It’s so wild to hear that people don’t know this.
I:
- Fainted while watching TV on the couch.
- Had a blood pressure of 80/40.
- Have been to the ER twice.
- Had long-running (over two years) chest pain, heart pounding, weight loss, vision differences, dizziness, shortness of breath.
- Was so sick with those issues I was bed bound for months.
- After I started feeling a little better, overdid it and put myself back to bed for a week. Twice. With easy shit like rearranging the canned goods cabinet.
- Lost a tooth. (White lie, actually. I’m scheduled to have it extracted early February.)
- Still have lingering heart pounding and dizziness on a not-infrequent basis.
All from covid.
I’m fortunate to be mostly recovered. It sucks that there are so many who haven’t recovered to speak of.
That’s fucked, buddy. One can only wonder at the uncalculated costs of everyone who had it that bad.
If we knew the costs, we could charge the republican senators a share directly.
I don’t mean to be rude but a blood pressure of 80/40 is perfectly fine? Typo?
Well, I can assure you I wasn’t fine when that 80/40 was measured. 120/80 is considered normal. (And that’s right about usual for me. Googling just now, I saw something about them apparently updating the guidelines to 120/70, but that’s not that different.) Elite athletes can have resting blood pressures more like 100/something, I think. But I’m no athlete. And having low blood pressure will absolutely render one light-headed, unconscious, or dead. Depending just how low it gets and how long it stays that way. It’s not a “lower is better” thing.
I mentioned passing out while watching TV. As soon as I regained consciousness and was still very light-headed, an ambulance was called for me. There were two EMTs. One distracted me while the other took my blood pressure. And took it again. And took it again. And finally asked the other EMT to check, so he took it and was like “no, I think you’re getting the right numbers, TootSweet’s BP is just low.”
When they handed me off to the ER staff at the hospital, he told them he was pretty sure that BP reading wasn’t just a bad measurement because I had a lot of “palor” (paleness) at the time.
So, it’s probably a reasonable assumption that my BP was a fair amount lower than 80/40 a few minutes before and that 80/40 was taken on the way back up. And the EMTs acted as if 80/40 was not normal or healthy.
Honestly, I largely only mentioned the 80/40 because it was the only test I was given where I got an abnormal result. An ECG, an EEG, EKGs, chest x-rays, Holter monitors, a stress test, a full brain MRI, a calcium score CT scan, multiple rounds of bloodwork (I’m probably forgetting some) – all those came back “normal” while I was having some of my worst symptoms.
I finally got a doctor who reviewed the results of all those above tests and told me “your nervous system is kindof oversensitive.” I had to ask him if he’d just given me a diagnosis of “dysautonomia” and he admittied that “that’s not an incorrect term to use for it.”
So I guess I’ve got a half-hearted diagnosis of sorts. Ha! I doubt it’s in my chart, though. (I hope you’re somewhere more civilized than the U.S… Medical costs is not at all the only problem with medical care in the U.S…) Much better than my previous doctor who told me it was anxiety. (It wasn’t/isn’t anxiety.) My previous doctor also swore he’d seen proof that COVID came from a Chinese laboratory, so there’s that.
I’m rambling, but in short, not a typo and 80/40 is not somewhere you want to be, I assure you.
What units is that perfectly fine in?
120/80 is perfectly fine, 60/40 is twice less and can’t be perfectly fine, 80/40 is much closer to the latter.
Edit: can’t find anything regarding what exactly low pressure shouldn’t be. Everywhere it says “lower than 120/80” is good. Like okay 0/0 also seems healthy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mean Arterial Pressure is the actual number we use as a guideline. MAP is calculated as 1/3 of the top BP number + 2/3 of the bottom number:
https://www.mdcalc.com/calc/74/mean-arterial-pressure-map
Goal is bare minimum 60, and preferably >65. A BP of 80/40 gives you a MAP of 53, which = no bueno. Your kidneys and brain will not be happy.
Source: am critical care nurse
People look at me strangely, but I don’t go in anywhere without a mask, still. I don’t eat in restaurants, I don’t go to indoor family gatherings without a mask.
It’s a big sacrifice but I’m not willing to live with long COVID and brain fog.
My heart goes out to you friend. I’m with you; masking is still better than the alternative.
As someone with long covid, it is fucking hell. The extreme fatigue, muscle soreness, lengthened healing times of wounds or new sicknesses or physical exertion have made life hardly bearable. I just straight up don’t have the energy or mental capacity to do anything I used to love and enjoy.
It’s endlessly depressing, even though I know I am keeping myself out of clinical depression after learning how to deal with depressive issues more proactively now.
