u/obliviousolives

I've NEVER had this sort of reaction to an antibiotic before. 500mg daily of azithromycin makes me feel like I'm being punched in the stomach. Churning, sudden urgent nausea, absolute horror for hours on end. It's making me scared to try an alternate antibiotic to treat this infection, because what if they all make me this sick now?

TLDR: how do I navigate using a wheelchair in the office only sometimes, and walking other times--especially after not previously needing a wheelchair at work?

I'm about to return to my firm after a brief medical leave for an acute medical issue. I've had mobility issues since I joined the firm, but now they're worse. Before, I could strategically plan out my day so I wouldn't be upright or walking long enough to need a mobility aid. But now, I don't think I'll be able to get to work without my electric wheelchair.

The thing is, I don't need the wheelchair all the time. I know it sounds weird, but I have a small window of time within which I can walk, stand, move around, etc., before the symptoms force me to sit or lie down. That window is now too small to accommodate my morning commute, but not too small for things like walking to the bathroom or even taking a lap around the block sometimes. And just to make this even weirder (and harder to explain to people), the window of time gets much bigger in the afternoon/evening, so I can probably commute home in the evening without using the chair.

How would you navigate rolling into the office in a wheelchair, and then mostly not using it for the rest of the day? My illness is very difficult for most people to understand as I look completely normal, and I would like to evoke the least amount of eyebrow-raising possible. After a couple recent news articles about how young women fake invisible illnesses for attention or because of psychological issues, I'm afraid of being judged and having my reputation damaged.

Just a dumb passing thought. Before I got long covid, I NEVER stored weight on my belly. Even at my heaviest (135lbs) I had a kind of rectangular shape with weight evenly distributed on my arms and legs and especially hips, but no belly. But within a few months of developing long covid I suddenly had belly fat for the first time in my life. I have gained 25 pounds with long covid (was about 110 most of my 20s, jumped up to 135 with long covid) but that's how much I weighed in college (~10 years ago) and I didn't have a belly then.

Even now that I've lost a little weight (thanks to ketotifen) and am down to 125, the belly remains.

I've wondered if it could be related to my activity levels but I don't think that's it either as I've actually managed to continue getting 7k-10k steps in per day through most of my long covid tenure, and I lift weights for 10 minutes/day most days.

Could it be hormones? My cortisol has been consistently high since I got LC.

Edit: ANSWERED, thank you! He'll just board the blue line ferry near St. Mark's and take it all the way to the airport. Appreciate the help :)

Hello! I'm trying to help my boyfriend who has thrown his back out. He is in Venice for just one day.

He needs to get from approximately St. Mark's Square to the west side of Venice at 6am, to catch a ferry to the airport.

His original plan was to carry all his luggage across Venice on foot to get to the ferry, but he has just hurt his back and is in a lot of pain.

How difficult would it be to take a water taxi? I'm assuming he could probably get one from the St. Mark's area? Would it be better to try to take the "water bus" or would that be slower? Any recommendations welcome, thank you so much!

TLDR: anyone else have high iron and ferritin? Like actually high, not just "my ferritin is elevated because of inflammation"?

When I first got long covid my ferritin and iron were low. I couldn't tolerate supplements so I just ate a lot of iron fortified foods like Cheerios, and eventually my numbers leveled out. I quit eating Cheerios. But my iron has just continued to rise. Within 1 year of getting long covid, my iron and TSAT were high but ferritin was still normal. No one noticed these weird labs. Then I was retested 2 years post long covid onset, and by this point my ferritin was elevated too. I was tested again 4 years post onset (this year), and now all of my labs show iron overload: high iron, high ferritin, high saturation, low UIBC (TIBC somehow still normal but borderline). This spooked my doctor so I've gotten it tested 3 times this year, and it continues to show iron overload, even though I am negative for hereditary hemochromatosis.

Anyone else? Unsure if this is a long covid thing or just a me thing.

I would love to hear from people who have also made this move! I have a manual wheelchair that I basically never use because I'm not strong enough to push myself. It's annoying to only be able to use it if I'm with other people who can push me. So I caved and finally got an electric chair.

This is possibly an irrational fear, but I was thinking today about why I'm so nervous and I realized I'm scared I'll get harassed as I move around the city I live in. Like, I'm scared people will think I'm faking and give me crap for being in a wheelchair. I've already gotten some mild pushback for things like asking for a seat on the subway or having to sit/squat in weird places. I'm also really not looking forward to getting comments from people if I am using the chair then get up and push it for a bit (maybe to get over a curb, or maybe if I'm just feeling really good for a bit).

