Community Help For Mike and Lexi (COVID)
Hi Friends,
As some of you know, our friends Mike and Lexi Heidenberg have been having a tough time lately. Since May 2020, Mike has been struggling with COVID-related illnesses that started with pneumonia. He was tested several times for COVID but the results were negative; however, due to the unreliability of the tests and the many, many symptoms he has experienced, it seems clear that this is what he had. The pneumonia cleared up in May, but instead of recovering, he actually got worse. In Mike’s words,
“After two antibiotics and a course of oral steroids, my cough was finally under control (more or less, though it never fully went away).
But I still had chest pain, shortness of breath, massive headaches, double vision, and terrible, crippling fatigue that saw me sleeping up to fourteen hours a day.
And then the other symptoms started. My voice, which I had been using more and more to communicate with students remotely before I got sick, was shot. I could barely speak, and it felt like a wood block was stuck in my throat. I kept having to pull these weird white threads out of my mouth.
An ENT diagnosed me with thrush and hyperfunction, likely the result of the antibiotics that did nothing for the pneumonia. Medication got rid of the thrush (knock wood), though it took two rounds of meds to do so, and speech therapy has been helping me slowly get my voice back.
But there were lots of other things that began to pile on -- horrible muscle and joint pain, random twitching, insomnia, burning and stabbing neurological pain that could (and did/does) show up anywhere at any time. Dizziness. Nausea. Heat intolerance. Short term memory loss. Aphasia (forgetting words/short circuiting when I try to speak).
Writing, both typing and by hand, has become much, much harder, and I make a lot more mistakes than I ever have, including writing words that I know my brain didn't tell my fingers to write. Writing this, which would have been easy before I got sick, feels like running a marathon…uphill.
Rapid heart rate -- my resting pulse used to be around 80, but it's rarely gone below 90 and is often well over 100. Hypertension -- I wound up in the ER again a little over a week ago with a BP of 187/104. And on and on and on -- I've counted over 40 individual symptoms.
I've been to about a dozen doctors, and while some have danced around it, none has come out and called this what Lex and I are sure it is: I'm a COVID long-hauler, meaning that I may have had a relatively "mild" case at first (since I didn't need hospitalization), but that it has left me with many lingering symptoms that have no definite pattern or end date.
Several of the doctors believe it's a disruption of the autonomic nervous system -- the part that handles breathing, circulation, and all the other things that we usually don't have to think about.”
This medical nightmare has left Mike unable to work, and as many of their friends know, Lexi’s own health problems have already placed her in the same situation. She receives permanent disability but Mike’s short-term disability was cut off on July 28.
Unfortunately, without a positive COVID test or an official diagnosis, Mike cannot legally prove his disability. Not only does this make it hard to get his disability benefits reinstated, but it has put his job in jeopardy. He’s been told that he must return to work by 9/8, or he will probably be fired from the job he has given his heart and soul to for five years.
If any of you knows how to help try to get a correct diagnosis and/or reinstate the disability payments, please get in touch to offer your expertise! And in the meantime, hopefully the rest of us can give enough now to help prevent Mike and Lexi from wiping out their entire life’s savings while they deal with this situation.
Please donate what you can using the link here. If you’d prefer to give directly using PayPal to avoid credit card fees, please message me and I will give you the appropriate information to make that work.
Thanks for your kindness and support.
