Health Professionals, Learning First-Hand What COVID Recovery Is Like

"This disease -- I've never seen something that destroys the lungs in the same way. There's no point of comparison. Even talking can become a struggle."            "It feels like the air is never going to fill up in your lungs again."                            "To understand what the patient is feeling, it changed me."                                      Ana Carolina Xavier, 33, physical therapist

"One thing we have begun to notice is a fatigue syndrome that patients apparently cannot overcome, even a while after recovering from COVID-19."                        "I've had patients who a month-and-a-half after recovering, still feel tired."          Lucia Viola, pulmonologist, Fundacion Neumologica, Colombia

Physiotherapist Ana Carolina Xavier of FamilyCare, a group specialising in mobile physiotherapy care, and who also works at the ICU of Lagoa-Barra field hospital for COVID-19 patients, is treated by a colleague with the Brazilian physiotherapy method called RTA (Re-Balancing Thoracic-Abdominal), after being diagnosed with coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at her house in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil June 25, 2020. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

Working as a physical therapist in a Rio de Janeiro field hospital, Ana Carolina Xavier ended up with a throbbing head, her lungs attempting to expand to take in air, while her heart pumped strenuously. She had been giving physiotherapy to up to six patients recovering from coronavirus daily, aiding them to gradually recover lung capacity, giving little thought to her exposure and the possibility of contracting the disease herself. But she did.

Ana Carolina Xavier, therapist, became a patient in June  Still from video

And in so doing, became a COVID-19 patient herself. She had become familiar with the type of damage wreaking havoc on patients she helped; young and otherwise healthy, but under the influence of the disease, struggling to catch their breath.

Then, a scan of her lungs indicated the very same kind of damage. She has recovered, but her condition remains anything but normal, necessitating that she pause frequently from whatever she is doing, to take the time to rest and recover. 

She suffers frequent headaches. Blood oxygen levels occasionally descend, weeks after her recovery. Ms. Xavier and other frontline health workers who tend to the needs of COVID patients are increasingly warning of lingering respiratory issues. Issues that may in time be recognized as long lasting and even perhaps permanent damage done to the lungs of COVID-19 patients.

They speak of young or middle-age adults who had experienced symptoms seen to be moderate, never having to enter emergency, much less be placed on ventilators, despite which their daily lives have been altered beyond recognition by symptoms that appear to have become chronic. Irrespective of these events impacting people presumed to have recovered from the novel coronavirus, these same patients show up in government statistics as "recovered".

A "call to arms" appeared in The Lancet medical journal in May, written by experts hoping to raise awareness of recovered coronavirus patients who have, despite their assumed recovery, gone on to develop pulmonary fibrosis -- irreversible scarring of the lungs, causing fatigue and shortness of breath. Two such patients have had to undergo coronavirus-related lung transplants in the United States; one of them 28 years of age.

Ms. Xavier confirmed that several of her own patients also developed fibrosis. Feeling out of breath merely from making coffee or taking a shower, she now knows directly and personally just how her patients feel, some of whom had described to her feelings of exhaustion after walking  up stairs, even turning around in bed.

She had been inspired to become a physical therapist when she saw her grandfather, suffering from Parkinson's Disease, aided through therapy. When she initially began working with COVID-19 patients she thought of herself as analogous to an athletic coach, striving to persuade patients work through their exhaustion. With her newfound experience she understands when they require rest, before carrying on.

Ana Carolina Xavier, treating a patient as a physiotherapist, in the Rio field hospital