And, maybe even more niche, I'm absolutely dreading how to deal with this at work. Is it ok if I only use the chair on bad days? Will my coworkers think I've lost my mind if I only use a wheelchair some mornings, but I walk by evening? And some mornings?

Have you all experienced this? Am I just overly concerned? If you have experienced it how did you deal with it?

My doctor has asked me to monitor my blood pressure, mostly because she wanted to make sure it's not too high and that she's good to put me on medicines that could potentially increase my BP a little. Well, I've been taking it and it's regularly quite low. Just now I got a reading of 91/53, took it again and it was 95/55. Yesterday it was 85/52 lol. If I stand up for 1-2 minutes and take it while standing, it will be in the normal range (around 120/80). I had some friends and family use the same 2 machines I'm using to see if perhaps the machines are just wrong, but they're all getting normal or high readings.

I don't feel like I have symptoms from the low blood pressure, but this is so weird to me. I'm even on fludrocortisone right now which is supposed to raise the pressure in theory. My pressure has always been on the low side but I figured that was because I used to be an athlete. For example once many years ago I was at work rushing through the hospital and a staff member stopped me to check my BP as part of a hospital initiative. Even with me running patient samples back and forth all over the place, my BP was like 95/65. So perhaps I just run low and it's OK. But I'm curious if this is a common experience here.

TLDR: I THINK I had really bad adrenaline dumps for the first 2ish years of LC. They went away, and I'm now having extremely minor adrenaline dump type symptoms after starting microdose of GLP-1. Curious if this will hinder my healing.

So to start with, I'm not even totally sure what I previously experienced was an adrenaline dump. Mine were all "triggered" by something, and I think it sounds like a lot of you all get them just randomly. If anything interesting happened, I would get crazy anxiety, fast heart rate, nausea, and a panicky I-need-to-escape feeling. For example, once I almost fainted from watching an exciting super bowl commercial. Another time I almost fainted because a friend texted me that our mutual friend had spent the night in jail for a funny reason. One time it happened because a fire trick drove by my house with sirens on. Once it happened when my professor told me I did a good job, and I had to run out of class to go puke lol. It happened on my first day of work when the HR rep made us go around the table and say our name and where we're from (I am usually SO unbothered by this type of stuff). It would happen if my boss came into my office to talk to me for any reason. Etc. Interestingly, this began after my 3rd vax and BEFORE I got my real long covid. It got much worse after my first covid infection that led to full-fledged POTS etc.

After 1.5 years of long covid, these episodes seriously calmed down, so that I was mostly only experiencing it while doing genuinely overstimulating or stressful things: going to meet someone for a blind first date, going to an extremely loud and crowded restaurant, or having two people intensely talking to me at the same time (talking over each other). And it was milder--I felt bad but I could still function.

After 3 years, all of this was mostly gone. I could confidently do thinks like host a birthday party with loud music and 50 guests and know I would be fine. I could go to any loud bar and be totally fine. Maybe if I was already having a really bad long covid day I would avoid super stimulating environments, but otherwise this adrenaline dump type stuff was a thing of the past.

Then about 4 years into my long covid I started microdosing GLP-1s. I immediately noticed increased anxiety and depression. After 3 weeks the depression went away and the anxiety was less bad, but I was now getting super mini adrenaline dump type symptoms from things I had previously been able to do. Like we had an office-wide meeting in a conference room. It wasn't even that loud. I had to leave. I've gone to a few parties or loud restaurants where I had to leave within 30-60 minutes because I could feel the overwhelm/overstimulation feeling creeping in.

What is this? Is this adrenaline dumps? I can't help but feel like this means GLP-1s are setting my progress back. I've worked pretty hard to calm my nervous system down--I have no idea if that actually matters, but it seems important since I feel bad when my nervous system is freaking out. Idk, I guess I'm curious if anyone has insight about what adrenaline dumps actually are, if we actually need to calm this down, and what role GLP-1s play here. Thanks!

I'm curious if this lines up with others' experiences, as my doctors can't seem to agree whether my issues are stemming from vestibular problems or binocular vision problems. I've been diagnosed with both but trying to decide which treatment to pursue more aggressively with my very limited schedule.

