When COVID doesn’t go away
KAYLA BRIM LAUGHED WHEN SHE learned it could take 10 days to get her COVID-19 test results back. “I thought, O.K., well, within 10 days I should be fine,” she remembers.
That was on July 2. More than a month later, Brim is still far from fine.
Before the pandemic, the 28-year-old from Caldwell, Idaho, juggled homeschooling her two kids with her work as a makeup artist—she was supposed to open her own salon in July. Now, she suffers daily from shortness of breath, exhaustion, excruciating headaches, brain fog, neuropathy, high blood pressure, and loss of taste and smell. She feels like “a little old lady,” completely knocked out by simple tasks like making lunch for her children. She’s working just enough to help pay the bills and the lease on her empty salon, but she has no idea when she’ll be able to work full-time again, and no idea how she and her husband will manage financially if she can’t. “Half of my day is spent trying to sleep, and the other half of it is trying to pretend like I’m O.K.—and I don’t know when I’ll be O.K.,” Brim says.
This is “long haul” COVID-19. Even young, healthy people
