Two months after contracting Covid-19 in August 2021, Heather Marti, a university programme administrator from West Virginia, began to experience a terrifying array of symptoms that have changed her life.
The 52-year-old describes agonising muscle pain, gastrointestinal problems, weeks-long migraine-like headaches, brain fog and “extreme mental fatigue similar to what has been described after a traumatic brain injury” among a litany of other problems.
Grasping for an image to explain the devastation, she said: “All of the wires in my body are crossed — if you turn the water faucet on, the door would open. There isn’t a system in my body that has not been impacted.”