Toronto woman with long COVID applies for MAID due to financial strain

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A Toronto girl has utilized to be euthanized below Canada’s Medical Help in Dying program after lengthy COVID has sapped her vitality and left her unable to get pleasure from life’s peculiar pleasures, she stated.

“My high quality of life with this sickness is nearly nonexistent, it’s not life,” Tracey Thompson, 55, advised DailyMail. “I don’t do something. It’s painfully boring. It’s profoundly isolating.”

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Thompson, a former chef, says she is unable to work because of debilitating Lengthy COVID signs, together with fixed nausea, fatigue and reminiscence loss.

Excessive exhaustion has additionally left her bed-ridden for 22 hours a day, whereas mind fog has more and more made listening to music, studying and watching motion pictures inaccessible as a result of she “can’t course of the information,” she stated.

Thompson advised CTV Information final yr she determined to use for MAID as a result of she is operating out of cash, not out of any want to die.

“I’m very completely happy to be alive. I nonetheless get pleasure from life. Birds chirping, small issues that make up a day are nonetheless nice to me, they’re nonetheless satisfying. I nonetheless get pleasure from my pals,” she stated.

Canada’s MAID program, which was initially launched in 2016 for terminal sufferers, was expanded in March 2021 to incorporate sufferers with “a grievous and irremediable medical situation.”

In 2022, 13,241 folks died by the MAID program, accounting for 4.3 per cent of all deaths in Canada. That determine contains 463 folks “whose pure deaths weren’t moderately foreseeable,” based on a Well being Canada report.

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In a GoFundMe web page created in 2021, Thompson says she was attacked by a person who gave her COVID in March 2020, because the an infection was first starting to unfold in Canada.

“The person grabbed me, shook me, coughed in my face & laughed ‘You’re sick now,’” she wrote.

“I believed it was a merciless joke. I used to be mistaken,” she stated. “I had contracted COVID & I by no means recovered.”

Just some months after being contaminated, her well being worsened past the signs most individuals endure.

“At the moment, they didn’t even know what lengthy Covid was, nobody did,” she stated, including it was troublesome “to be taken severely” by docs.

She was dropping her cognitive perform and skill to train, being too in need of breath.

Within the fall of 2020, Thompson stated she was again in hospital after struggling to catch her breath for 36 hours. She was was lastly recognized with lengthy COVID months later, in 2021.

Since she contracted COVID, Thompson has been recognized with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or continual fatigue syndrome, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and mast cell activation syndrome.

Thompson, who loves cooking, is now solely capable of eat unseasoned hen and greens for many days as a result of she is “allergic to every little thing,” she stated.

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She additionally suffers from unstable blood strain and lightheadedness. Her coronary heart can begin racing from easy duties like standing up and mendacity down.

In line with analysis printed within the journal Nature, a minimum of 65 million folks worldwide endure from lengthy COVID, which has no remedy. The analysis recognized 200 post-COVID signs impacting a number of organs; lots of the signs can final for years.

Thompson stated she has no household and has misplaced her pals since her sickness took maintain. She additionally needed to give her canine up for adoption as a result of she may not look after her, she stated.

Her financial savings have now been severely strained because of meals, housing and medical prices.

Her GoFundMe web page, which was created in October 2021, has raised $65,683 of her $100,000 aim. Donations and phrases of encouragement had been nonetheless arriving in latest weeks and months.

“I’ve signed up for trials & am hoping for, not miraculous, however a minimum of helpful outcomes,” Thompson posted in a June 2023 replace.

She has stated she is legally barred from sharing the standing of her MAID software.

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