Chest Pain, Diarrhea, Severe Acid Reflux, Unbearable Nausea: Covid-19 Patient Lists 'Terrifying' Experience

A coronavirus patient on Saturday tweeted about her experiences with the deadly virus, saying she has been incapacitated for almost three months and while "it's not enough to not die, you don’t want to live through this either".

In a Twitter thread, US-based Dani Oliver detailed the physical and mental pain she has undergone since she was infected by the coronavirus in March and has been sick with severe respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological symptoms.

The US on Friday posted a record 53,000 new cases as the deadly pandemic accelerated across the Americas.

Oliver said she would detail her "terrifying symptoms" as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has refused to add widely-reported symptoms to their lists.

"So here’s a grab bag of what patients like me are experiencing: Extreme tachycardia. My heart rate was once 160 while I was sleeping. Chest pain, like someone’s sitting on your sternum," she tweeted. "Back and rib pain like someone’s taken a baseball bat to your torso. Fatigue like you’ve never felt before in your life. Fatigue like your body is shutting off. Fatigue so bad that it would often make me cry because I thought it might mean I was dying."

She said other symptoms include GI problems, diarrhea to severe acid reflux. "I had diarrhea every day for two+ months. Unbearable nausea. Also: Inexplicable rashes. For me, little broken blood vessels all over my body. For many of us, a constant shortness of breath that doctors can’t find an explanation for," she added.

Oliver said neurological symptoms she experienced included delirium and hallucinations. "Many report tingling all over their body, an internal “buzzing” or “vibrating.” Also, insomnia and chronic hypnic bodily jerks," she said, adding once she woke up in the middle of the night gasping for breath. She said this is a common symptom among coronavirus patients.

"I also experienced tremors while trying to sleep, like someone was shaking the bed. Also: many report a “hot head.” Mine literally radiated heat, despite not hitting a high fever," she said, further describing a “brain fog”.

"I couldn’t read or make sense of text at times. I couldn’t remember words. I’d stare at my partner at a loss for what I needed to communicate, or how to do it. Also: thickening of the blood, clotting. Weird, inexplicable changes to the menstrual cycle," she said.

"I wake up every morning and when I breathe in, it feels like someone is crinkling plastic in my chest. And these are just the symptoms. I’m not even touching the physical damage done to patients’ organs and bodily systems. I’m also not touching the mental component of this, which is compounded by the very virtue of not knowing if it’ll eventually kill you. But long-term COVID-19 sufferers all report the same thing: that the recovery is non-linear," she added.

Oliver said many feel like getting better, as with flu or cold, and then deteriorate and get bedridden, worse than before. "It makes no sense. You start to think you’re losing your grip or maybe it’s all in your head. It isn’t," she said, adding that thousands are experiencing these cycles.

US, Now the epicentre of the pandemic, has recorded nearly 1,29,000 deaths out of more than 2.7 million cases and is expected to record its three millionth infection next week.

Florida, which now has more than 1,69,000 cases, is a key focus of public health experts who worry about a surge in southern and western US states.

States that reopened their economies the earliest and fastest after the pandemic struck -- and against the advice of federal health authorities -- are now experiencing the highest caseloads.