Belinda he first grappled with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. She had a fever, chills and trouble breathing, but the real clincher was her loss of smell. He remembers opening a canister of Tony Chachere’s creole seasoning, lowering her nose to take a whiff, and not smelling a thing. “That stuff usually clears the kitchen,” she says.
second infection, two years later, was worse. After 12 long weeks of endless fatigue and aching joints, her doctor suggested she seek treatment for long COVID. The lingering, sometimes full-body condition can plague people for months or years after a COVID-19 infection.
in late August, I joined He, age 64, in a small exam room for her first in-person consultation at the Johns Hopkins Post-Acute COVID-19 Team clinic. Wearing a navy dress and a blue surgical mask, He is sitting in a chair across from physician Alba. As they discuss He symptoms, doctor and patient face each other occasionally swiveling her stool to tap notes into a computer. symptoms are extensive. Brain fog, fatigue and pain top the list. She’s depressed even walking to the clinic from the parking lot left her winded and in pain.i have not felt good in a long time.
a retired digital media consultant used to be an avid skier and a cyclist. She loved to travel and dance and was planning to learn how to play golf. She’s not sure what the future holds, though she tells me she still has faith she can be active again.
treating people with long COVID can be complicated – especially for those who have other medical conditions. She has pulmonary hypertension, fibromyalgia and the connective tissue disease scleroderma. It’s tricky to tease out which symptoms come from the viral infection. he approach is to listen, ask questions and listen some more. Then she’ll zero in on a patient’s most pressing concerns. Her goal: manage their symptoms.“How can we make their quality of life better? she asks
He a retired digital media consultant, used to be an avid skier and a cyclist. She loved to travel and dance and was planning to learn how to play golf. She’s not sure what the future holds though she tells me she still has faith she can be active again.
treating people with long COVID can be complicated – especially for He and those who have other medical conditions. She has pulmonary hypertension, fibromyalgia and the connective tissue disease scleroderma. It’s tricky to tease out which symptoms come from the viral infection. Azola approach is to listen, ask questions and listen some more. Then, she’ll zero in on a patient’s most pressing concerns. Her goal: manage their symptoms. “How can we make their quality of life better?”.
System overload
On the afternoon of He visit, it’s a warm summer day in Baltimore, blue skies laden with fleecy clouds. Inside the labyrinthine halls of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, the vibe is not quite as sunny: bright lights, shiny floors, people in line and people in scrubs. Everyone I see is masked.
Azola meets me in the waiting area, walking briskly and wearing bright red glasses. Before the pandemic, Azola, a rehabilitation physician, treated patients recovering from strokes, spinal cord injuries and other disorders. Most mornings, she still works with these patients. But for the past two years, her afternoons have been booked with people laid low by COVID-19.
She’s squeezed me in to talk about the Johns He pact clinic, which opened in April 2020, around the time when the world hit one million confirmed cases. “To be honest, we didn’t know what to expect,” Azola says. Back then, most of the clinic’s patients were recovering from COVID-19 after a stay in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Now, at least half of their patients never got sick enough with COVID-19 to be hospitalized – yet still had symptoms they couldn’t shake. In a single week, Azola and her colleagues may get 30 referrals. “It’s constant,” she says, “more than we can provide service to.”
As those referrals pile up, patient wait times can stretch. The PACT clinic expanded last summer, and now has more than a dozen people on staff, including therapists, physicians and other specialists. They try to keep the wait to around two months, Azolaa says, but sometimes it takes up to four months for a patient to be seen.
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