh world at times and you deserve to feel comfort and joy.
posted by Zumbador at 10:31 PM on May 5, 2022 [7 favorites]
Beyond a certain point, gathering information just makes me *more* anxious. Especially in a situation like this where the information simply doesn't exist, and I inevitably stumble across some new scary "fact".
What helps me is to accept that I don't know what might happen, but to trust that whatever happens, I know I will meet it with courage.
Things that help me when the anxiety becomes overwhelming: spending time with other people and talking about something other than my fears. Doing something routine but useful. Making something. Going outside and looking at something far away,like the clouds.
And ultimately, reminding myself I am only responsible for getting through today. The future will happen whether or not I worry about it.
Also, I found that I was way more emotional and sensitive after having Covid. It takes longer than I thought to really recover. My friends who have had it, had the same experience. Even a mild case leaves one vulnerable to depression and volatile emotions.
I hope you find ease. It's a tough, harsh world at times and you deserve to feel comfort and joy.
posted by Zumbador at 10:31 PM on May 5, 2022 [7 favorites]
Even if reliable data were available about risks of pulmonary embolism etc. on a population level, that wouldn't tell you anything about your individual risk. The best you can do is to be aware of symptoms of DVT/pulmonary embolism, get a little pulse oximeter for home (but don't check your levels constantly) and try to deal with the anxiety as best you can. I realise that's easier said than done.
For what it's worth I also had a mild dose of Covid but was monstrously tired after the symptoms cleared up. That lasted about three weeks and now I am completely fine.
posted by altolinguistic at 5:03 AM on May 6, 2022 [1 favorite]
For what it's worth I also had a mild dose of Covid but was monstrously tired after the symptoms cleared up. That lasted about three weeks and now I am completely fine.
posted by altolinguistic at 5:03 AM on May 6, 2022 [1 favorite]
« Older smart, funny, GENTLE, non-edgy comedy | Capcut (app) doesn't remove my backgrounds... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
Try to come back to present. Be aware of your desire (or habit) for certainty and control. Become more aware of your courage instead of being swept away by fear. Let go of the search for certainty and control and replace it with faith in yourself and life.
What is your reality right now? You are in your home, at a computer, sitting upright and feeling physically well. Notice and breathe. Nothing is harming you now. Notice what is positive right now. Be aware that you're searching for security on the outside when you already possess courage on the inside. Become more aware of your inner courage that was never lost. It's always been there. When fear comes welcome it and move ahead. Trust in yourself, have faith, and notice what is okay.
posted by loveandhappiness at 2:27 PM on May 5, 2022 [16 favorites]