COVID nightmare lasts 18 months for 1 local woman

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - Life moved on for many of us, but some are still dealing with the long-term effects of COVID-19

For people like Michelle Noble, long-COVID symptoms are something they’ll deal with for the rest of their life.

“I was fine walking at the stadium. But then once we had to go up, I was walking, I was good and I was walking level. But once we had to start going up,” she said she was huffing.

For the past year and a half, she’s been in and out of the hospital fighting for her life from complications with her first COVID dose.

“My life has been shaved – everybody, even people around me,’ she said. “They treat me differently because of this. So it’s affected everybody.”

While on Facetime with her husband, she coded.

“He said, ‘That’s the last time I talked to you.’ I found out later I coded. I found out later that I coded with the phone in my hand talking to him talking to my husband. And I was put in a coma -- a medically induced coma is what they call it. And I was put on a ventilator. I had a trach,” she said.

She woke up five weeks later with shortness of breath, brain fog, dizziness and more.

A year and a half later, the problems still affect her everyday life.

“My pulmonologist told me that I had the lungs of a smoker now,” she said. “They’re destroyed, all due to COVID. I was not like that before, but because of COVID My lungs will never be the same.”

Dr. Stephen Hsu at Augusta University says the United States could soon face the next health crisis with long COVID.

“We just have the data to show that it could be a disaster, and we’re talking about health disaster, about $3.7 trillion, the impact to the economy,” he said.

He wants to improve a saline spray to combat symptoms like brain fog to give people like Noble their life back

But she fears it may be too late

Why did it why did it take so long for it for people to come up with this?” she asked. “Why I mean, what, you know how many people died? It’s good that they have it but to me, I just feel like it’s too late.”

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