It looks like the virus is here for the long haul!
“‘Gaslighting’
is the word I’ve been using repeatedly,” one COVID-19 survivor said.
“I’m so ill and some people are telling me this is a figment of my
imagination."
Ailsa
Court loved to be active before she fell ill in March. Now a walk in
the woods leaves her panting, but doctors have dismissed her concerns.Courtesy Ailsa Court
By Elizabeth Chuck
The
frightening symptoms began in early March, when Ailsa Court of
Portland, Oregon, suspects she caught the coronavirus from someone at
work. More than four months later, she still has shortness of breath,
achiness in her lungs, and a strange tingling in her calves.
But
doctors have downplayed Court’s concerns as her health problems have
dragged on. At one point, her primary care doctor suggested that perhaps
she was just “stressed because of the economy,” she said.
And
during a visit to an urgent care center in May — when she feared she
might be having a stroke or other neurological problem because she was
having memory loss and a crippling migraine, in addition to chest
tightness and numbness in her legs — a physician rolled his eyes at her,
Court, 35, said. Her issues were nothing more than acid reflux, he told
her in a dismissive tone, plus maybe a vitamin deficiency.
The
doctor’s diagnosis infuriated Court, a commercial makeup artist, who
felt a male patient who went to urgent care with the same set of health
concerns would have been taken more seriously.
“‘Gaslighting’
is the word I’ve been using repeatedly,” she said, referring to the
psychological tactic of making a person second-guess whether something
they know to be true is real. “I’m so ill and some people are telling me
this is a figment of my imagination. It truly feels like a nightmare.”
Court
is not alone. Across the country, many coronavirus survivors with
long-lasting symptoms, particularly women, are dealing with dual
frustrations: debilitating health conditions that won’t go away, and
doctors who tell them the issue might be all in their heads.
Despite
their oath to do no harm, medical professionals’ judgment can be
inadvertently altered by deeply ingrained unconscious biases, experts
say, and the “hysterical female” patient has long been a dangerous stereotype in medicine.
While there are no studies on how female coronavirus patients are treated compared to male ones, past research reveals a disturbing pattern. Women who are in pain are more likely than men to receive sedatives instead of pain medication; women with the same type of pain as men who go to an emergency department have to wait longer to be seen; and women are up to three times more likely to die after a heart attack than men as a result of unequal care.
In addition to gender, race and ethnicity are major contributors in the type of medical care people receive: Data show
that Black patients in acute pain are 40 percent less likely than white
patients to receive medication, and Latino patients are 25 percent less
likely than white patients.
And while
income, education and other socioeconomic factors explain some
differences in health outcomes for minorities, experts believe those
alone don’t account for all disparities — including the significantly higher rate of maternal mortality among Black women in the United States. They point to implicit biases on the part of health care providers as one explanation.
Alisa
Valdés, 51, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, novelist who, along with her
19-year-old son, Alexander, has been sick since mid-March, has been told
by doctors that her problems were a “mental issue,” despite what she
says are very real physical complications of her illness, including
emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder. The doctors, she said, have
been “minimizing me as a woman, minimizing me as a Latina.”
Alisa Valdés.Courtesy Alisa Valdés
“Nobody
is going to come right out and say that they’re discriminating against
you for those reasons,” she said. “So what do I have to go by?
Intuition, instinct, past experience. The attitude of certain providers.
The way they look at you. The way they don’t look at you. The way they
shrug you off.”
Valdés’ symptoms have
included extreme burning in her digestive tract, unbearable pain in her
sternum and upper back, and a loss of appetite. She feels doctors’
biases have influenced the way they treat her son, too: When she took
him into the emergency room two months ago because his heart was racing,
she said she was stunned when doctors automatically assumed his heart
rate must be elevated because he was on drugs, which he has never taken.
Other
coronavirus survivors say it is hard to parse out whether their gender
or race factored into the response they got from doctors. All they know
is they have had their symptoms written off.
“Nobody is going to come right out and say that they’re discriminating against you for those reasons.”
Adrienne
Crenshaw, 38, of Houston, who is Black, says she has not witnessed
explicit racism or sexism during the multiple trips to the emergency
room that she has made since she got the coronavirus in mid-June. She
has had shooting pains around her heart, skyrocketing blood pressure and
tingling in her arms and legs, and has gone to the hospital several
times worried she might be having a heart attack.
Doctors
have prescribed anti-anxiety medications to Crenshaw, a bartender and
former fitness competitor, despite her insistence that her symptoms are
not a result of anxiety. Her father died of the coronavirus July 10 —
but she has learned not to mention that to her medical providers, since
it usually prompts them to suggest her problems are a manifestation of
grief and stress.
Adrienne
Crenshaw, far right, seen with her children and parents. Her father,
Jerry Crenshaw, died of the coronavirus, but she has learned not to tell
doctors that, because they blame her lasting symptoms on grief and
stress.Courtesy Adrienne Crenshaw
On one trip earlier this month, she overheard a doctor talking about her to his team with disdain, but she didn’t know why.
“He
said, ‘The girl’s perfectly normal, there’s nothing wrong with her,’”
she said. “And in my head, I’m like, ‘I’m not perfectly fine. I don’t
just go in the ER to take a room up.’”
The
medical community as a whole has not ignored these so-called
coronavirus long-haulers. Health care providers throughout the United
States have been working to figure out why they are not getting better, and a handful of post-COVID clinics
have sprung up across the country for patients who are having
neurological and physical difficulties months after they first got sick.
And
in recent weeks, to the relief of long-haulers, top public health
officials have recognized that COVID-19 symptoms can last for lengthy
periods of time. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention acknowledged in a report
that as many as a third of individuals who were never sick enough to be
hospitalized are not entirely better up to three weeks after their
diagnosis. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious
diseases doctor, has said more research is needed on individuals who appear to be suffering from a post-viral syndrome.
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