“I practically live in bed. At 36”: the testimony of Francesca Lo Castrosick of Long Covid and founder of the long-term care network. “It was a Thursday in March 2020. I was in my office in London and I had chilblains on my hands: it was the first sign,” the woman told Republic, remembering the day she fell ill with Sars-CoV-2. The second step of her ordeal, however, dates back to April 27 of the same year: “I get a great fever. Violent cough. I end up in the emergency room. But they don’t admit me. ‘She is young, she does not risk her life’.”
From home, however, the disease never improved. On the contrary. “The pneumonia doesn’t go away. I go back to the emergency room twice more, each time they send me home”, continued Lo Castro. In September 2020 he confirmed it: “They tell me that my illness has become chronic. Pneumonia was replaced by pleurisy. After a year, following an alleged heart attack, I was diagnosed with chronic myocarditis and pericarditis. I find myself in a wheelchair”. Speaking of the symptoms of this disease that has never left her, she mentioned the main ones: “Frightening asthenia. I don’t have the strength to do anything. Headaches. Nausea. In the summer I feel differently worse. My body recovers, I can go out with the cane, people tell me ‘you’ve improved’, it’s not true, because in the heat I feel worse mentally.
In short, his physical condition also had serious repercussions on a mental level: “I have a terrible anger inside me. I happen to think the worst.” So much so that she then added: “I’d rather spend my whole life in wheelchairs than have my brain turned to jelly.” Even though she admitted that the thing that makes her suffer the most is “not being believed”. At the origin of her failure to recover from Covid, as she herself explained, there is a syndrome “defined dysautonomy. She affected my immune system like HIV. It’s as if I had developed AIDS, except that it didn’t arise from an HIV infection, but from a covid-19 infection.”
Lo Castro then said that she had been vaccinated “four times. The vaccine saved my life. If I had contracted the virus once again I would certainly have died or worsened seriously, like other friends of mine who, having small children, cannot protect themselves from external agents Furthermore, he revealed that he had written to the prime minister Giorgia Meloni “to ask that Long Covid be recognized as soon as possible as a chronic debilitating syndrome with fluctuating symptoms over time. The State must invest in research. And give equal access to diagnostic tests and supportive therapies”. Finally, she said that she became pregnant with her partner two months ago. Even though she admitted: “I was given bad advice by gynaecologists. They removed the spiral from me due to endometriosis ‘she can’t get pregnant anyway'”.
