You feel it happening. The clotting. Even if you’ve never had clots before, you know there’s something really wrong. It’s hard to explain. Everything goes thick. Your mouth, your eyes, your veins, your thoughts, your movements. Thick. Then there’s the dread. A spiritual omen of impending doom. It’s coming for you. You know death is here, just outside the room, checking his teeth for spinach in the gleaming blade of his scythe. You feel death hardening your insides. An overcooked microwave potato kind of thing. The palpitations, like even your heart is trying to escape. The racing pulse. The too-slow pulse. The urgent jumping lunatic frog of your heart contorting in the middle of the silent ache. Everything just thick and fucked up. Like a river behind a mine in a Republican state. Even harder to explain to doctors who refuse to listen. This is most doctors. Most doctors are fools. This surprises you. You didn’t used to think this. I didn’t either. I didn’t used to think this. I used to respect doctors. Tip my hat kind of respect. Here take my seat sir or ma’am respect. Then I got Long Covid. Now I respect a doctor. Maybe two. The ones who listen when you clot. When you feel yourself clotting. The ones who believe your gummy grumblings. The ones who realize you might die. The ones who help you not to die. Not the ones who went into this field for the Tesla or the gig at that school in San Francisco or that check from Koch enterprises. Those motherfuckers can kiss my ass now. Dead to me. Clots in the arteries of the world.
I’ll never forget the day in late 2020 when I went to the emergency room full of covid clots. Chest pain. Shortness of breath. Dizziness. Pain when I inhaled. Swollen veins, puffy feet. I’d had clots before, thanks to a genetic disorder that leaves me prone to clotting. This helped my ancestors, this gene. Ancestor got gored or gashed, ancestor scabbed up quicker. Ancestor bled a lot in childbirth, didn’t die though. That was then. This is now. I wasn’t gored. But I clotted. Clots in my legs after my C-section in 2001. Clots in both lungs in 2015 after a hospitalization. After Covid, I felt clotty again. Old familiar bullshit. Terrifying bullshit. That thing you never wanted to feel again, and you’re feeling it again. I begged the non-listening doctors to listen. I told them the Chinese and Italians were reporting SARS2 caused clots. Showed them studies on my phone. Their eyes were dead as mantis eyes. The kind of people who’d give away their head for a moment of bliss. I wished someone would chew up their heads in her sideways jaws.
It was eight months since I’d been infected and so they rolled their eyes because they thought everyone got over covid in two weeks. They thought this because they only think about medicine at work, and even then it is only the bare minimum. Incurious as a rusted coffee can filled with broken glass and jagged stones. But they humored me, by drawing blood. Or tried to. They put the needle in my arm, attached the glass tube. Nothing came out. Not even a hiss. I stared in horror. How was this my arm. How was there no blood at all. How was I not dead already. Normally, blood would flow out. Now, nothing. A dried-up well. I was a superfund site unto myself.
They had to use a syringe, backwards, to suck my blood out. It clotted as soon as it left my arm. A tube full of wobbly scab. Unusable. Give it a toothpick, slap it on a silver platter, boom, vampire appetizer. Brown and thick as old chocolate pudding. Sludge. I was made of sludge. I cried. Said this wasn’t normal. The nurse said it was normal for some people. I wasn’t one of those people, I told her. She ignored me. I told them this was covid blood, begged for blood thinners. I’d had clots before. I knew what it felt like. It felt like this. They refused to help. Acted like I was just a junkie jonesing for warfarin. Like I wanted to get high on eliquis and heparin. Fuckers sent me home.
Two years later, my blood is normal again. This is because I had to fight for anticoagulants and statins. Like nearly come to fisticuffs or a gentleman’s duel fight. That kind of fight. The kind of fight where they realize you’re hiring a lawyer or chambering the gun and write you a prescription just to make you disappear. Fighting like that while your blood is sludge. While everything is thick. The bull with three spears in its hump already. Blood in my eyes. It takes every last ounce of rotting pudding you have. It took months to get the prescription, months when I had to self-medicate to fix my blood. Aspirin, curcumin, fish oil, niacin, water and more water, vitamin E. I didn’t die. I haven’t died, I mean. Not yet.
