Unseen Scars of COVID-19 that Shaped my Life

 COVID-19 has not only uprooted economies, but also destroyed individuals both financially and healthwise. My daily routine was brought to a standstill during the second wave of the pandemic, as the notorious disease caught me. But even as the symptoms subsided, the lingering effect of the virus has been disrupting my life. Here I talk about my journey that went through the post-covid recovery and how it reshaped my thinking of health both mentally and physically.

After being a victim of corona a lot of things have changed in my body and in my thoughts.

I was still working in a college near Chandigarh, when, one early morning while riding towards my work I felt that something was just not right with me.

By the time I reached the hostel room of the college, I was just not feeling the energy to move ahead.

This happened during the second wave of the pandemic. Private colleges had partially opened and they had allowed some essential staff to stay within the hostel and look after daily operations.

I knew that I would be hit by a fever, and by afternoon I felt that I should head back home for a good amount of rest.

The next day, I was completely engulfed by a fever, and my first thought was that no, it can’t be me, just a normal human thought, that I could not be the victim.

There was no doctor to check around, and the only option was Santokh Nursing Home which was the closest to my house.

I know it is bad to particularly name someone, but I consider it essential here because I was in a lot of trouble at that time, and this private hospital tried to cash upon this opportunity. These are not hospitals but shops and patients are their customers.

Going there only made things worse, as instead of giving me simple medication, the doctor and the staff of the hospital were pulling me to get admitted to their hospital.

They were in full mood to take advantage of my helplessness and drown me under a heavy bill.

The doctor there prescribed me a heavy antibiotic, although the recommended treatment was simple paracetamol and multivitamin.

Those antibiotics spoiled my digestive function and now I was hit by my loose motion as well.

That doctor, a lady doctor at Santokh Hospital, looked at me as a customer and not as a patient.

For nearly three days I was completely drowned in fewer and I was feeling weaker and terrible each day.

On the second day, I also started having breathlessness. As I got up after doing an early morning chore, I felt things blurring in front of me, and I felt for the first time that I was getting out of breath.

I had not felt so helpless ever before in my life.

Things got worse as our family had shifted to a new rented apartment, as when the lockdown opened up we put our house on renovation.

It was after a long time that I did not have a bath for nearly 2 weeks in a row. 

On the fourth day, I got a call from my Maa Ji. This was the turning point. Her voice in my ears felt like someone had given me an instant magic healing potion.

She said that she had the intuition that something was not right with me, and she felt the impulse to call me.

That night after the call, after being highly restless for four days, I felt at ease and had a good sleep.

Trust me I was taking the same medicines but that call from my Maa Ji turned things around.

From that day on things started to get eased out and on the sixth day, the thermometer read normal temperature for me.

It took me another week to get to my complete consciousness and be up to do normal daily work.

I had lost my sense of taste and smell on the first day of fever and it returned back on the seventh day. One can clearly feel the sense of taste and smell return.

I did feel breathless until the end of next week.

Things just did not end there, as somehow I feel that I am still suffering from this and the covid-19 virus has not exited my body completely.

Here is how and why I feel so….

Initially, after recovery, I used to feel that I did not have enough energy to carry out the day's work, I used to get tired quickly, much faster than before.

I reasoned to myself that I had just recovered from a heavy fever and my body was still accumulating its energy so in a few days' time things would get back to normal.

Thankfully during those early days after recovery, my brother-in-law had brought some multivitamins from Spain.

So I was taking them regularly, these multivitamins helped in faster recovery. However, during days when I did not have that multivitamin, I used to feel the same loss of energy.

Nearly one or two months after recovering from COVID-19 I felt that I had fast-forwarded five years in age.

I was feeling that in just two months I had aged five years. It was not just me who was feeling like this, my brother-in-law was feeling the same.

Fast loss of energy was one of the distinct after-effects after recovering from COVID-19.

After around two months of recovering, I started doing pranayam, and it has helped me a lot ever since.

I have been doing pranayam, the one told by our Baba Ramdev, for quite a long time, and it has been quite effective.

However, doing pranayam after COVID-19 has not given the same effectiveness as it was before the illness. With time things are getting back to normal. 

Another distinct feature I observed was the loss of stamina or muscle fatigue so to say. I don’t know how to term it or describe it exactly, but the loss of energy that I was describing earlier is different from the muscle tiredness I am describing now.

I will explain this by an example. Before becoming a victim of COVID-19, I was comfortably able to jog for nearly 5 - 6 km. I was not fast, but I can say that I was able to travel that distance at a brisk walk pace.

