Her Symptoms Suggested Long Covid. But Was That Too Obvious?
The New York Times Doctors make assumptions about a case and those assumptions can sometimes cloud their judgment.
The 61-year-old woman lifted the laundry basket, then grimly eyed the steps up from the basement. The climb seemed to get tougher every day. Before she was even halfway up, she could feel her racing heart and hear her ragged, rapid breathing. She gripped the wooden handrail in case she started to feel lightheaded again. Once she made it up to the main floor of her home, she dropped her burden and practically fell into the soft embrace of her living-room sofa.
The woman first noticed that she often felt out of breath a few months earlier. She wondered if it was her weight. She liked the way she looked, but suspected that her usual care provider, a much-trusted nurse practitioner with a medical group at Yale School of Medicine, would be happy if she lost a few pounds. Her daughter worried that her shortness of breath could be a result of the Covid infection she had a couple of years earlier.
She finally called her P.C.P.s office when her right leg started to hurt. The combination of shortness of breath and leg pain made her nurse practitioner worry that the patient had a clot in her leg that had broken off and lodged in her lungs. She sent her to get an ultrasound of the leg. There was no clot, which was a relief, but she was still out of breath.