During that time, I read. A lot. Writers do that. Well, the good ones do that. The bad ones spend their days insulting the good writers on Twitter. Also, fuck Twitter. I found some good information on Twitter. Being sick doesn’t improve you as a soul, turns out. It just makes you the same asshole, but sick. My reading was mostly science journals. Studies from other places. Places with better doctors. I wanted to know what was happening. Why the fuck my blood looked like that. Why the fuck no one seemed to care. Why the fuck the government downplayed the fact that this fucking virus could turn your blood into muddy motor oil.
Here’s what I learned.
It is not a respiratory disease.
When SARS2 manifests as a breathing or oxygen problem, it’s because that problem began in the blood vessels of the lungs. Capillaries. They’re everywhere. They are where the magic happens. Where an inhale is turned into usable oxygen in exchange for an exhale full of carbon dioxide. Where the nutrients from the food you eat is pulled apart and absorbed into the blood vessels and sorted and assigned to do a job wherever it is needed. That our bodies are figuring all of this out without our help should be proof there is a God, proof that intelligence has literally nothing to do with conscious thought. But I digress.
SARS2 attaches itself to ACE2 receptors. Here is where you have them: Pretty much all the places. For our purposes today, we will talk about how they’re in the endothelial cells - which is what we call the cells lining your blood vessels like teeny tiny tiles.
Specifically, SARS2 takes its disgusting stupid spike and jabs it into your ACE2 receptor, unwelcome. A billion trillion tiny rapes in your veins. That’s what this is. Its unwelcome protuberances, penetrating your receptors. No wonder the white power bros pretend it’s not big deal. An army of little Bret Kavenaughs, fratting all over your insides. Stabbing you with their spikes until you bleed and the powers that be telling you that’s not happening, it’s a little head cold, quit complaining, how about amnesty, how about you just let covid rape every inch of the 60,000 miles worth of blood vessel lining in your body and we require you to pretend this is just the sniffles because we don’t like being told what to do by the likes of you or your endothelium.
The endothelium is the 60,000 miles of blood vessel lining in the average adult human body. Children have slightly less. One hundred percent of kids infected with covid have blood markers afterwards to indicate ongoing vascular damage. Let’s not tell anyone about that though. Let’s take this check from Koch fucking eugenics industries instead and tell kids it’s good for them, receptor rape is good for them, that if they don’t feel well it’s because their mean parents didn’t let covid rape them enough. Take off that mask. My air wants in you.
Sometimes you feel like you are the only sane or good person left standing. And then what? How do you live in a world like this? You don’t. You run away from it, as I’ve done. I live in the middle of literally nowhere now. I go nowhere but outside, to hike. All food is curbside. My best friends are crows, a cat and a dog now. They are amazing. But, again, I digress.
So the spike pierces the endothelium. The endothelium is more than just wallpaper for your veins and arteries. It is a sensing organ. It measures and analyzes all kinds of things, to figure out how much of what microscopic thingy needs to go where, to keep your body running. Most of your autonomic functions - things that happen in the body without you having to think about them - happen because the endothelium is conducting the orchestra of your organs. It figures out what your blood pressure should be. Your heart rate. Things like that. It does this by sending signals from one endothelial cell to another, all throughout the pipeline. SARS2 can obliterate entire patches of endothelium. Road becomes impassable. Signals don’t go, or don’t go correctly. Blood pressure spikes. Heart rate, too. Electrolyte balance gets all fucked up. You might notice you have low sodium or low potassium now, thanks to SARS2 raping your endothelium’s cells.
People who’ve had covid are twice as likely as those who haven’t, to have markers for endothelial dysfunction. Even if they never had symptoms. You don’t feel the inside of your blood vessels. It’s not a thing you consciously feel, like your skin, because it doesn’t need you to know what’s going on there, and because knowing what’s going on there might in fact be distracting. But just because you can’t feel the destruction doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. You will feel it in other ways. So many people with “weird” symptoms “coming out of nowhere” weeks and months after covid infection. It did not come from nowhere. You just weren’t aware it was building up to this - this dizzy spell, this unstable heartbeat, this gasping for air.
