#and i'm worried that covid damaged my immune system | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thebibliosphere · 2 years

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Do you have any tips for surviving covid and avoiding any long term symptoms? I had CFS for two years and I’d just mostly recovered (somehow, I got really lucky) before I got covid, and now I’m scared it’ll flare up again :(

Hello friend, I'm sorry to hear you're dealing with this.

I'm obviously not a doctor, but as a chronically ill person, covid definitely set me back in my own recovery when I got it. This is not to say it will for you, but if you already have CFS, it's best to act with caution. I thought I was "fine" post covid infection in 2020, and then 3 months later, all my chronic illnesses flared at once, and I'm still dealing with some of the fallout -- likely because I didn't take adequate time to rest post-infection.

I basically spent the whole of 2021 working on my mental and physical health and am just now getting back to a stable baseline with my POTS and exercise intolerance.

So my advice would be to treat yourself like you are already dealing with a CFS flare. Prioritize being gentle with yourself. Avoid exercising beyond your limits, and make sure you're getting enough to eat and sleep.

Also, make sure you're on top of any possible deficiencies. I seem to recall covid hits people harder if they've got vitamin D deficiencies, which makes sense if you know vitamin D helps regulate mast cells, which in turn regulate how your immune system responds to infections and recovery. (You do not need to have MCAS for low Vit D to affect your mast cells. It's been shown to affect things like asthma and other allergic diseases as well.)

Guard your energy levels as best you can, and if you're able to, take extra precautions against getting infected again. If I have to go anywhere, I only ever wear n95 masks with an additional paper surgical mask over the top to get more wear out of the n95.

I buy mine from here, in case that helps. You can also get "reusable" ones from places like Cambridge Masks, which can be hand-washed.

Also, make sure you stay up to date with any available vaccines. I know the vaccines may cause mini-flares (they do for me), but it's better than the full-blown flares that covid itself can cause.

Overall just rest, rest, rest. Obviously, talk to your doctor too if you find yourself with any new or worrying symptoms, just be wary of any recommendations for exercise.

Doctors do so much harm when they prescribe exercise too soon for post-viral syndromes, and while the initial hit of endorphins might feel good, the long-term damage isn't worth it. Trust your body; after living with CFS, you know it better than anyone else.

Best of luck and take care. I hope things go smoothly for you.

#long post #chronic health tag #covid #cfs

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blackkat15 · 1 year

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Diabetic Things ✨️

Having people assume that I'm type 2 and that I can't have an icecream after going for a swim at the beach

Having teachers assume you're okay to do exams after not being able to do revision and after being dead for two weeks

Having your friends do their own research and panic all the damn time. They mean well but I can look after myself

Waking up at 1am from a low glucose alarm

Having a case of minor brain damage from my brain being in an acid bath for four years. I now have trouble pronouncing things and it takes longer to remember things (Wheatley was right)

Having to find out the correct amount of carbs for calculating at restaurants but all they have are calories. MacDonald's of all places have the carbs on their website and I am so damn grateful to them

Feeling icky whenever my blood suagr is high and then realising that's what I've been feeling for the past four years

Being a healthy weight after many years

Not feeling cold all the time after many years

Pancreas not paying rent

Immune system sucking ass for giving me shit allergies, a dead pancreas and malfunctioning lungs

Being able to drive again without nearly crashing the car

Feeling more confident in my appearance because I don't look like a skeleton

Less anxiety and depression

Realising the medical system in Australia is a load of bullshit. Nobody gets paid enough, they're so worried about COVID they've forgotten that more deadly things exist, the medical staff are taught differently than how they were before and are more snobbish

Having the National Diabetes Service Scheme only cut the costs of the cheap ass needles and not the expensive ass insulin and sensors

Getting scars more easily because diabetics don't heal as fast as other people

Getting a good night sleep where I don't have to get up every thirty minutes to pee

Being able to be alive instead of being half dead

Learning I can't have alcohol because it can mess up my blood sugar and if I wanna have sex I have to make sure my sugars are okay (Wtf)

Having teachers say I'm very resilient and that even if I was dead and in hospital I did all my work and was ahead of everyone

