Body
Five years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 1 in 5 adults continue to have a health condition that might be related to their previous COVID illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago, rehabilitation is one pathway to support those struggling with long COVID.
A recent story on WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s NPR affiliate, highlighted Shirley Ryan AbilityLab’s outpatient COVID Rehabilitation Unit, which opened in 2021 to provide care for patients experiencing long COVID symptoms.
In the WBEZ segment — Doctors, patients battle long COVID five years on — Shirley Ryan AbilityLab senior speech-language pathologist Marie Saxon, MS, CCC-SLP, shared that pacing strategies and learning when to take breaks from certain activities can help individuals manage their long COVID symptoms, such as brain fog or headaches.
Marie also noted that “doctors are beginning to identify some patterns when it comes to improving cognitive function in long COVID patients.”
“I think that’s been very comforting for people with long COVID, to know they’re not alone. There are other people who are experiencing this range of symptoms that can feel really random and scary, but know that it’s not just isolated to them,” she said in the story.
The WBEZ segment also featured one of Marie’s patients, Rosalynn G., a local artist and associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After testing positive for COVID in 2022, she has experienced long COVID symptoms including dizziness, brain fog and extreme fatigue for nearly three years.
Rosalynn said she came to Shirley Ryan AbilityLab for physical and speech-language therapy and “remembers feeling relieved that her doctors understood what she was going through.”
Though Rosalynn doesn’t know if she will ever fully recover from long COVID, she now has hope and the “necessary tools to manage her symptoms.”
“It’s unknown to me where I will be five years from now, but I am completely optimistic,” said Rosalynn in the WBEZ interview. “In my studio practice, I frequently say that in order to make the type of work that I make, I have to be ridiculously optimistic because it’s complex, and I feel like the same optimism is necessary for a recovery from COVID.”
