Stephanie Taylor was on a flight home to California from New York in 2008 when she started to feel ill. When she stood up to disembark, she felt so dizzy that she would have fallen over if another passenger hadn’t caught her. She took to bed with aches, swollen limbs and joints, and a fever that spiked to 104. Over time, painful pustules formed on her fingers and in her nose and ears. Exertion would send her crashing into a state of near paralysis. Unable to eat solid food and too weak to stand in the shower, she had to be spoon-fed and washed by sponge. Her doctors suspected a viral infection but couldn’t identify a pathogen, and so she remained bedridden with extreme fatigue as her small video production business teetered on the edge of failure.
Emily Taylor, her 25-year-old daughter, gave up the lobbyist job she loved in Washington, D.C., and moved back west to take care of her mother, shuttling her from physician to physician. “I’m not exaggerating, we probably saw 30 different doctors,” she says. None could pinpoint what was wrong, and few were sympathetic to their plight. “The experiences ranged from ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you’ to outright hostile.” Four years after Stephanie first fell sick, they found an endocrinologist who pored over mountains of medical records during a two-hour appointment and asked for more time to study her condition. “And three months later that doctor came back to us and said, ‘I think you have this illness called chronic fatigue syndrome,’” she says. Continue reading New York: Has Long COVID Always Existed?