I can drive on the highway and I feel great for the first hour--so long as it's a pretty regular highway. If it's a very twisty-turny busy city interchange area, with lots of exits and heavy traffic and bending, then I can't last very long.

After I hit some kind of internal limit, I will start to feel almost a little drunk. I don't get dizzy in the traditional sense--like the world isn't spinning, but I do feel disoriented in space and a weird kind of floaty dizziness. I feel nauseated and my heart rate will increase. If I try to push through this feeling, it will just get worse. Usually if I manage to get off the highway before my symptoms get really awful, I can get to my destination using back roads. But if I push past a certain point I won't even be able to drive slow back roads without bad symptoms. My family has asked me why I can't just push through and continue driving, but the feeling I get makes it feel like I'm very unsafe to keep going on the highway. They have suggested I have anxiety but that's definitely not it.

I find this very frustrating because it severely limits what I can do in life. I get bad motion sickness on all vehicles except for slow trains, so I can't just have people drive me around. I did a few months of VRT and that helped me become able to be a car passenger on slow city roads. I'm currently doing vision therapy and I don't think it's helping tbh.

TLDR: I loved the data part. Seeing a mathematical rundown of my features was super cool. But I hated almost all of their recommendations because they steered me towards the "instagram face" look, even though that's not the vibe in the before/after photos they use in advertisements.

I ordered the basic, non-surgical QOVES analysis recently. I usually feel pretty--I get asked out a lot, used to model, am decently fit (for example, I have visible abs). But lately I've developed health conditions that affect my face/jaw shape, and I've dealt with some major life stressors and haven't been feeling super, so I was really interested in an objective assessment of how I could enhance my own beauty as I age. QOVES advertises that they aren't "looksmaxing" and they don't steer everyone towards a single ideal, but rather they examine your own strengths and facial harmony and work with that.

I do not have anything close to the typical "instagram model" look. When discussing celebrity look alikes I usually get Grace Kelly, Erin Moriarty (pre-plastic surgery) and Zooey Deschanel. I was really hoping QOVES would give me advice for enhancing and playing up the characteristics that most define MY face, not just generic "lip filler" type advice that makes everyone end up looking the same.

The "enhanced" photo in my results looks absolutely hilarious(ly bad) to me. Even though I ordered the non-surgical package, the image has altered cheek shape and noticeably larger lips. The eye shape is slightly different, too. I sent the "before and after" photos to several friends and they threw around words like "horrible" and "creepy." The enhanced version is something I personally would strive NOT to look like. It does not make me look better at all--except that it has nicer skin than me, haha. It even downplays some of my best features.

I just don't really understand why the QOVES team pushed my "enhancements" towards this kind of stereotypical face that I don't naturally look like. The advertisements I see on instagram etc look like really exceptional makeovers that truly enhance the person's natural features. I don't feel like I got that at all.

So, I unfortunately will not be using most of their advice. But like I said, the data part is neat. I'm enough of a nerd that I probably would have paid to have a full mathematical analysis of my face lines and angles anyway, so I'm not too upset about this, but I really wish I could walk away from this with some actionable items to improve my appearance. Oh well!

I take Amtrak between Washington, DC and North Carolina somewhat regularly, and struggle a bit with the stretch of track around the Lynchville, Charlottesville, Culpepper, due to the combination of high speeds and bumpiness. It makes me motion sick and disoriented. Is the stretch of track between DC to New York is any worse than this mountainous Virginia area that gives me trouble? I remember having a bit of trouble with the section around BWI in the past, but in recent years I've developed a brain condition that causes more motion sickness so I'm not sure what to expect. Thanks!

This is going to be a little TMI, sorry!

When I eat a food that sets off my symptoms, in addition to hives, high heart rate, etc, I get super nauseated and have weird, frequent, small/thin stools that leave me feeling like I still have to "go." The nausea will last several hours, and then eventually the nausea dies down enough that I can mostly resume normal life aside from feeling a little bad. But the small stools thing will continue for like a full week after the exposure.

I am finding it super annoying--the whole time I'm having these small stools, my stomach is in pain and I dislike the constant "I'm going to poop again soon" feelings. So I was wondering if others experience this, too. My MCAS first flared in winter 2024, then went into some sort of remission, and it has been flaring again for the past 8 months. The small stools thing is a new symptom that I didn't experience back in 2024 but has been a consistent staple for me this time around. I'm starting to wonder if I just also happened to develop IBS or something.

