Woman with long Covid-19, 55, requests euthanasia in Canada as her condition leaves her bedridden and bankrupt: ‘My life with this disease does not exist’

A Canadian woman has applied for euthanasia after Covid left her unemployed and in constant pain for a long time – amid fears that assisted dying has become too easy in Canada.

Tracey Thompson, 55, of Toronto, has not been able to work since contracting the virus in 2020 and is so sore and tired that she spends up to 22 hours a day in bed.

The former chef has been robbed of life’s simple pleasures: she’s too weak to cook, too nauseous to eat, and can’t listen to music, read, or watch movies because her brain fog is so intense that she can’t… cannot process’. .’

In the almost four years she has been suffering from her illness, she has not been able to work and her savings have run out. She also has no family to speak of and has lost all her friends.

Now Ms. Thompson is trying to take her own life through Canada’s assisted dying program, widely considered one of the most tolerant in the world.

“My quality of life with this disease is almost non-existent, it’s not a good life,” she told DailyMail.com. ‘I do nothing. It’s painfully boring. It’s extremely isolating.’

In Canada, anyone with an incurable medical condition can apply to die, even if the disease itself, like long Covid, is not terminal.

Thompson contracted Covid-19 in March 2020 and, like millions of patients, developed a sore throat and lost her sense of taste and smell.

But it wasn’t until months later that her hellish ordeal really began. Instead of getting better like most after a few weeks, her health slowly deteriorated.

By May of that year, she was still having trouble thinking, breathing or doing any exercise and went to the emergency department, where doctors performed tests.

“At the time they didn’t even know how long Covid was – no one did,” Ms Thompson said.

When doctors couldn’t find anything definitive, they sent her home, leaving Ms Thompson feeling “dismissed”, adding that she found it “difficult to be taken seriously”.

In the fall, she was back in the hospital after experiencing chest pain and struggling to catch her breath for 36 hours. After months of tests and doctor and hospital visits, she was finally diagnosed with long Covid in 2021.

Initially able to live on her savings, her finances began to dwindle as she had no active income and had to pay for housing, food and medical treatment.

Now without a job or energy to do much, Ms Thompson tells DailyMail.com that every day is “painfully boring”.

Most days look the same: she wakes up, takes several medications, drinks a meal replacement shake, and goes to the bathroom.

Mustering up enough energy to go to the bathroom is the “biggest part of my day.”

Then she lies back in bed and waits until it’s time to eat. Mrs. Thompson was once a professional chef who loved cooking and food. She has become “allergic to everything” and the food she can eat is limited. Most days she cooks unseasoned chicken and vegetables.

Then she takes more medication, including a pill to help her sleep. “Then I wake up and do the whole thing again.”

Ms Thompson has no family and says she has lost most of her friends to her illness. She also had to give away her dog because she could no longer properly care for her.

She sometimes attends virtual sessions of long Covid support groups and scrolls Twitter to find people in similar situations because “there are people there.”

On a good day, Ms. Thompson says, she can sometimes sit up in her chair at the computer for a while and walks around the block twice a month.

She told DailyMail.com: ‘My quality of life with this disease is almost non-existent. There is a real absence of life. It’s not a good life.’

In December 2022, she enrolled in Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying, a program that allows people to take their own lives if they have an incurable disease.

Mrs. Thompson told it CTV News Toronto in July 2022, her decision was mainly ‘a financial consideration’ due to her tense circumstances.

While she applied for the program, she told this website that she was legally unable to discuss any further details about the status of her MAiD request.

Adopted in June 2016, only people with a terminal illness where death from natural causes was reasonably foreseeable – known as Track One patients – were eligible for MAiD.

But in March 2021, legislation was updated to create Track Two patients. These are defined as people suffering from an ‘intolerable’ and ‘irreversible’ illness or disability and who may not yet be close to death from natural causes.

Last year, data showed that 13,241 people chose MAiD to die, a 31 percent increase from 2021. This accounted for one in 20 deaths in the country.

The controversial policy, which has some concerned people will commit suicide out of desperation, was further updated in December 2022 so that people looking to MAiD to end their lives solely because of mental illness will become eligible in March 2024.

To qualify for MAiD, people must meet all the criteria: be eligible for government-funded health services; be at least 18 years old and considered mentally competent; has an irreversible medical condition – a condition that is irreversible, in an advanced stage and causing unbearable physical or mental suffering – makes a voluntary request for death; and give informed consent to receive medical assistance to end your life.

There are two methods MAiD uses to end someone’s life. In the first case, a doctor or nurse administers a drug that causes death. In the second case, a doctor or nurse prescribes a medication to a patient that he or she takes himself or herself.

Medications used in MAiD deaths are often medications that healthcare providers already use for other purposes, but in much lower doses, such as pain management, anesthesia, and nausea.

Since her first Covid diagnosis, Ms Thompson has been diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (PoTS) and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS).

ME/CFS is a complicated condition that many doctors remain skeptical about, given its ambiguous definition, difficulty in diagnosing, unknown cause, and similarity to other conditions or side effects of other conditions. Some have even suggested that the disease does not exist.

Patients with chronic fatigue syndrome are diagnosed after suffering from severe exhaustion that does not improve with rest for six months, and patients report feeling so tired that they are homebound for days after performing even the simplest tasks.

There is no cure for the condition.

She has also been diagnosed with POTS, a condition in which the heart rate increases very quickly after getting up from a sitting or lying position. With POTS, the body cannot keep blood flowing at a healthy pace and cannot keep blood pressure steady and steady.

The condition can cause lightheadedness, lightheadedness, brain fog, fatigue, and chest pain. The exact cause of POTS is not known, but people who have recently suffered from a viral illness are at greater risk of developing the syndrome.

In addition, she has been diagnosed with MCAS, a condition in which a person repeatedly experiences symptoms of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction. Symptoms include hives, low blood pressure, swelling and breathing difficulties.

Severe anaphylaxis can be fatal.

Although the symptoms resemble an allergic reaction, MCAS is not caused by allergies, although allergy treatment, such as antihistamines and epinephrine, can be helpful in treating the condition when symptoms occur.

There is also no cure for this condition.

Long Covid is estimated to affect between nine and twenty million Americans, but it is notoriously difficult to diagnose as most clinical diagnostic tests appear normal and much was not known about it in the early days of the pandemic .

Although millions of people report suffering from the condition, Covid has long been difficult to diagnose as most diagnostic tests – such as urinalysis or X-rays – appear normal.

Patients are often dismissed by doctors who think it’s all in their heads or that they have an entirely different condition.

The condition consists of a constellation of symptoms that persist after a person recovers from the initial Covid infection, including persistent fatigue and brain fog.

However, a study published in September found that blood tests of people who report suffering from long Covid-19 show clear biological differences from people who do not have the condition.

The study suggested that blood tests could be helpful in identifying possible treatments for symptoms, which would give hope to those who report living with the condition.