Long-COVID patients seek awareness and understanding for a still-enigmatic condition

With a steady gaze and unwavering voice — the confidence of rote memorization — a long-COVID patient can tell you exactly what their body experienced as it was ravaged by an invisible illness.

“Long-haulers” in the Roaring Fork Valley describe tingling skin that itches like lice on their scalp, tinnitus that rings “like thousands of crickets” in their ears, migraines akin to “a sharp needle through the eyeball” and chest pain that feels as if an orange has been shoved under their sternum. They speak of a brain fog that robbed them of their vocabulary — like looking in the refrigerator, staring at a head of lettuce, and not knowing what it’s called — and of a “numbing and debilitating” fatigue that can leave them bedridden for days, an exhaustion so all-consuming that even a sip of water seems out of reach.

The “internal shaking” can feel as if their entire body were quaking from the weight of a heavy barbell; the inflammation and pain as if they were “on fire.” They’re sidelined by nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain; heart arrhythmias turn a short walk into a cardiac event. They struggle to breathe and to get that oxygen into their bloodstream; they struggle to sleep even as they feel completely depleted.

They have told this story before, to doctors and specialists and holistic medicine professionals and family and friends, and they have told it again and again until they could find somebody to believe them — somebody, at least, to listen.