Sarah* fully expected that catching COVID would be a disaster for her health. As a health researcher, she’d followed the science of SARS-CoV-2 more closely than many people — she understood how serious the pandemic was.
She also has a rare form of muscular dystrophy, a genetic disease that causes her muscles to weaken and waste over time, and struggles with asthma and migraines. “My quality of life was already really bad, so I’d rather have died than get long COVID,” says Sarah, who caught the virus from her husband in May 2022. “And then it happened.”
But she wasn’t prepared for how quickly long COVID would crack her marriage of almost 20 years.
After getting over her acute infection, suddenly Sarah was grappling with a completely new set of symptoms: fatigue “on a whole new level”, brain fog that made her previously sharp thinking feel soupy and slow, shortness of breath and muscle pain — the usual list so-called long haulers report. She has pushed herself to keep working part-time from her home in Canberra, but spends the rest of her time resting, taking medication and supplements, hoping she’ll recover.
While her husband can carry on planning catch-ups with friends and interstate work trips, Sarah can only take one day at a time. Her lack of energy and weakness means she can’t go on holidays with him — she can’t even go out to dinner with him or watch him play sport like she used to. And because he travels so frequently, she often has to isolate from him at home, so she doesn’t catch COVID again and risk her condition getting worse.