Emma Hames is angry and it’s easy to understand why. Rather than enjoying health and happiness at the age of 33, her life is blighted by extreme fatigue, jelly-legged weakness, headaches, insomnia, muscle pain and brain fog.
Her heart can race so fast it ‘feels like a washing machine on spin cycle’ and she often lacks the strength to even walk to the shops.
Emma, who lives in Cardiff, has been largely housebound for four years and had to give
Transplant patient Steve Harrison has barely left his house since the end of February last year, because he’s terrified of catching Covid. And with good reason.
The 38-year-old logistics manager suffered kidney failure, and in December, after a torturous ten-month wait, he finally underwent a kidney transplant. But the drugs Steve takes to ensure his body does not reject the new kidney suppress his immune system – and, unfortunately, this has rendered the Covid vaccine ineffective on him.
He’s not
Mid-pandemic, while undergoing a much-delayed Pap smear at a London hospital, and encountering a poster of some tulips that neither uplifted or offended me, I thought of a scene in Ben Lerner’s novel “10:04,” throughout which the protagonist undergoes various vaguely degrading medical experiences. “There was a poster of Picasso’s dove in the first neurologist’s waiting room, watercolors of Manhattan sunsets where they sent him for bloodwork, photographs of orchids where he waited for his CAT scan,” Lerner writes. The
Nicole Lawson spent the beginning of the pandemic incredibly worried about her daughter, who has asthma. Five-year-old Scarlett’s asthma attacks were already landing her in the ER or urgent care every few months. Now a scary new virus was spreading. Respiratory viruses are known triggers of asthma attacks, and doctors also feared at the time that asthma itself could lead to more severe coronavirus infections. So Lawson’s family in Ohio hunkered down quickly and masked up often to keep Scarlett
