One of the things I keep seeing about COVID is that people recover but have a loss of lung function. And every time I see this, I roll my eyes.
Here’s why.
(For new folks: I have CF, I had a double lung transplant 15 years ago. Pulmonary issues are my bag.)
So, let’s talk about lung funciton.
There are actually different types of lung function, but the type most people are probably talk about it spirometry, which is how much air your lungs can hold, and how much you can blow out in a second. It diagnoses various things and it can tell how much function you have—ie, how many liters of air you can get in your lungs, ie, a percentage.
So, right now, my lung function is about 54%. For me, this is good. This is where I’ve been pretty much since transplant.
Lungs are essentially really strong balloons. If you have normal lungs (ie, not CF lungs), then when you get sick with something like pneumonia, you do lose some lung function. For example, when I had pneumonia a few years ago, my lung function dropped to about 30%. Now, it’s not at 30%—it’s at 54%. Your lungs do recover, just like any other cells in your body. Damaged cells out, new cells in.
As you get older, obviously, this process slows down, and if you’re a smoker, you’re ruining your lungs all the time, STOP IT.
For something like COVID, yes, you will lose lung function initially. We don’t know enough about it to see if this lasts permanently, but my guess is that it doesn’t. Lungs do take awhile to recover. They just do. It’s part of their charm. (Not.) But unless you have CF, which impedes the lungs from healing, then you’re going to be fine, eventually. And even my old, crappy CF lungs recovered to an extent, even after I’d been in a medically induced coma, on a ventilator, for two weeks.
So, if my old crappy lungs could do that, yours can too!
Losing lung function is not the end of the world. Even with 21% lung function, I was in college, I double majored, I had an internship. You can live on it. The problem for a lot of you will be that you’re used to having really good lung function and suddenly it’s gone.
It will—most likely—come back. You have to be patient with the process.
So when I see people freaking about losing lung function, I want to tell them to relax. It will come back. The fact that you’re alive is a miracle, to quote Hamilton. You can get lung function back. It does happen—pretty much all the time, folks. There are also things like pulmonary rehab, which can help you gain back lung function via exercise. There are ways!
So, if you get COVID and you recover, your lungs will recover too. Give them time.