Before she caught COVID-19 at a wedding in March 2020, the physician associate spent her days diagnosing and treating people; after she was infected, she turned to her own colleagues for that same care. “At first,” she told me, “I felt a kinship with them.” But when her tests started coming back negative, her doctors began telling her that her symptoms—daily migraines, unrelenting vertigo, tinnitus, severe crashes after mild activity—were just in her head. (I agreed not to name her so that she could speak openly about people she still works with.)
When she went to the emergency room because half her body had gone numb, the ER doctor offered to book her an appointment with a counselor. Another doctor told her to try removing her IUD, because, she remembers him saying, “hormones do funny things to women.” When she asked her neurologist for more tests, he said that her medical background had already earned her “more testing than I was entitled to,” she told me. Being part of the medical community made her no different from any other patient with long COVID, her eventual diagnosis. Despite being a physician, she couldn’t convince her own physicians—people who knew her and worked with her—that something was seriously wrong.
I’ve interviewed more than a dozen similar people—health professionals from the United States and the United Kingdom
who have long COVID. Most told me that they were shocked at how quickly they had been dismissed by their peers. When Karen Scott, a Black ob-gyn of 19 years, went to the emergency room with chest pain and a heart rate of 140, her physicians checked whether she was pregnant and tested her for drugs; one asked her if her symptoms were in her head while drawing circles at his temple with an index finger. “When I said I was a physician, they said, ‘Where?’” Scott said. “Their response was
She must be lying.” Even if she had been believed, it might not have mattered. “The moment I became sick, I was just a patient in a bed, no longer credible in the eyes of most physicians,” Alexis Misko, an occupational therapist, told me. She and others hadn’t expected special treatment, but “health-care professionals are so used to being believed,” Daria Oller, a physiotherapist, told me, that they also hadn’t expected their sickness to so completely shroud their expertise
