In November 2020, despite being extremely careful, I was infected with Covid for the first time (I will never know for sure, but most likely it was an aerosol infection through my mask at a DIY store or supermarket – the only places I went at that time).
This infection changed my life forever – a few months later I was a nursing case, completely bedridden and in constant pain. I spent a small fortune on all sorts of treatments and finally, after almost a year, found 3 that worked in combination: Blood-thinning supplements and drugs got me out of bed and back into the garden and onto the couch. Antivirals and intravenous treatments relieved the symptoms and pain and allowed me to walk short distances, and finally Help Apheresis brought me back to life.
I have all sorts of memories of those days, and of course of the time after that when we started to build the Apheresis Center so that people would have a place to go to prevent what happened to me from happening to them – endless suffering, no help, and on top of that the stigma and gaslighting. But the best memory was that I had a family who cared for me.
Last week I received a heartbreaking phone call – a young man in his mid-twenties, in tears, full of fear that he would not be able to travel, because he is so scared all the time, and see doctors outside of his country (where the health system and doctors do not treat Long Covid and Post Vac Syndrome). So I promised him that I would try to help him and take some of his fear away by showing him what to expect. I sent him lots of pictures I had taken in the past – the airport, the clinic, the sea, the old town and many more. I also gave him a little tour of the clinic via video call. And last but not least, I promised to send him a video – not of patients – he had seen plenty of those on our website and online – but of carers like his mum. Carers of Long Covid and Post Vac sufferers have a lot in common, they share many of the same experiences. They see the invisible disease and they see the induced anxiety their loved ones suffer from. The spontaneous result (I took my mobile phone, gave it to a Dutch lady sitting in our lobby and she filmed us talking in English and German) is now online on our homepage:
English Subtitles are available for this video, just press the CC button and choose ‘English’
Спасибо всем участникам за то, что поделились своим опытом!