While moving such a distance, I never felt that I would not be able to do that, but after recovering from COVID-19, I mentally felt that I would not be able to walk that much distance briskly.

I felt that my body was not responding the way I wanted it to. I don’t know if it was psychological or if it was actually happening, but there was something wrong.

The third thing I felt was the persistent pain in my bones. There was good enough pain in my hip bones and this started happening only after recovering from COVID-19.

I felt the need for frequent rest because of the pain in my hip bones, knee and other places.

Adding to this is the pain in my fingers, since my job of content writing required continuous typing, and the continuous tapping of fingers on the keyboard was having an effect on my fingers.

Pain in my fingers started happening after some time, maybe around one year later, but I am sure it is something that is connected to being a victim of COVID-19.

Not immediately, but after some time, I am experiencing the problem of indigestion. There was a time when I could eat anything and rarely had any issues.

Now, if I eat pizza or some oily food then I will not have easy motions the next day.

The first fatal episode of indigestion after COVID-19 was when I ate mushrooms. My wife made a really tasty mushroom sabzi. I bought and cooked mushrooms fresh, and I did not experience anything unusual while eating them.

Then in the middle of the night, I had loose motions, and then some vomiting also. In nearly 3 hours, I had three motions. The excretion was completely liquid.

I had mushrooms many times in the past but this was something I never experienced. I had sensed little problems with indigestion after COVID-19 but this was the biggest episode.

After this incident, I stopped having mushrooms. I would say that COVID-19 is not the sole culprit, I would combine it with my age which is clocking 45 now, and some of the lenient eating habits that I had in the past.

Everything combined is having this effect on me.

The list of health problems does not end here. Another thing I have observed in me is a slight loss of muscle mass.

I feel that my body is not developing muscles as readily as it used to, something that has prominently come to my notice after COVID-19.

I am not feeling a shortage of strength though.

And yes, how can you forget this one, loss of memory, it is also happening after the fever of COVID-19.

Some kind of fogginess in my thoughts or lack of clear thinking is being experienced by me after this pandemic fever.

There has been no effect on my reasoning abilities though, and when it comes to logically understanding something I am as sharp as I was earlier.

In short, there has been tampering with my brain as well by this COVID-19 virus.

All in all, the COVID-19 virus has affected some major parts of my body.

In the middle of experiencing all this, I should thank my good habits because of which I am able to keep these aftereffects of COVID-19 to a minimum.

One good habit of mine is to be regular in doing pranayam. Even though I am not able to do pranayam as religiously as I want to, still I am able to maintain my habit.

I want to do pranayam before sunrise, which I have not been able to achieve till now.

Because I have not been dedicated to anything in my life, which is the reason for my failure in life, a different topic of discussion. I have been quite glued to my habit of doing pranayam. In a year, I have maintained this habit for nearly 250 days, which I would say is pretty consistent.

I would say that Pranayam has helped me a lot in recovering from the effects of COVID-19.

Through consistent pranayam I have been able to regain my stamina of walking to a great extent, so much so that I can now walk five to six km without feeling strained.

The problem of indigestion has not been solved completely though and I am still caught by surprise many times.

One thing is clear now though that my stomach is not as tough and rugged as it was before. To take care of this, I have reduced eating maida products to a great extent.

Most of the cuisines are made out of maida, for example, burgers, chole kulcha, chole bhature, pizza and other stuff like these.

I try to keep their intake to a minimum and try to avoid them most of the time.

I have been reading about the aftereffects of COVID-19 and I thought it would be good to share my experience.

I would say that this virus is simply not good, I read somewhere even in a normal human being this virus remains in the far corners of their arteries.

My experience says yes it does.

Whoever made this made, and for what purpose has certainly done a menacing job.

Some say that this virus has been artificially created in China’s laboratories, and in case this is true, then it is certainly bad for China.

Life is a long journey, and completely uncertain too. Some are completely healthy but they are not able to touch 30 years of age, while others follow quite an unhealthy way of living yet they cross 60 years of age.

A weird thing about the human body is that we only have one set of this body. Meaning, we only have one pair of eyes, one intestine, one mind and one penis.

And we have to live with these one pair of things for nearly 60 plus years. Our creator should have given at least one spare for each body part of ours.

Add on to this single pair of everything in our body, it is also so complex, there are so many chemicals, joints, and intricate parts.

Had our body been simpler it would have been much easier to live.