Difficulty breathing, concentration and even walking: five months after being diagnosed with Covid-19, Violaine Cousineau continues to suffer from severe symptoms that prevent her from resuming normal life.
“I feel like I’ve been 30 years in a few months,” the 47-year-old Canadian tells AFP.
Sitting in her kitchen and wearing a mask, Cousineau moves with her hands as she speaks, as if clarifying her words as her voice is reduced to whiskey. .
“I don’t recognize myself, my family doesn’t recognize me either. I’m not the man I was,” said a Montreal resident, noting that she walks with a rod so as not to tuit i.
A mother of two daughters ages 12 and 15, she is one of hundreds of patients expected by a new clinic in Montreal specializing in long-term health effects at Covid-19, or “Covid long. “
She had no preexisting health problems and even enjoyed walking “super cardio” on mountains near weekends.
After getting the illness in October, she spent the first week trying, including being in bed for three days.
“I could never have imagined for a fraction of a second that it would go beyond that,” she says.
Now, cooking has become difficult – and going downstairs? “I’m going to miss for the day,” laments the literature teacher who can no longer turn the pages to read a novel or return to work.
“Daily life has been turned upside down,” she says. “It’s an ordeal of life.”
10 to 30 percent harassed
Secretly, a large number of patients who contract the novel coronavirus suffer destructive symptoms long after others have overcome it. The European branch of the World Health Organization says the seemingly dire situation must be “extremely important” to health authorities around the world.
In Quebec, which has recorded more than 294,000 cases of coronavirus, “between 10 and 30 percent of patients may have complications,” said Emilia Liana Falcone, director of the new clinic that Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) established. , which is affiliated to the University of Montreal.
Opened in February, doctors at the clinic focus on understanding Covid’s long-term problems and the time to diagnose the causes and develop treatments.
Falcone says patients still show symptoms one year after being infected.
The clinic, she says, has so far examined about 15 patients and expects hundreds more with complications that affect “19-year-olds as much as those aged 69. age. “
“Fatigue is definitely very common,” says the infectious disease specialist, such as shortness of breath, muscle pain or sleep disorders.
Cousineau says she “doesn’t expect miracles.” Blood tests, cardiac ultrasound, chest x-ray: all tests have returned to normal.
“I almost feel like a mutant, a new breed that has emerged and needs to be successfully coded,” she says with a smirk.
The only relief from her symptoms: spending very long hours in the fast Canadian winter air, outside the city.
Anne Bhereur, 44, another patient at the clinic, finds her “very confident in getting support from people who are capable and interested in understanding what is happening.”
“What makes breathing so difficult?” Surprises the family doctor who has long been involved with Covid, explaining in whiskey that her colleagues are “just as baffled” by the her symptoms.
After Covid-19’s contract in December at the hospital where she was working in palliative care, Bhereur thought she would return ten days later “with protection against the virus, while she was a little safer. “
But she still feels very tired and has difficulty breathing and concentrating, forcing her to break up all daily activities.
“It takes me 30 minutes to go around the block when it doesn’t usually take even 10,” she says, adding that she’s trying to be “hard to be optimistic.”
She said: “Laughing or crying, I become too short of breath, so we take things one day at a time.”
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