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“Shame and ego get the better of me taking care of my teen daughter living with Long Covid”
The feeling of terror of losing my daughter to an invisible illness like Long Covid, walks like a shadow over me on most days. Long Covid, a slow moving and a silent crisis in the body and brain, produces complex symptoms. The heterogeneity itself is remarkable, and the diagnosis is so complicated that it has led to no single solution or even recovery as of yet. It robbed us both of our identities.
My daughter was 10 when she got her first COVID-19 infection in the summer of 2021 at a basketball camp. Her case was mild, and she was never hospitalized. Two months after it seemed she had recovered; odd symptoms began to appear that were often unexplainable. In a span of a year, she went from a highly active, gleeful tween who was full of energy to someone held hostage in her own body. Unpredictable pain, crushing fatigue, flare ups that set her recovery back months — forcing her to start all over again — and the loss of control over her body derailed her life completely.
As her mother, I witnessed an unwanted journey that my daughter never deserved. Life felt uncertain each time her symptoms set her back. Managing her illness became a full-time job that came with infinite day-to-day inconsistency and unpredictability.