The disease of covid-19 is an inhaled endotheliitis. What’s amazing is that China has known this since March of 2020, and acted accordingly. Intelligently. The United States got it wrong from the start, and like the global narcissistic bully it is, stuck by its mistake for nearly three years now, preferring instead to gaslight anyone and anything that proves otherwise. The cost has been millions of lives lost to death and disability. This is BEYOND PSYCHOPATHIC. It is embarrassingly stupid. I am embarrassed to live in a country run by idiots who are supported and emboldened by other idiots. We will pay a huge price in power, life, quality of life, for decades and perhaps centuries to come. All because we couldn’t be temporarily inconvenienced in order to deal with, you know, FUCKING REALITY.
For some reason, in some people, the endothelial damage continues, unrelenting. In my case, it got worse from year one to year two. Today I get blood drawn to see where it’s at rounding year three. Can’t wait. So endothelial damage from covid doesn’t stop when you stop testing positive. No one has been able to say for sure why that’s happening. But it seems pretty clear, from emerging science, that it’s happening because the virus isn’t gone. It’s still hanging around somewhere. Happily, it can’t replicate inside endothelial cells. But it can infect them once, and kill them.
Once an endothelial cell dies, it can take up to two years for the body to replace it. This is because endothelial cells are made in the bone marrow, after the bone marrow gets signals from the endothelium that there’s damage. But if there’s enough damage, the signal might not get there as soon as it should. I think this is why so many with Long Covid start to feel better at about the 2.5 to 3 year mark. At any rate, the dead bits of the endothelium are rough, like torn-up asphalt. This makes it hard for the blood to pass smoothly.
The body will try to patch up these broken bits, with blood clots, while waiting for the new endothelial cells to arrive. It’s a kind gesture, with potentially horrific outcomes. People who’ve had covid are at much great risk of clots.
The clots can be very small. If they’re small enough, they won’t show up on traditional clotting tests, like D-dimer, though in many with covid D-dimer is also elevated. The small clots can block capillaries altogether, and this can result in capillary death. Both those things can cause low oxygen in the places where the capillary is supposed to deliver oxygen.
The low oxygen levels caused by blocked and dead capillaries will signal the body to generate new capillaries. This is called angiogenesis. So people with Long Covid will have markers for lots of angiogenesis, like Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor. Usuallly, VEGF is only high in fetuses. Now, it’s high in everyone, as the body desperately tries to built itself a new vascular system. But if those new capillaries are only going to be filled up with the crappy clotty blood that’s still everywhere in the rest of the body, they will die too.
Thus, it can take many years to recover from the endothelial destruction wrought by SARS2. In older people, or in those whose diets, mental health and lifestyles contribute additional oxidative stress to the endothelium, that healing might never occur at all.
How do we fix this?
Hell if I know.
People much smarter than me are figuring that out. But it’s going way too slowly. Three years in, millions upon millions languishing. Still no protocol. Still no treatments.
What they’re starting to say is that people with Long Covid (which is just covid, let’s be real here) need low-molecular-weight heparin, both as an early intervention in acute infection, and in long covid, because it is both a blood thinner and a SARS2 antiviral. I was given a month of heparin injections in 2020 after covid killed my gallbladder and it was removed in emergency surgery; I got this because of the genetic clotting disorder I told you about, and I believe it is why I recovered more than some other Long Covid people.
They’re saying we need statins, to protect what’s left of the endothelium and halt ongoing damage wherever possible.
They’re saying we need antioxidants, to help repair the damaged endothelium.
Some people have found that apheresis, where the blood is removed, filtered, and returned to the body minus some of its clots, is helpful though the relief doesn’t seem to last.
At some point, I’ll talk more specifically about microclots here. But today’s rant was a jumping off point. Ciao.