Before I begin I want to apologize for the poor formatting. I am typing this on my phone and I expect the formatting will be less than optimal.
I know this thread is a few months old at this point but I wanted to add my experience here. I was diagnosed with ME/CFS in 2015 and have had moderate symptoms for the past 8 years. (1 year of seeing so many doctors that I can’t remember them all just trying to find out what was wrong with me and 7 years diagnosed) For about 3 years now I have had a decent handle on how much mental/physical energy I can afford to expend to keep myself from having a run of bad days/weeks.
I contracted Covid about four weeks ago (around May 20th) and was prescribed Paxlovid. The only side effect I experienced was a bitter taste in my mouth starting about 1 hour after taking each pill. (Both morning and night pill). On the morning of the third day I woke up feeling more clear headed and energized than I had felt in the past 8 years. I still had all of the Covid symptoms (like cough, headache, general crummy feeling) but even with all of that I still felt better than I had in 8 years. As the week went on the Covid symptoms began to fade (the cough was last to go).
The Paxlovid included 10 pills (1 morning and 1 night) for 5 days. My Covid symptoms, except for the cough, were gone after about the eighth day but more importantly my ME/CFS symptoms were much less pronounced. I would say at its peak 40-60% better than what my normal baseline had been. The bad news is that they slowly started to come back. The good news is that as of this AM I would still consider the way I feel as 10% better than my pre-Paxlovid baseline. I don’t know whether or not the last 10% of “goodness” will fade but I am getting ready to wear out the search bar to see if any other antiviral medicines have yielded positive results. My doctor was so encouraged by these results that she is willing to try other “longer term” (especially those with less potential side effects) antivirals to see if we can find one that will give me my life back. At this point I am cautiously optimistic and I will keep my fellow sufferers posted.