Then something strange happened: My toes started changing color. Every night, they’d become red, hot, and ungodly itchy. During the day, they’d be purple, as if they belonged to a corpse. Scheduling an appointment with a dermatologist for an unrelated foot problem in the middle of a pandemic felt ridiculous—hundreds of people were dying every day in New York at that point. But whatever this was—a rash? Gangrene? Creeping death?—got worse, causing many sleepless nights in which I would spray my burning feet with ice-cold water at 3 a.m.
When I wrote that piece, the headline posed the same question I’d spent all my sleepless nights agonizing over, “Will my Covid Symptoms Ever End?” At the time, I considered the question to be rhetorical and the answer obvious—it would end eventually, if not soon. At that point, I never could have imagined I’d still be experiencing consequences from my first Covid infection. Five years later, however, that question seemingly has an answer: No. Now I find myself marveling less about Covid’s insidious initial reach and more about the degree to which those of us suffering have been shunted to the side.
From June 2020 until vaccines became available to the general public in April 2021, my “fire feet” persisted. I tried different medications, ointments, and supplements. I could only walk a few blocks each day. During the George Floyd protests in summer 2020, I relied on Citibike. Yet by that winter, I would no longer be able to ride a bike, and today, I still can’t.
When the “fire feet” subsided, the leg cramps began. A strange tingling up and down my legs that felt like hundreds of mosquitoes biting my skin concurrently. I experienced the worst of these symptoms in the first half of 2021. I’d moved into a crappy third-floor walk-up with a persistent mold problem. I carted around a plastic tub I’d ordered online that each night I filled with cold water. My body ached. Six months after that, my mouth started itching and my ears and nose and cheeks turned bright red and hot after eating. I had to go on a special “low histamine” diet that I still follow to some extent. I take multiple antihistamines a day to control my reactions.
