KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When 41 Action News last spoke to the Arrowood family, 29-year old Ashley was in the hospital on a ventilator after becoming infected with COVID-19.
Fast forward to November, Ashley is recovering, but still on a long road to 100% health.
"I have new symptoms showing up every day. Some of those include hair loss, just gobs of hair coming out. I’m also having palpitations every day and chest pain, then just chronic fatigue. I’m a person who works 60 hours a week and goes to school, 16 hours a week wipes me out," Ashley explained.
She is a member of a group known as COVID-19 "long haulers." They're patients who exhibit symptoms months after their initial diagnosis.
"There are a lot of long haulers and it doesn’t really matter if you had a mild case or severe case like myself. Whenever my hair first started falling out I thought I was crazy, this can’t be happening it must be something else. I joined a Facebook support group for people who had COVID and I just asked them, is this common in what you’re seeing, they really validated what I was experiencing and I didn’t feel quite so alone," Ashley said.
She left the Kansas City metro area back in June to help St. Louis front-line workers during the early stages of the pandemic. That's where she was infected, even after taking precautions as a medical worker.
"I was really tired for a long time but we were working four shifts a week, complete total patient care, the patients were incredibly sick. I thought I was tired from that. I had been tested the week prior due to some other symptoms I was having, and I was negative. They told me I was safe to go back to work," Ashley recalled. "I had no fevers, or any other symptoms, no cough, no shortness of breath. Then I came up here to work a shift at the hospital up here and I came home and couldn’t catch my breath, my lips were blue that’s when it was serious and I need to go to the emergency room."
She's now warning others to do what they can to stay safe.
"I think it’s really important to understand there’s no real predictability to this virus. It affects all different people in different ways. My mother has diabetes and was exposed by me, you’d expect she would’ve had a severe case, but she didn’t. She had no symptoms. Whereas I don’t have diabetes, I have hypothyroidism, but I was knocking on death’s door," Ashley said. "It’s important to realize that hopefully if you get it, you won’t be on a ventilator for weeks at a time, but we just don’t know, and it’s really important to care for ourselves and have compassion to care for other people affected by our actions."
