Good Weekend letters to the editor: March 4

Long Road

Reading Fenella Souter’s article on long COVID [February 25], polio survivors like me would be thinking, snap! So many of the long COVID symptoms mirror those of the late effects of polio – gross fatigue, brain fog, swallowing and breathing difficulties, etc. After many years of treatment, Dame Jean Macnamara prophetically told my mother “they will pay for this later”. We sure did. Unlike those with long COVID, most polio survivors had a period of sunshine, time in their 20s and 30s to live with whatever disabilities they had from childhood. Then the nasty little virus woke to pounce again. By this time, of course, a new generation of doctors hadn’t seen polio. One GP told me the symptoms were “all in my head”. Post-polio organisations around the world continue to fight for informed treatment for us. Long COVID hit immediately. We hope the period of sunshine comes soon and lasts longer.
Fran Henke
Hastings, Vic

Noting Good Weekend’s article and Katrina Strickland’s editorial, I have chalked up 55 years of chronic fatigue syndrome, since age 16, and for the first 23 years it went undiagnosed. In fact, green lights from the medical and yes, psychiatric fields, saying there was nothing wrong. Little was known in the 1970s. Finally, the poverty and incapacitation led to aloneness and loneliness.

I failed massive, and I mean massive functioning testing in 1999 and was told, “Graeme, you are running on nothing most of the time. You are in no state to enjoy the pleasures people simply enjoy. As a matter of course, life’s daily trials and tribulations are like killer blows.” For there is an extreme collapse in metabolism and cell function generally, not picked up by the standard medical testing. Long COVID may provide more impetus for serious action on CFS. As Payton Jacobs says, she would like to get her life back. I was denied one. I have nowhere to turn. A marriage of 43 years has survived this slow burn cataclysm.
Graeme Tychsen
Toronto, NSW

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Rare Finds

Having read Melissa Fyfe’s article on the State Library Victoria [February 25], I wondered if she has read The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray: the story of Belle da Costa Greene, a young woman of colour who kept her heritage secret, becoming the personal librarian to John Pierpont Morgan (J.P. Morgan) and responsible for cataloguing and purchasing rare incunabula to enhance his private collection.
Megan Dunnet
Toronto, NSW

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Long Road