COVID leaves 46-year-old TD woman with chronic lung issues
From North Central Public Health:
Helen Mendoza, 46, of The Dalles now struggles daily with breathing after getting COVID. She is urging friends to get vaccinated against the disease.
Helen Mendoza still has health issues from her bout with COVID-19 almost a year ago.
“I have chronic daily issues with my lungs now,” said Mendoza, 46, of The Dalles.
She’s vaccinated and has talked several others into getting the vaccine.
“I know a lot of people that are anti-vax and they have too much misinformation and I’ve helped a couple of those people get over it and get their vaccination and that’s a wonderful thing to me.”
She apologized after a burst of coughing, saying, “That’s my COVID cough, and it makes my chest hurt when I cough. It gets worse too, to where I can’t catch my breath.”
Mendoza, 46, got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in March. She already has health issues including fibromyalgia, diabetes and arthritis, but since she had COVID, “the fatigue is much worse now. I used to stay up and go, go, go all day long and I can’t do that anymore. If I go walking through a store, by the time I’m halfway through the store, I can’t breathe.”
She’s now reliant on rescue inhalers and has them stashed everywhere. “Two nights ago I was having pass-out episodes where I couldn’t breathe.”
Even so, she’s grateful to be alive. “I lived through it when there’s a lot of people who have not.”
She said she doesn’t know anybody who got COVID “who doesn’t have a little bit of survivor’s guilt to go with it. Why not me? Why that baby or that mother or that father?”
It’s why she got vaccinated, to avoid the disease and those feelings, again. She doesn’t think her immune system could tolerate another bout.
And she’s also lost four people to COVID “and I’m about sick of it. I just lost my husband’s mother. COVID took her in six days, two months ago.”
She’s used her own safe experience with the vaccine to soothe friends. After she got vaccinated, she visited a vaccine-hesitant friend at the friend’s work for three days in a row, to show that she was fine. “I showed her I didn’t have any severe side effects from it.”
She said, “Misinformation is scaring people into basically killing themselves, and they’re not doing the one thing that can save their lives and that’s to get a shot.”
North Central Public Health District has a number of vaccine clinics set up over the coming weeks. To book a first, second or booster dose online, click here. You can call NCPHD at 541-506-2600. The vaccine is also available by appointment at local pharmacies.
