Long Covid

 Hello everyone, I am awful at journaling but wanted to have some sort of record of what has been a major challenge in our family for the past seven months. I worked in a small county hospital, but had to leave my job last week because of the worsening fatigue and post exertional malaise as well as brain fog that increased with the fatigue. My son tested positive in Nov and my wife in Dec, but I never did, nor did I have any symptoms. It's likely that I had Covid at some point prior to being tested or had a false negative. I had the Pfizer Vax in Dec and Jan. I reacted badly to the second shot: nausea, fever, swollen lymph nodes, fatigue, etc. It lasted for almost a week before I felt somewhat back to normal. A week later, I ended up with decreased motivation and increased fatigue and brain fog. It's kind of a blur and my Amber handled setting up appointments for me since I couldn't concentrate, but I ended up at a men's health Doc and after running labs, they found that I had low testosterone. I was treated for that and 6 weeks later it was high, so they cut the dose back. I did have some improvement, but the fatigue continued. Anxiety began to increase and I went to my primary Doc who prescribed some meds. We ran a bunch of labs but everything mostly came back normal (high ferritin, slightly elevated lymps), but the fatigue continued. We switched some meds thinking that they were contributing to the fatigue, but with no effect. My Doc thought it was anxiety related and said that we'd just have to keep working on getting the right meds. I was tired of having no answer to the continued issues and began researching various things when I stumbled upon long covid. I had never considered it a possibility since I never tested positive and had the vaccine, but everything fit. I ended up going to a long covid clinic and the Doc diagnosed me with long covid.  I finally had to leave my job because I couldn't tolerate the fatigue any longer. After reading so many stories, I know that was the right thing to do, but it is a hard decision since I loved my work environment so much. So far I've been to a cardio, pulmonologist, and psychiatric nurse practitioner with normal labs and ECG. I have a stress test next week (I am dreading how that will affect me for the following days) and I hope it will give some answers to my poor activity tolerance.  It's nice to have so much love and caring shown by so many people throughout this time. Thanks!