Katie

Age at interview: 12

Brief Outline:

Katie is 12 and caught Covid in May 2020. Her mum has Long Covid too. Before catching Covid, Katie was very active. She played sports and ran a lot. She is currently part-time in school and can’t do many of the activities she used to enjoy. She has fatigue which sometimes causes her to crash and not be able to get out of bed for a couple of days. Katie also has brain fog which causes her to forget the names of everyday things. Katie was interviewed in June 2022.

Katie is 12 and lives with her mum. Ethnicity: White British.

More about me...

Katie is 12. She first caught Covid in May 2020. Her first symptoms were stomach pains and diarrhoea. Her hands were stone cold, and she experienced her temperature going up and down. After a few weeks she felt like every bone in her body was hurting, and she had fatigue and headaches. Some days she would feel a bit better, but then she would go back to feeling horrible again.

Before she caught Covid, Katie played tennis and football and also enjoyed running and going for long walks. Since having Covid, she gets tired on short walks and can’t play football or go out running. Katie attends school part-time and feels that, overall, her school have been supportive, although some teachers have found it difficult to understand how Long Covid affects her.

Katie had tests for other conditions that affect the digestive system and sometimes felt she wasn’t believed by the healthcare professionals she saw. It was as a result of her mum doing research on the internet that they came to think that the ongoing symptoms they were both having could be due to Long Covid. Katie doesn’t have any specialist support for Long Covid and is being encouraged by her doctors to increase her activities. This seems to be causing her to have more regular ‘crashes’ (when she is so tired, she can’t get out of bed). She is trying to eat well and takes magnesium and Vitamin D.

Katie said it would help other children like her if health professionals believed them when they come for help for their symptoms.

Katie’s mum said that her daughter seemed to always have a new symptom poking its head up.

It was one of those things where we weren’t getting better. You know, some, like I said, some days we felt better. Some days we didn't feel so good. Then it’d be a new symptom, you know, something else would poke its head up. Like I said like the cough that I got developed two weeks or something afterwards. You know, then suddenly, you know, there it was. Katie never really got the cough. No, you had light-headedness and stuff, yeah, but not the cough.

Katie’s mum heard about Long Covid on Twitter.

It just kind of continued on. So, at some point, I went on, I was on Twitter and I think because there was a guy that my mum was watching, Garner? Yeah, who’s now like, he’s kind of gone off, you know, a little bit odd. But, anyway, at the time, he was talking about the symptoms going on and on and my mum had seen him on TV and she said, “Oh my god, this is it.” And then I went onto Twitter to find him and then to see what else was going on and that’s when I heard about Long Covid. And, in fact, the, one of the women who designed the term Long Covid came up with the term, so it’s kind of a weird, you know, like one of those weird coincidences [laughs]. But you know, then I started, you know, I read and I just thought, no, this is, this sounds very familiar. But there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about GI issues because most people on Twitter were adults.

Walking to school made Katie feel so tired that she could barely climb the stairs when she arrived.

Well now it’s like I, you know, I walk to school and I’m tired and you know, my school is like a 20-minute walk and you know, I walk to school and I can barely like make it up the stairs, you know, you know, ‘cos it’s really tiring, you know?

Katie remembered waking up one day and ‘every bone in her body hurt’.

Mum: I think it was June she woke up and she couldn't, her, every bone in her body hurt.

Katie: Yeah that was a few weeks later wasn’t it.

Mum: Yeah. You said it felt like an old man.

Katie: Yeah, like I couldn't really move that well ‘cos there was like, all of my bones were like, hurting.