At 50, Heidi Ferrer looked 10 years younger than her age. She was slim and vivacious with long, blond hair and glowing skin. She had a handsome husband, a beautiful son and a passion for her work writing television scripts and encouraging other women on her Girl to Mom blog.
Looking at photos of her posing at a Hollywood gala, walking barefoot on a beach or clutching a bouquet of sunflowers, it's easy to see why people close to her called her “sunshine in a dress.” And it's hard to imagine what could have made her take her own life in her bedroom in May 2021.
Ferrer's husband, Nick Guthe, wrote later in the Guardian about how he found Heidi in the afternoon and tried to revive her while their 13-year-old son waited for paramedics outside. She died at the hospital.
A doctor assumed she was depressed, Guthe recalled. “When I told him, ‘She wasn't depressed, it was long Covid,’ he looked at me with bewilderment and asked, ‘What's long Covid?’”
Guthe's column was fulfilling a promise to his wife to raise awareness about long Covid, a disease with a wide spectrum of more than 200 symptoms that affects a minority of people following a coronavirus infection. Sufferers experience everything from “brain fog” and heart palpitations to neurological tremors and extreme fatigue.
While for most Covid is a mild infection that's gone in two weeks if not days, for some, a range of symptoms continue to crop up afterward. A Dutch study in the Lancet found last year that one in eight people who had Covid infections were reporting persistent symptoms, including loss of smell, chest pain or fatigue, three to five months later.1 For an unknown number, those symptoms can be life-wrecking. Heidi had Covid in April 2020, and her lingering post-infection symptoms began with “Covid toes”-a condition that made her feet red and painful and robbed her of sleep. She suffered from gastrointestinal issues, and extreme fatigue made walking up a flight of stairs exhausting. Her heart would race for no apparent reason.
Urination and sex became painful, and her cognitive issues worsened so she couldn't read a book. By May 2021, she was bedridden with pain and neurological tremors, and a few weeks before her suicide, she said she thought she might die of a heart attack or stroke.
“While for most Covid is a mild infection that's gone in two weeks if not days, for some, a range of symptoms continue to crop up”
The epidemic after the epidemic
Two years later, is a more familiar term thanks in part