Karen's judging me for living my damn life

#diabetic stuff #type one diabetes #type one diabetic #welcome to Australia bitches #Kat says stuff

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jmtorres · 2 years

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had a weird conversation today where I said Id gotten vaccinated for flu & covid (bivalent booster) and it knocked me flat and i slept for three days, and the guy i was chatting with thought i'd contracted the actual illnesses not been vaccinated

i think we have a reluctance to talk about normal vaccine effects--I don't even want to side effects, because you're deliberately setting off your immune system, this is what is supposed to happen. But because there's so much anti-vax bullshit we try to pretend vaccination is 100% positive and has no downsides and... I think that's actually more harmful in the long run, like people who may not have an opinion get a vaccine and the experience kinda sucks for a few days and they go "oh the anti-vaxxers were right!" well no they weren't, the vaccine is NOT worse than the disease, but it's not fun, that's true.

So it's always remotely possible you will have an allergic reaction to a vaccine, and this is why pharmacies ask you to hang around for 15 minutes after the jab to make sure you don't come down with hives or start having trouble breathing. This is really rare and if you've had all your childhood shots without a problem it's unlikely to affect you. But it's also why they ask you if you're allergic to any of the components of vaccines, like egg proteins, which, if you've got that allergy I'm sorry and you probably already know better than I do what vaccines you can have and what alternates are available to you. Anyway: an allergic reaction to a vaccine if you've never had one before is an abnormal problem and not one most people will ever deal with. But if you are worried, hang around the pharmacy for 15 minutes, they're equipped to help you if you do have an allergic reaction, and if you're going to have one it should happen in that time frame and you can stop worrying about it after.

But then: normal vaccine reactions. Many people get sore in the arm that was injected. This usually lasts a couple of days. I got two vaccines at once and opted to have them in the same arm so I only had one arm affected. It's really common to be fatigued the day or two after a vaccine, because your immune system is in overdrive. I ran a low-grade fever and flopped around adjusting my covers on and then off when it broke. Again, this is a normal immune response.

Some people are like that sounds like being sick, why bother getting vaccinated, why not just risk getting sick? Here's symptoms of the illnesses I got vaccinated for I got to skip the experience of:

runny nose, congestion, sore throat

headaches

full body aches

vomiting

diarrhea

fevers high enough to risk brain damage

difficulty breathing

hospitalization because you can't breathe

death

you think it won't happen to you but people do die of both covid and flu

not to mention long-term bullshit, I had a relatively mild case of covid a couple months ago and I'm still not up to my usual level of activity, plus I have scar tissue behaving super weirdly? and there are so many worse longterm covid effects ppl have reported. sense of taste or smell being permanently fucked up. lungs wonky for months. new blood pressure problems. worse fatigue.

so I got to avoid all that, and I got to choose when I wanted to deal with a couple of days of being too tired to do anything, so I could do it in a holiday weekend and not miss much.

Also, at no point was I contagious! I never risked giving even my minor miseries to other people!

And that's why I would rather get a vaccine and have a couple of sucky days while my immune system learns from it than get the actual disease.

Vaccines aren't fun. But in most cases they're better for you and for society than the disease they're preventing, and for those few people who have allergies or are immunocompromised in ways that prevent them from getting vaccinated, they're relying on as many of us who can get vaccinated to do so, to lower their risk of exposure. That's what herd immunity is and does--when the majority of a population is vaccinated, a disease can't spread through the population, so rare ppl who can't get vaccinated are protected.

Please get your vaccines! As of the beginning of September, 2022, in the US, this season's flu vaccine is out at pretty much all pharmacies, as well as the bivalent covid booster, which is supposed to protect against two common strains of omicron. Pharmacies can also handle all your standard childhood vaccinations and stuff like tetanus (you want a booster every ten years!) and HPV and others. Vaccines are preventative medicine so they're free under pretty much every insurance and government medical care.

[ID: "it's free real estate" meme edited to say "it's free healthcare!" end ID]

#vaccines #vax #side effects #healthcare #free stuff #flu #covid

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inkybirdy · 2 years

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I’m kinda worried, you talk about being tired a lot in recent posts. Please take care of yourself!

oh dear - I don't mean to worry anybody, but I really appreciate your concern! It's been a rough year but I'm okay, I promise. I'm working on taking better care of myself, even if the last few months have been fighting against me.

