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Fighting long Covid

I am clearly still fighting against long Covid. I’m trying the antihistamine stuff now. Some say it helps fight the main symptoms:

I have all of these and doing yoga has both helped and brought them out more. I was already struggling to recover from decent workouts and bike rides before, sometimes taking several days even though I’m in really good shape otherwise. Now I feel like I’m recovering all day.

Another side-effect is that the regular challenge I have with chronic inflammation is just so much worse. It is caused, we think, by me being allergic to almost everything—especially our dog and tree pollen (we live in NC). The yoga for the first week fought off the inflammation turning it down to zero. The bike rides help as well. This is why I have yoga scheduled in the morning and bike ride in the evening. Without doing something that makes me sweat regularly and regularly sleeping I’m pretty much incapable of doing anything productive at all.

Yesterday everything seemed a lot better and it wasn’t until today that I remembered that I tried taking two 5000 mcg of B12 sometime after yoga. I had a strong brain and good energy all day long. But now I’m thinking it was fake. It could be the benedryl that I took last night (as recommended) to fight off night-time Covid. It always lasts into the next morning and has the same negative effect as alcohol on my sleep. I can sleep soundly, but it isn’t a good REM sleep (which is exactly what alcohol does). Based on that I’d rather not do benedryl at all. It just kills my morning routine completely.

This is one of those times where writing about all this might end up helping someone. The good news is that people regularly recover form long Covid, but that it takes months. A lot of tech workers are reporting their brains just not working at all, programmers completely unable to program. I felt like that the last few days. Simple code taking me several days and long hours just staring at it waiting for wheels to turn in my head and nothing happening. If this is what old-age feels like later, I want to do whatever I can to fight it off. Hopefully, I can dial in something to do to fight it this year. In a good way, I’m regaining habits to maintain mental health that I had given up before. For the next few months if I do not follow them, I simply won’t be able to work at all, so there’s a lot on the line here. Here’s a summary of my attack strategy:

There’s no way I can do any sort of endurance training like this. My wife’s friend is an avid, competitive runner and long Covid has completely destroyed her training for anything. I’m not gonna push it. The stakes are too high.

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