27 Dec 2025 3 min read by Alice

My symptoms

A list of the 60+ symptoms I experienced during this journey.

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I am not a doctor. I am sharing my personal experience. This should not be considered medical advice. Always consult your healthcare providers for any decisions regarding your health, and listen to your body.

On online forums about Long Covid and ME/CFS, we often hear:

What are your symptoms??
Did you have [this particular symptom]?
What did you do for [that symptom]?

I had 60+ different symptoms throughout my journey. Some were constant, some came and go, some returned after they had disappeared for a while...

In this short post I'm going to give you the list of all the symptoms I had. In the beginning, it felt very reassuring to search in forums and read that someone out there also had the same weird symptom I had.

💡

My basic medical tests came back normal and there was no visible organ damage. It is extremely important to rule out other medical causes for your symptoms, because Long Covid and ME/CFS can coexist with other things.

Global symptoms

Excruciating fatigue (more like a full-body shutdown, if you ask me)
Post-exertional malaise (PEM)
Muscle weakness
Swollen and tender lymph nodes
Weight loss (I lost 9 kg (~20 lbs). At my worst my weight was 38 kg (~84 lbs). I'm now back to my normal pre-Covid weight!)
Hair loss
Shortness of breath
Post-nasal drip
Sore throat
Allergic rhinitis
Muscle twitching
Tremors (hands, legs...)
Blood pooling (legs, feet)
Interstitial cystitis
Urinary retention
Dizziness
Sudden sensation of falling when eyes closed
Poor body temperature regulation
Hot flashes
Burning skin sensation
Freezing cold feet
Breast pain
Joint pain (mostly the knees)

Cognitive

Brain fog
Memory loss
Unable to visualize
Stress intolerance
Derealization / depersonalization (DPDR)
Depression and emotional numbness
Dark thoughts
Anxiety, panic attacks, sense of impending doom
Severe insomnia
Vivid dreams and nightmares
Auditory hallucinations (24/7 for a year and a half, my brain would play the sounds of my environnement on a loop, sometimes 5 different sounds on top of each other…)

Heart

Tachycardia
Extra heart beats
Chest tightness
Chest pain
Chest / lungs burning
Orthostatic intolerance

GI

Nausea
Diarrhea
Yellow stool
Dry mouth
Changes in appetite (too little or too much)

Head

Headaches
Head and face pressure
Sensation of swollen face
Neck stiffness
Neck pain
Cracking sounds in the neck
Dental pain
Bruxism

Eyes

Light sensitivity
Visual fatigue
Pressure behind the eyes
After images
Blurred vision
Moving colored spots in vision when eyes closed
Visual snow

Ears

Sound sensitivity
Tinnitus
Pressure inside the ears
Ear fullness
Muffled hearing
Vibration in the ear
Popping / clicking in the ear

Through the recovery approach I describe in this blog, I realized that the nature of each symptom didn't really matter. That they all had the same and unique root cause for me: my nervous system was heavily dysregulated.

Bringing my nervous system back into a state of safety improved all my symptoms at once over time.

The only slightly specific things I did were for insomnia and anxiety (but it still relies on the same principles).

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