Long COVID: from Healthcare Worker to Remote Life Coach

By Estelle Jarrett
UConn Journalism 
Oct. 18, 2022

In Dan­bury, Con­necti­cut, 54-year-old Heather DeLu­ca is cur­rent­ly liv­ing a new life as a for­mer hos­pi­tal work­er who con­tract­ed the first strain of the COVID-19 virus in April 2020. After years of see­ing many Yale spe­cial­ists, DeLu­ca still lives with debil­i­tat­ing symp­toms of long COVID that caused her to lose her job at Man­ches­ter Memo­r­i­al Hospital. 

“It was men­tal­ly drain­ing; I def­i­nite­ly had depres­sion from it that I was going to ther­a­py for. It robbed me of my life in a way,” said DeLuca.

DeLu­ca start­ed feel­ing symp­toms April 7, 2020, two days before they even began wear­ing masks in the hos­pi­tal. Weeks lat­er, she went out of work on disability.

Long COVID, or post-COVID Syn­drome, is a term for when COVID symp­toms per­sist for more than three months and can’t be explained by anoth­er con­di­tion, accord­ing to the Nation­al Library of Medicine.

Accord­ing to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion data released on Oct. 5, 2022, 81.4% (rough­ly 18.5 mil­lion peo­ple) of U.S. adults with long COVID report­ed hav­ing their abil­i­ty lim­it­ed by the con­di­tion. An analy­sis in August by the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion esti­mat­ed that 2 to 4 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are out of work because of symp­toms of long COVID. This main­ly con­cerned staff in inpa­tient and out­pa­tient care as well as in hos­pi­tals, accord­ing to the Nation­al Library of Medicine.

DeLu­ca worked as a lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant at the hos­pi­tal when she was first hit with a wave of COVID symp­toms that left her impaired. She said she worked with doc­tors to solve her ‘brain fog’. She had no ordered think­ing; She could read words, but her brain would not process them any­more, so she began at a kinder­garten lev­el. She read sim­ple things like recipes and did word prob­lem games. Her deci­sion-mak­ing was so unre­li­able she didn’t trust her­self to dri­ve for four months after she was diagnosed.

Brain fog is a promi­nent lin­ger­ing symp­tom that has been the sub­ject of many stud­ies. A study by North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty showed that out of 100 patients with long COVID, 85 per­cent of the patients report­ed four last­ing neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems six weeks after their acute infec­tions. While the patients report­ed that the neu­ro­log­i­cal symp­toms start­ed to improve after 15 months, the symp­toms had not gone away com­plete­ly in their every­day life, accord­ing to Kaitlin Sul­li­van in the March 2022 NBC report titled “Brain fog, oth­er long Covid symp­toms can last more than a year”.

To help patients with brain fog, COVID Clin­ics like Hart­ford Healthcare’s COVID Recov­ery Cen­ter hire speech-lan­guage pathol­o­gists to treat a person’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions skills (atten­tion, speak­ing, read­ing, mem­o­ry, orga­ni­za­tion). The cen­ter usu­al­ly sees high num­bers of patients between the ages of 45 and 50. This includes full-time work­ers and many front-line health work­ers. Even so, accord­ing to the patients they get, all ages and back­grounds can have long COVID, even peo­ple who have nev­er been hos­pi­tal­ized and had mild COVID.

DeLu­ca ran on the tread­mill every day for three miles, but sud­den­ly she couldn’t even walk on it because of her rac­ing heart rate. To this day, her heart rate has not recov­ered ful­ly, and she still can­not run, if at all.

Clin­ics see a range of symp­toms from the lungs and heart (short­ness of breath, rapid heart­beat), brain (mem­o­ry, fatigue, dizzi­ness, blurred vision, seizures, depres­sion), and stom­ach (pain, diar­rhea), accord­ing to  Dr. Sub­ra­mani Seethara­ma of Hart­ford HealthCare’s Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Net­work in an August 2022 podcast.

Accord­ing to the British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (BMJ), long COVID can fol­low a con­stant course, but oth­ers expe­ri­ence relaps­ing, and some­times symp­toms can occur due to trig­gers, like the body’s trau­ma response. 

One out of ten peo­ple expe­ri­ence symp­toms of COVID or devel­op new symp­toms months after a COVID infec­tion has run its course, accord­ing to Hart­ford Healthcare’s COVID Recov­ery Cen­ter. Hartford’s Recov­ery Cen­ter has cared for over 2,000 patients since open­ing in the fall of 2020. Indi­vid­u­als call these kinds of cen­ters when they have symp­toms of COVID so that they can get spe­cial­ized care by being direct­ed to spe­cial­ists who are trained in the unique symp­toms of the heart and lungs.

Hali Kor­su, a junior at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, has shared that she’s been con­cerned about a 15 bpm increase in her rest­ing heart rate since she first got COVID in fall of 2021.

“There’s no oth­er expla­na­tion for it. I vivid­ly remem­ber sit­ting in my car in front of urgent care see­ing my shirt rise with the pound­ing of my heart while I just sat still. That heart-attack feel­ing hasn’t gone away, even when I’m calm,” Kor­su says.

At this cur­rent time, there is a lack of defin­i­tive cura­tive ther­a­pies, but clin­ics can help by diag­nos­ing long COVID, man­ag­ing the spe­cif­ic symp­toms, shar­ing the uncer­tain­ties of the prog­no­sis, and set­ting real­is­tic goals for recov­ery, accord­ing to Trisha Green­hal­gh, pro­fes­sor of pri­ma­ry care health ser­vices, in a BMJ report in 2022. There is no stan­dard pro­to­col yet for treat­ing long COVID, but recov­ery pro­grams are designed to aim for improv­ing the phys­i­cal and men­tal well­be­ing of the patient. 

DeLu­ca can no longer phys­i­cal­ly work at her old job help­ing moth­ers in the birth cen­ter. How­ev­er, she has adjust­ed by start­ing an at-home busi­ness webi­nar called Peri­na­tal Life Coach­ing. Accord­ing to DeLu­ca, she uses her edu­ca­tion and expe­ri­ence to ful­fill a role near­ly tak­en from her by the COVID-19 disease.