I’m going to have to ‘make it all political’ in here for a moment. Politics has a great bearing on my future and the health of many of those around me.
But first, I want to talk about symptoms.
“I’m so tired, and my hair is falling out. I think I’m going through menopause.”
For months in 2020, whenever anyone mentioned pretty much anything to do with their health, it pricked something in the back of my mind. Since early that year, I had been suffering with a myriad of symptoms — including, but not limited to — vertigo, nausea, headaches, nerve tremors, cold limbs, a stabbing pain in the upper back, a feeling of heaviness in the lung.
I wondered, how are other people not getting any of these symptoms following Covid? And as our wonderful Director General emphasized so many times, why am I one of the ones to get something so “rare”?
Surely, someone else must be suffering like me. I can’t be the only one.
As time went on, I joined an online support group and found many, many others. In fact, in the UK, one in six middle-aged people who had Covid-19 reported Long Covid symptoms. Why would New Zealand be any different? And it wasn’t. Even the rarest symptom was met with responses of ‘yes, me too, isn’t it awful?’.
We had crossed what felt like a great divide into understanding post viral illness, and were now leagues away from our friends, and sometimes our families. It was isolating, scary, and many medical appointments brought no answers.
But I didn’t have a positive test. Each visit to a doctor or specialist focused on one symptom. Take more iron. Take antihistamines. Take painkillers. Take stronger painkillers. This narrow focus on a symptom at a time doesn’t take into account the whole person.
So when Luxon and his party focus on the symptoms of the pandemic, and not the cause, I despair.
Let’s start with beneficiaries. Long Covid is having a massive impact on the workforce. In the United States, out of adults who worked and then contracted Long Covid, over half are out of work or working fewer hours. I think we are about to see the impacts of this here in New Zealand.
Then there’s truancy. The rates have increased, but there are many reasons for that. Some of them will be kids having to work to support income, kids looking after family members who are sick. Some of them will be kids with ongoing symptoms.
My own teenager has been out of school for most of this term with constant sinus problems. That’s not something you can go to school with, in the time of Covid. A specialist appointment in October can’t come soon enough.
You can tell it’s not just that the kids don’t want to go to school, because the teachers are also absent here in New Zealand.
So these problems that the Opposition are bringing up, trying to stoke fear that the younger generations ‘don’t want to work’ or ‘won’t go to school’?
We know there is a biomedical basis to these symptoms. We're hoping for diagnosis and treatment.
I have still never had a diagnosis. And I’m no doctor.
But I can diagnose where all these problems are coming from: Covid-19.