Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19
I&#x27;ve been struggling with health issues for the past 3 years.  My heart races.  My blood pressure spikes to dangerous levels.  I get heart palpitations.  I get pains in my chest.  When it happens it&#x27;s alarming and it&#x27;s easy to fall into fear.  I&#x27;ve gone to the hospital a few times absolutely sure I&#x27;m having a heart attack.  But it seems that my heart is fine (as far as anyone can tell).  I have a host of other problematic symptoms too, but for years nobody  could find any real problem.<p>It&#x27;s easy to say, &quot;It&#x27;s a panic attack&quot;.  It does not appear to be life threatening.  But boy does it <i>feel</i> life threatening.  The doctors all say, &quot;We can&#x27;t find anything wrong with you&quot; (apart from you heart racing randomly, your blood pressure spiking to dangerous levels, heart paplitations and various other problems).  But what if they missed something?  It&#x27;s pretty hard to gamble your life on this stuff.  I was absolutely fine until one day I wasn&#x27;t.  <i>Something</i> must have changed.<p>One of the problems with getting symptoms and not being able to diagnose the illness exactly is that you will never know.  Pain in your chest.  Difficulty breathing.  Complete lethargy.  It could be corona virus.  It could be a panic attack brought on by worrying about the corona virus.  You will never know unless you are tested (and even then it might not be right).<p>My experience has been that sometimes I take comfort in imagining that I have some strange disease that nobody knows about.  It certainly feels better to me than, &quot;My nervous system is making me ill through stress that I don&#x27;t know how to relieve&quot;.  But, I&#x27;ve also found that if I believe I&#x27;m ill, then the symptoms feel worse as well, even though I get some psychological relief from the stress of experiencing the symptoms.<p>The best way that I&#x27;ve come to deal with the problem is simply to believe that I will feel well again soon.  I may feel bad <i>now</i>, but <i>soon</i> I will feel better.  I may have an illness.  I may not have an illness.  It may be life threatening.  It may not.  Even if it is life threatening, there is nothing more I can do.  So it is best to believe that I will feel better soon.  This has helped me immeasurably, even though it is quite difficult to do.<p>I recently (and as a last resort) had a sleep test.  I averaged 52 apnic arousals per hour.  In other words, at most I was sleeping for a minute or so at a time.  They gave me a cpap machine and while I would be lying if I said all my symptoms are magically going away immediately, I <i>do</i> feel a lot better now that I&#x27;ve started to get used to the machine.<p>But the reality is that your belief is powerful medicine in an of itself.  Whether your are ill or not.  Whether you have corona virus, or the flu, or whether you are just very tired and stressed: believing that you will feel better soon will help enourmously in my experience.