On the screen of a mobile phone, the still image of an extinguished lung, sucked into the shadows. For Marta it’s many things: the memory of a dramatic moment in her life hostage to long Covid, but also the liberating explanation of the real cause of that malaise that kept her away from her usual life for years. “I got sick in March 2020, but Covid is always here, he took everything away from me, and lately even my job. And now I’m struggling to get back on track”. Marta Esperti, 34, is the spokesperson for a forgotten category: people, especially the unfortunate ones who were hit by the virus during the first dramatic wave of infections, who fought for many months before being able to give a name to the their syndrome.
“Now I’ve improved, especially after taking the antivirals for a longer period than 5 days in a kind of trial, but I’m still not like before, it’s a very slow recovery. In the most difficult moments when I didn’t have any medications I help me, it was like being a zombie, like being dead but alive by a miracle and always on the verge of not making it. I couldn’t stand up, it was as if I had no control over my body,” she tells time.news Salute. Marta met the hospital in the midst of the Covid crisis, she experienced the now well-known ‘cytokine storm’ that killed people when we still didn’t know how to deal with it, she knows what air hunger and dependence on oxygen are. He also experienced cognitive fog: “One day I was in Rome at a hospital cash register to pay for services and the PIN numbers of my card suddenly disappeared from my head. Yet I had used that code until recently. Those numbers never came back.”
Before Covid, she was a woman in constant motion: “I worked – she says – I was a PhD student and taught political science at two universities, Paris Sorbonne and Lille. I had a full and active life. I was also an invited researcher at Oxford. I was closing my doctorate because I had already done three and a half years of research and data collection. I had important scientific publications to my credit with my director”. After the long Covid tsunami her race stopped. “I haven’t finished my doctorate yet, because I fell ill twice more in 2022. And now closing my doctorate is essential for me to get back to having new contracts. I haven’t given up, but while waiting to finish my doctorate I have to find other solutions to live with an income that has been reduced to 640 euros a month, just over half of my rent”. Solution as a small mutual aid fundraiser especially in the international Long Covid patient community, the state support for the home. Without considering that there are the health care costs that a long Covid patient faces.
That image, which in the past has gone viral on social media, because it clearly and crudely shows the hidden damage perpetrated by the virus against her vascular system, Marta keeps it, almost as a reminder. “During the first year of my illness I struggled a lot with the doctors to try to figure out what was wrong. I had a persistent cough, severe tiredness, shortness of breath and difficulty breathing and there were objective findings because by doing the breath tests, the walk test , it was found that I had problems. But, for example, the CAT scan showed nothing except the signs of the old pneumonia. No one explained why I was still so sick and then it was really a pulmonologist who had the intuition to have me done a more in-depth examination to investigate the microvascular perfusion of my lungs, a tomoscintigraphy in nuclear medicine”.
Result: “I had very serious microvascular damage in the lungs, which prevented correct breathing, and a situation of general inflammation. It matched all the scientific discoveries on Covid, which creates vascular and coagulation problems, it is not a lung disease in the strict sense From that moment I was able to get a diagnosis of the problems I also had with my heart and I had access to some medicines that improved my quality of life. I had all the vaccines – 5 doses – as a vulnerable subject and they also helped. But for me the dysregulation of the immune system had been very strong. I reinfected myself with Omicron and the two reinfections put me back on the ground again”.
Marta has decided to actively fight for recognition of her condition and that of many other Italian and European patients. He is the spokesperson for ‘Long Covid Italia’ and explains: “The essential point is that this disease was not immediately recognized or treated as it should be, unfortunately it did not even have great visibility in Italy. Today it is as if it did not exist. Even if patients, the media, health authorities such as the Istituto Superiore di Sanità know very well that it exists, and I would like to say that Italian research on this front has always been at the forefront.Tricolor scientists were among the first to have and share insights on the disease. But I don’t remember striking public statements by an authority or a minister who spoke of the Long Covid risk, as happened, for example, in Germany or even in France”.
“I – reflects Marta – can consider myself a privileged patient compared to others who have not been able to have access to diagnoses and treatments, I have been very determined, I have pressed for answers, but not everyone has these possibilities. It must come a bit from the State , it doesn’t have to be the individual who makes the battle to try to improve the quality of his life, and maybe go back to work”.
“If people are not taken care of and treated as much as possible, there is no way out – he continues – and it is also damaging to the community. We know that there is no magic cure for Long Covid. There are now millions of publications and the World Health Organization (WHO) with which we are engaged, has attested that there are cardiovascular risks, coagulation risks, there is cognitive decline, immune dysregulation, damage to the brain and muscles. this problem must be taken seriously to help people recover faster and avoid even fatal risks”.
It is important, Marta concludes, “that Long Covid is finally a recognized disease and that there are also exemptions as happens for other diseases, even less serious ones. Unfortunately it is expensive for the national health system and I believe this is the reason why at the At the moment we did not want to give help, an exemption to the sick. But in the end, with all European patients and the WHO we are on this line: communicating and preventing such a disease is much more convenient than making so many people ill then they will need treatment or in any case they will disappear from the job market for who knows how long”.