Michelle Wilson was an emergency room nurse at Barnes-Jewish Hospital when she was diagnosed with COVID-19 in November 2020. She had what she calls a “mild case” and returned to work after recovering.
But then she got sick again.
One morning she woke up with chest pains and found it difficult to breathe. When she arrived at the hospital, she was diagnosed with bilateral pneumonia — an infection of the lungs that affects the lung tissue and makes it difficult to breathe.
After she got better, she returned to work. But soon –
“The tiredness was too great. The shortness of breath, the cardiac arrhythmia, it just felt like I was running on a treadmill the whole time. So they put me off work again and I spent January through May seeing every doctor I could think of,” Wilson said. “Within a month I had a specialist of all kinds. So I worked really hard in those five months to get back to work.
That started a long cycle of getting better, going to work and getting sick again. Wilson was soon diagnosed with long-term COVID, a chronic illness that can last indefinitely.
The University of Missouri Long-COVID Clinic opened in May 2022 in response to people like Wilson who were looking for answers. It had many patients as one in four Missourians has long had COVID. dr Zachary Holliday, a pulmonologist, runs the clinic.
He said they still don’t know much about the disease because it’s so new, but for a long time COVID can affect basically every part of the body — the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, the gastrointestinal tract system etc.
“Your body determines what you do and you have to listen to it. And if you feel like it, you can do a little bit more every day – fantastic. We want you to do that, but at the same time when your body is saying, ‘This is very painful. I’m having a really bad time breathing, you gotta hear that,” Holliday said.
“The fatigue was too great, the shortness of breath, the arrhythmias, it just felt like I was running on a treadmill all the time. So they put me off work again and I spent January through May seeing every doctor I could think of,” Wilson said. “Within a month I had a specialist of all kinds. So I worked really hard in those five months to get back to work.
He added even for his patients, who are recovering after months with the disease, things may not be the same.
“You may not be at your previous baseline. It may either take longer or you may never come back fully, but you still have to listen to yourself to make sure you don’t hurt yourself,” Holliday said.
This can affect the ability to work. Holliday said he understands this could be a difficult but necessary conversation with an employer.
He added that most of his patients’ employers would understand, but in some cases employers have had to take some extra steps to get his patients the accommodations they now need.
“Just spoke to someone today to follow up on some issues that actually needs to work through Workforce Comp[ensation] just an employer changing jobs to help with their symptoms, and that’s always hard to hear,” Holliday said. “They have to go through the stress of doing something like that just for their employer to listen to them.”
In October, the University of Missouri Extension released a report titled “COVID-19 and Paid Vacation,” which examined the impact of long-lived COVID on an already tight job market. Luke Dietterle, Consulting Specialist for Exceed – Regional Economic and Entrepreneurial Development, was one of the report’s authors.
“An estimated 3% of Missouri’s adult population has had a significant impact on their day-to-day activities due to the long COVID – approximately 62,000 Missourians,” Dietterle wrote in an email.
This exacerbates a tight labor market. According to the Missouri Monthly Job Report, unemployment in Missouri was 2.7% as of November 2022, but some businesses are still struggling to find workers, especially as more working-age Missourians are long diagnosed with COVID.
“Employers will face challenges accommodating these individuals in the workplace and hiring new individuals from a workforce that may be reduced due to these long COVID patients choosing to move away from the available workforce pool,” Dietterle wrote.
A recent Brooking’s Institute study found that as of January 2022, long-COVID accounted for about 15% of the vacancies in the market.
So when it comes to getting back into the workforce or what that will look like, Dr. Holliday of the MU COVID Clinic says he is often unable to answer these questions for his patients.
“I think the hardest thing for our patients is that if we find something that we know how to treat, we can treat it, but there’s still a lot of unknowns out there,” Holiday said. “I think that’s difficult. We are still working on possible treatment interventions for some of these patients.”
But for Michelle Wilson, returning to work is just part of her long COVID story. She’s sold her two-story house because of the stairs, hired someone to help her keep the house clean, and at times she’s so exhausted that it can be difficult to cook dinner or even take a shower.
Recalling her interactions with her doctor, Wilson said, “I would ask the doctor, ‘How long do you think it will be before I feel better? How long will it be before I won’t be short of breath anymore? How long until I’m not tired anymore?’ And they just looked at me and said, ‘Well, we don’t know, you’re helping us find out.’”
For now, she said, she’s accepted chronic illness as part of her new reality.
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