Four months before she fell ill with COVID-19, Harper Powell stood atop the podium at the USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Championships, sporting the stars-and-stripes jersey she won for the women’s club category.
Her feat helped her University of Colorado Boulder team clinch the team category and capped off years of competing for the endurance athlete and Colorado native.
Then in February 2020, the young woman’s life changed.
A semester in France was cut short for Powell and her friends, some of whom also likely contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus that shuttered the world. Her friends got better. Powell did not.
“I’m used to kind of pushing my body at a high level and being able to recover quickly. That’s part of competing,” Powell said during a recent CU Anschutz 360 podcast. “So, getting sick and not having that same kind of bounce back was really surprising and hard to come to terms with for sure.”
Fourteen months later, Powell still struggles with debilitating symptoms. Fatigue, headaches, chest tightness, heart palpitations and exercise intolerance have interrupted her athletic-focused life. While Powell remains faithful that she, with the help of her medical team at the UCHealth Post-COVID Clinic on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, will get better, it’s been a long haul.
Sarah Jolley, MD, left, shares what experts are learning about Long COVID as her patient Harper Powell listens.
About half of the patients who come through her doors were never hospitalized with COVID-19, said Sarah Jolley, MD, pulmonary and critical care specialist at the CU School of Medicine. Jolley leads one of the region’s first clinics dedicated to patients whose symptoms persist more than a month post-infection. Many of them are young and were previously fit, she said.
With research still in the infancy stage, “long-haulers” remain largely a mystery for doctors. At the Post-COVID clinic, an array of specialists treats patients on an individual basis, targeting their varied symptoms and slowly pacing their return to exercise.
Both women shared their knowledge and stories in hopes that more people will recognize the scope of the problem and understand the suffering that it’s causing. “It’s real,” Jolley said. “And as a scientific and medical community, we should come together to support people who are recovering from this.”
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