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 power and left her unable to take pleasure in life’s extraordinary pleasures, she mentioned.

“My high quality of life with this sickness is nearly nonexistent, it’s not a superb life,” Tracey Thompson, 55, instructed 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 resulting from 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 films inaccessible as a result of she “can’t course of the information,” she mentioned.

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

“I’m very glad to be alive. I nonetheless take pleasure in life. Birds chirping, small issues that make up a day are nonetheless nice to me, they’re nonetheless pleasant. I nonetheless take pleasure in my buddies,” she mentioned.

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 means of the MAID program, accounting for 4.3 per cent of all deaths in Canada. That determine contains 463 folks “whose pure deaths weren’t fairly foreseeable,” in accordance with 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 assumed it was a merciless joke. I used to be flawed,” she mentioned. “I had contracted COVID & I by no means recovered.”

Only a few months after being contaminated, her well being worsened past the signs most individuals undergo.

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

She was shedding her cognitive operate and talent to train, being too wanting breath.

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

Since she contracted COVID, Thompson has been identified with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or persistent 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 mentioned.

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

In accordance with analysis revealed within the journal Nature, not less than 65 million folks worldwide undergo from lengthy COVID, which has no treatment. The analysis recognized 200 post-COVID signs impacting a number of organs; most of the signs can final for years.

Thompson mentioned she has no household and has misplaced her buddies since her sickness took maintain. She additionally needed to give her canine up for adoption as a result of she may not take care of her, she mentioned.

Her financial savings have now been severely strained resulting from meals, housing and medical prices.

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

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

She has mentioned she is legally barred from sharing the standing of her MAID utility.

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