I wish I just wore an n95 whenever I was around people now, but I know I never would have done so unless I knew how truly awful long covid is.
I’m there with you. If you haven’t already, look into the treatments for mast cell activation disorder, it has a lot of overlap. In fact, I’m convinced they’re largely the same thing. I’m popping pills like candy nowadays but I’m finally on the upswing.
It’s not even that big of a sacrifice honestly. Wearing a mask is pretty trivial. Restaurants have outdoor tables. The indoor-only ones that don’t but are still worth going to tend to seat less than 15 people so I occasionally deem it worth the risk.
Long Covid seems way, way worse than a mask. When we have a cure for that I’ll drop it, but until then it’s not even that inconvenient.
Plus, you don’t even have to get the worst symptoms for it to affect you. A couple people I know lost their taste and smell in 2020/2021 and have yet to regain it. That, I think, ruins restaurants more than sitting outside.
I was told over and over again that wearing a mask is the most tiny, unnoticeable thing in the world. Literally the easiest thing you can do
Well, did you?
The sacrifice would be tiny if the general population made that same tiny sacrifice. Instead they don’t bother to ever wear a mask, exponentially increasing the chances they’ll spread it to someone else.
I have a family member that relies on me for help as well as a friend that I see weekly. Both are very high risk for COVID complications - family has almost no immune system and friend has a rare clotting disorder. I don’t think I would be able to forgive myself if they caught COVID from me.
I also don’t want to end up like two other friends of mine with long COVID. They were healthy and extremely active, now they are riddled with problems and had to abandon the activities they used to enjoy (and that I’d really prefer to continue to enjoy myself).
So, yes, avoiding everyone who takes no precautions has become quite a sacrifice. If I was confident that I’d be surrounded by people who were vaccinated and (regularly) wearing N95s I’d feel safer at restaurants, shops, gyms, public transit, parties, maybe even a concert. Instead I do take out or occasionally outdoor dining, minimize my time in most places, and avoid gatherings of any significant size.
Being extremely careful because nobody else is willing to be even a little careful really shrinks your world and it fucking sucks. Alternatively, I could join my dumbass aunt and make fun of people masking at the grocery store immediately after complaining about suddenly, mysteriously being diabetic following her third COVID infection.
We’re pretty shut in because of health concerns and I feel for you :(. Sucks that everybody else has moved on and just thinks you’re being ridiculous. I guess at this point I don’t know when to stop worrying. Sometimes I think “maybe it really is fine now” but then you hear about somebody getting ruined by long COVID and it just seems really scary. I’m also just kind of upset about how everything went down… If nothing else I kind of just mask up still out of spite.
The sacrifice isn’t really wearing a mask. It’s avoiding the get togethers and in person events and having people forget about you and move on with their lives while you’re still cautious. You could argue that these are small things too, but it’s a pretty big change for most people, and while they claimed this was a “big sacrifice” that’s just a figure of speech… They didn’t claim it was something they couldn’t do or weren’t willing to do, just that it sucks… Which it does.
If you haven’t done so, check out PhysicsGirl on YouTube. Good science channel, then she got covid right after her wedding.
EDIT: Link to video.
Long Covid is so scary, but one thing that worries me is, if you get Covid and you don’t get Long Covid, is that it, you’re never going to get it ever, OR is it just a matter of time before most of us or we’re all eventually suffering from Long Covid over the course of multiple waves? Why is it affecting some people differently than others? I’ve had Covid two or three times now and each time I was only out of it a week or two, otherwise no apparent long-term damage that I’m aware of, but will that always be the case?
The risk of long covid is cumulative so every infection increases your chance. But also just having covid increases your risk of heart attacks and strokes for up to a year https://nyulangone.org/news/study-helps-explain-how-covid-19-heightens-risk-heart-attack-stroke
It’s not a one-time risk, either. You face these odds every single time you catch the disease. Your risk accumulates. According to a groundbreaking Statistics Canada report, you’re almost three times more likely to develop Long Covid after your third infection. The more times you catch Covid, the more likely you are to come down with a debilitating chronic illness.
Covid messes up your immune system so even if you don’t get long covid, you get other opportunistic infections, plus nice stuff like heart attacks. Of course if you die of such a heart attack, it’s not counted as a covid death. So the damage of covid is way underestimated.
What’s up with this site’s domain? Ok Doomer? Who is that?
Sure, but my question is more like “who are you that I should trust your perspective?” Particularly when you seem to admit having a bias towards a “doomer” perspective. Like, I wouldn’t want to take an article seriously when the title is “We need more police, and that’s okay” from theauthoritarian.com