(though now that I'm thinking about it, I feel comforted when I find people with similar situations to mine that are open to offering their perspectives, so if you want an update/some frank conversation on lifelong chronic illness I'll put it under the cut)

I was super sick as a little kid (like, NICU ill, with RSV) and my family has a genetic cocktail of nonsense, so I've never been physically sturdy - and I didn't really have a consistent physician or medical care schedule so I ended up blindsided by a lot of things that got a lot worse as an adult because. Well, when you've always been chronically ill to some extent it's difficult to gauge what's normal.

(please keep in mind i'm absolutely an expert regarding medical stuff, and my medical care history has been... a varied patchwork with a lot of different people doing a lot of tests and guesswork.)

According to the doctors I saw when I started going in for regular check-ups in college, I was living with lungs and an immune system that weren't great to begin with and were otherwise kind of a time bomb. Basically, around the time that I moved out to live on my own and go to college, my health got significantly worse.

For instance, at one point one of my (extremely common) upper respiratory infections turned into pneumonia that lasted for over a month. I had to go in for breathing treatments and had to argue with my doctors against hospitalization because of insurance/school/work, etc. By the time I started recovering I was on a regular inhaler for the first time in my life and my reactive airways were more 'reactive' than ever with then-diagnosed asthma. Anything can set them off - changes in temperature, humidity, a cold, stress, exhaustion, dust, aerosols, etc. It's kind of like I'm one of those classic Victorian waifs ready to waste away from Ill Humor (tm), but I've got shit to take care of so I can't afford to lay around on a fainting couch.

Anyway, it kind of evened out to a new 'normal' for me for the last couple of years with minimal progression, until I got super sick again in December of last year. I never tested positive for COVID, but my doctors were pretty sure I had a fun salad of flu, upper respiratory and sinus infections, and pneumonia that lasted until like. February.

The fun part about being chronically ill and having an immune system that is constantly panicking is that it doesn't really like. Recover. Or, it takes a long time to bounce back. I have long-term damage from the pneumonia I had in college, and this was like that x4 - I've come to terms with the fact I'm going to be sickly for a long a time, and so far there isn't a whole lot that can be done about it.

Another doctor told me that when your immune system gets set back like that it can trigger other, 'dormant' conditions too - for example, a new thing that's developed since The Great Fuckening of December 2021 is a hypersensitivity to vitamin deficiencies and thyroid levels, which is a thing in my family but not something I've dealt with. Further, according to my latest doctor, straight-up narcolepsy. (Which like - I dealt with chronic fatigue a lot in college to the point that became a joke, but it was a lot less funny hearing it while sitting on an exam table.) But, because I'm already taking the highest amount of adderall that I possibly can for my weight, which I'm told is a pretty common treatment for it, there isn't a whole lot to be done about it at the moment to improve from where I already am in that respect.

So, altogether that means that at 'default' I'm very tired all the time, and I get sick pretty easily and pretty often. Like, oh-shit-another-bad-cold-every-three-weeks sick, or worse. It doesn't help that I have a pretty demanding job, which takes tolls on even very sturdy and healthy people that get into it. But. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I've managed to keep it from impacting my ability to do my job too much, but it takes a lot out of me. It impacts my ability to keep in touch with my loved ones, my responsibilities outside of work, my hobbies (I can't even count at this point how many times I've been too sick to run D&D or slept through it, or gotten really behind in my planning because I've been sleeping) etc. I have to be pretty careful about how I budget the energy that I have in a day if I'm trying not to overexert myself - it can be pretty demoralizing.

That all sounds very depressing, and some days are a lot more difficult than others - but it's also not all bad. For example, I was able to pick up writing Crown of Calamity initially while I was super sick, and being able to get into having fun with LoZ again has been great and something I've been able to do without a lot of time pressure.