I guess this could be a coincidence, but the compounding pharmacy asked if I wanted my ketotifen to be 1 gm instead of 0.5 g and I said sure. I've been taking 0.5g morning and night (so 1 gram total daily) and starting Thursday morning doubled it. Felt fine Thursday but Friday was brutal--high heart rate, low energy, insomnia. Could this be from the ketotifen? The slight time delay makes me wonder if it's not.

I've also been on SCIG and it caused insomnia for me on week 2 but I thought I had escaped that this week. I dunno. I am desperately seeking any explanation other than that I could be coming down with a reinfection :(

I have BVD from long covid (doctor said it's very similar to TBI type brain/eye symptoms). I can only be a passenger in a car for short periods of time, if the car is moving slowly and not too windy. Otherwise I get motion sick within like 2 minutes. I can take Amtrak trains but it's not fun--I'm basically meditating the whole time, eyes closed, soft music, popping dramamine and ginger. I can ride the subway around my city and most days I'm fine but I can't ever, for example, read a text message while I'm on the subway.

I am considering taking a 6 hour flight for a friend's wedding. I am terrified. Is this a horrible idea? How can I make this work? I guess I'm hoping a bunch of you will say you don't do well in cars or trains but airplanes are fine lol

I've had two SCIG infusions so far, a week apart, last one 3 days ago. I have been sooo fatigued and extra weak and shaky, with some nausea thrown in but I'm always nauseated so who knows what's causing that haha. Just curious if it typically gets worse before it gets better

I'm curious if anyone has experienced kind of vague progress like this. TLDR: after 6 weeks of vision therapy a 2.5 hour highway drive that used to take me 5 hours took me 4 hours. Can also now tolerate my 4-minute subway commute, but still get pretty crazy motion sick in pretty much any other vehicle.

I have BVD (convergence insufficiency and a lot of other stuff, multiple doctors have told me my brain and eyes act like I have a TBI but it's from long covid). Been in vision therapy for about 6 weeks now. I have 2 hour-long in-office visits per week plus 10 minutes of homework a day.

Around 3 weeks into vision therapy, I noticed I could ride the subway to work (I have about a 4-minute commute) without feeling sick most days. Prior to therapy the subway always made me feel at least a little sick.

At the 6 week mark, I got to test out a highway drive that I have to do every few months. When I was at my worst with this BVD stuff, this normally-2.5 hour drive would take me 6 hours (due to feeling awful and needing to take breaks and eventually having to give up and take backroads). Immediately prior to therapy (after I figured out that contact lenses and sunglasses help), it took 5 hours. This time, it took me 4 hours. And I felt REALLY GOOD for the first 2 or 3 hours of the drive.

I guess I'm looking for validation, lol. I still can't really be a passenger in a car. I still get motion sick on Amtrak (but I can manage with Dramamine, ginger, and just lying around with my eyes closed the whole trip). Airplanes feel out of the question right now. I kind of thought I would see more progress with driving or motion sickness. So--is being able to tolerate the 4-minute subway ride, and shaving an hour off my highway drive, decent progress for 6 weeks of therapy?

TLDR: dress listed as new with tags. Arrived with tag safety pinned on and with two stains on front, which I only noticed after accepting the order.

Hi guys, I'm new here so apologies if this type of post isn't allowed. I think this issue I'm dealing with is probably on me at this point, but I wanted to double check with people more knowledgeable than me.

I bought a reformation dress that was marked "new with tags." It arrived with no obvious damage but it didn't have the type of tags I was expecting--only a safety pinned tag that could have easily been removed and then put back on. I was a little concerned but went ahead and accepted the order.

Then, I noticed that the dress has two brown stains on the front bottom. I checked the listing photos and sure enough the stains are ~just barely~ visible in the photos (the photos are zoomed out enough and angled well to mostly hide the stains). So, (1) it seems like this is not a true new-with-tags item, and (2) the seller lied about the dress condition by hiding the stains.

There's nothing I can do since I accepted the offer right? I was wondering if it might be possible to still flag this for Poshmark even knowing I won't get any sort of refund, just so this seller can't do it again.

I have a prescription for subcutaneous IG from a long covid clinic but my insurance won't cover it. I appealed the insurance decision but they still denied. If I do this out of pocket, I would be able to pay for rent, my student loan bill, and SCIG, with no money left over for food, doctor, etc. So the smart thing is to not do it.

But if there were any organizations dedicated to helping cover these costs (or even helping lobby insurance) I would love to know!