“This is a very difficult and shocking concept to adapt to, especially for a previously healthy person.” “We had to adjust to the new reality that these patients are chronically ill, and the answers will not be there today,” said Fernando Carnavali with Mount Sinai’s Center for Post-COVID Care in New York, which has seen more than 4,000 patients so far. Over time, though, the thinking about covid evolved.

Many Americans have not been so lucky, especially if their illness has left them unable to work.Įarly on, there was hope that by putting researchers and multiple specialists together in one program, they might more quickly pinpoint the cause of symptoms and be able to provide people with a pill or other simple treatment that would help. Despite the enormous time and cost of her appointments and tests, which have mostly led nowhere, Polega has good health insurance that has covered most of these expenses. She sent in the reams of medical information she’d accumulated over the past year - down to the clinical notes from puzzled doctors, noting how “very strange” and “complex” her case was, and how much “confusion” there was in her test results - and booked a televisit. Then the cardiologist sent Polega off to the next set of doctors - a kidney specialist and an endocrinologist - to make sense of other symptoms.įor the first time, Polega said, she felt heard. “It felt like a really big thing, a scary thing, because I thought, ‘What if this doesn’t go away, will they be able to find a safe way for me to be pregnant?’” She was not ready just yet to have a baby, but she knew she wanted children and had recently purchased a house with her longtime boyfriend. It was the first time she realized how her illness might change the trajectory of her life in ways she had never imagined. Polega would later recall that moment as the worst of her ordeal. She cautioned Polega that she shouldn’t get pregnant on the medication, which is typically used after heart attacks, since it is associated with low-birth-weight babies. The doctor prescribed heart medication - 25 milligrams of eplerenone, twice a day, to lower her blood pressure. A cardiac CT calcium score exam, which helps evaluate the amount of calcified plaque in the heart, also came back without any concerns. So was her treadmill test, which looked at how her heart worked under stress. Her echocardiogram, an imaging test that looks at how the heart’s chambers and valves are pumping, was good.

Patient with covid coming back to life