Im 9 months into long covid. Just about recovered enough to start doing light cardio again. But during the first 5 months or so my brain was literally scrambled. At Christmas, simple trivia games were impossible. Recall of certain words that were usually available to me just didnt happen. It was awful, especially trying to keep my new job at the time. I also found myself doing things that I'd never done before, like leaving a tap running or heating a pan full of vegetables without any water in, as I'd forgotten I was midway though something.

Gradually, I began to get better, and this was in lockstep with my garmin's reporting of my HRV which had massively declined immediately after onset. At my worst, walking up one flight of stairs or showering would have me out of breath and send my heart racing.

Before all of this, I was an extremely fit young person (very high VO2 max and exercised daily). Im only just starting to get a resemblance of my former life back and I fortunately only had a mild case but it has really woken me up to the seriousness of post viral syndromes. I now actively avoid _any_ sick people, no matter how mild - my initial infection barely registered as a sore throat and sniffles.

I hope we really ramp up investigations into this field as I know there are a lot of people suffering in silence being fobbed off by archaic medical thinking in this area of medicine. Who knows what long term lasting damage has been done to my body