And, most importantly, I'm an extremely lucky person. My two siblings are absolutely incredible. We have a lot of common ground with our struggles and a lot of understanding for one another, and I'm grateful that we're able to live close enough to one another that we can be there to help when one of us needs it. Not only that - but I have a job, and a place to live, and three annoying cats that I love, and very sweet online pals who check in on me.

So, while things have been difficult with my health stuff and everything outside of it that's been going on, I'm okay - or, I'm going to be. Every day I'm learning a bit more about my new iteration of 'normal' and I'm trying to get into better habits so I don't overwork myself, and I have family that I can ask for help when I need it.

I hope that this wasn't a big depressing dump - Instead, I hope maybe some of you guys can relate to it, maybe take some comfort in the idea that you're not the only one dealing with dumb chronic health stuff that doesn't really have a clear 'fix.'

And, I hope that you guys know how much I appreciate you! Whatever difficulties you're facing in this current iteration of "Oh Goddammit Why Can't We Have A Good Year" - please know that I'm rooting for you, and I care about you, too.

I don't really know how to end this, but - thank you again. Really, truly.

#text #asks #long post #cw chronic illness #tbd? maybe? i don't know #i'm really not used to talking about it honestly ahah #but also i don't wanna worry anybody - it could be better but it could be worse!

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dontfuckmylifewtf · 3 years

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This is more of a serious thing.

I know I haven't been posting and that usually isn't something to worry about. I just deleted the Tumblr app so I can focus more on school. It worked, I wrote some good grades that I'm happy about.

But it's not what I want to write about.

My parents have been saying a lot about COVID-19 and the vaccine and that it doesn't work and might even kill people... I kind of believed them until just a few minutes ago.

My dad came home, angry and stressed from getting the groceries. He hates wearing the mask, because he thinks they don't work and because his glasses get damp. It didn't help that in the background in the shop's "radio" vaccine propagande or advertisements were played.

He started ranting about how the food prcies are going up while not paying the employees more, which turned into him talking about propaganda and that the vaccine kills peopel and doesn't do anything. His general opinion is that it's so unbelievable that it works so good, and that it's wildly unstudied, the government is making us infertile to decrease the population (it's actually not that far fetched, I once saw a petition to reduce birth rates by forbidding people to have more than one child with a lot of signatures), that it kills people because the protein maked the immune system turn the body against itself, and that it's still in testing and what you have to sign only gives you damage payment for three days after getting the jab. All that stuff.

I always kind of believed him.

But the first red flag was this: he doesn't support trand people. There is inherently not a lot wrong with that, you don't have to support someone to respect them. But he said it's a scientific fact that 99% (or smthn) of all trans people want to reverse the hromoen therapy. "Based on studies". And of course anything else like non-binary is fucking nonsense.

Another flag was a few days ago at the lunch table. There was some conspiracy talk and I said "Well at least you don't believe in the 5G thing". And then they said "It's microwaves they'll harm us". I just shut my mouth.

Next big red flags were this evening.

After his rant I told him that most people take the jab with the dead virus in Romania. Then we starte discussing about the Johnson&Johnson vaccine. My mum said it's not a dead virus, but a monkey-virus with spike proteins. My mums said the Sputnik vaccine has proper dead viruses but suddenly my dad interrupts. He starts talking about how they're lying and that it's not true and that they're spike proteins and shit and...

(note: in Germany any vaccines with dead viruses are banned. It's definitely sus because the healthcare minister isn't a medic in any way and worked with Pfizer (I think, I don't remember))

(another note: my dad is chronically depressed, traumatised from a narcissistic mother and never got what he wished for in life. He lost his job and has been home for many years now and is constantly on his computer playing video games. He is very pessimistic and thinks the world is bad and that another holocaust is approaching)

I just couldn't.

After that discussion my mum suddenly started reading a book summary with so much conspiracy shit that I just said some stuff along the lines like "that's bullshit" and went upstairs with my phone and scarf that I'm knitting. What I said was more polite though.

It was kind of a braking point.

I closed the door to my room and began crying with thick tears. I usually don't do that.

I need help from you, I need an opinion I can trust and people I can talk with. If I say something conspiracy wise, anti mask, anti vax and so on I... I guess I'm just trying to make sense of a few things.

I really need your help right now.

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