14 years ago I was at one of the peaks of my physical health & fitness. I cycled a few kms to and from work every day, I was doing fitness classes 5 evenings a week in activities ranging from circus training, gymnastics, swimming, diving, and dance. I had what I thought was a great immune system for years. Even more than a decade earlier if I caught the 3 day flu would pass me in a day, and I hadn’t needed a sick day from work in over ten years.
On the Monday evening this one particular week I was weirdly finding challenging to cycle up the main hill on the way home from work.
That Wednesday evening I started feeling a bit dizzy.
The Thursday morning I woke up in preparation for work but I couldn’t use my eyes. Even the morning light coming through my closed eyelids was caused significant pain and so I needed to keep a blindfold on at all times.
I took the day off work, I was taken to the hospital, and diagnosed with Reactive Arthritis.
I was given a full spectrum of tests; I didn’t have the trigger gene, they couldn’t find the typical previous indication of a UTI or similar, and so put me in the ‘we don’t know what triggered this’ group. They also warned me I was significantly more likely to get it again, especially if I get rundown.
Symptoms do vary from person to person. For me, initially I was effectively blinded for two days (needing to keep on a blindfold at all times because of the severe pain). Ongoing light was still painful to my eyes and I couldn’t use a regular computer screen for at least two weeks (I was primarily working in IT at the time). The reduced mobility in my my joints, and the ongoing lethargy stopped me doing any of my fitness classes for about a year (not even cycle to work). Similarly the joint pain and lethargy meant I couldn’t provide treatments anymore as a massage therapist.
Despite me continuing to taking care of myself as much as I can throughout my life (healthy diet, no smoking, no alcohol, no recreational drugs, good exercise, well hydrated, good sleep, regular yoga & mediation, etc.) I’m still very cautious about staying healthy as much as I can, for as long as I can.
Growing up I would repeatedly hear of people saying health is more important that wealth. They would say that if you have the health but not the wealth, both are possible. But when you loose your health, people would trade all of their wealth if they could, just to get their health back.
I’ve felt it necessary to change my life because of the ongoing covid risks to my body. I’ve stopped going to any kind of events, stopped meeting up for rope with any kind of play partner. And of course I’ve turned down multiple work opportunities to focus more on maintaining my health as much as I can (even if I can now work from home again).
However, I know I continue to have an over zealous auto-immune response from my body in the defence of real and perceived risk, and so it seems to fight against itself in many ways, however much I try to look out for it.
Even these 14 years on from that original diagnosis, even though I’m officially now also free of cancer, a recent blood test show that my blood still has clear markers for auto-immune conditions within my system.
Essentially, if I catch Covid, the chances are significant of it trigging another year+ episode of Reactive Arthritis again.
I really don’t want to wake up blind and disabled by my immune system again.
Similarly, because of my over active auto-immune conditions, the chances are likely increased for me getting Long-Covid too.
So that’s why I’m still isolating from Covid.
I’d love to hear from other people still COVIDing.
Anyone wanting to comment below that Covid is only like a cold or flu, can 4$!@ off. Thank you.