appreciate you!
It is my sincerest desire to be of service to you, M'lord.
*curtsies*
People be very careful this virus is not done yet
- Thread starter easy_b
- Start date
It is my sincerest desire to be of service to you, M'lord.
*curtsies*
There is already a new variant out and now there is going to be a push to say a person is not legally vaccinated unless they get a shot for every variant. These shot pushers are going to have 20+ shots by the time this is over and still be susceptible to catching COVID.
It is my sincerest desire to be of service to you, M'lord.
*curtsies*
honeysuckle
you know its talk like that leave me light headed
have my sugar-betes acting up.
So much for the free market: Florida to fine private businesses that require proof of vaccination
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reminds me of someone. Someone from popular culture. Is it Hannibal Lecter? Nah. Lecter was far more discriminate when it came to choosing his victims. President Camacho from Idiocracy? No way. Camacho at least showed glimmers...
www.dailykos.com
When historians study this period they are going to be shocked that the human race survived.So much for the free market: Florida to fine private businesses that require proof of vaccination
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reminds me of someone. Someone from popular culture. Is it Hannibal Lecter? Nah. Lecter was far more discriminate when it came to choosing his victims. President Camacho from Idiocracy? No way. Camacho at least showed glimmers...www.dailykos.com
...IF it survives.
She has to wait a few weeks before she can get the shot
Johnny Bench tests positive for COVID-19, will miss Baseball Hall of Fame induction
Johnny Bench was in Cincinnati last week for former Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman's Reds Hall of Fame induction.
www.cincinnati.com
@easy_b
@easy_b @Quek9 @Camille
www.espn.com
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
FOR TWO WEEKS last summer, Justin Foster puttered around his Clemson apartment, working out as best he could, waiting for the 14 days of his COVID-19 quarantine to pass. He was one of more than 40 Clemson football players to test positive, and, like most of them, his symptoms were barely noticeable.
The 14 days passed, and he headed back to the field, officially recovered.
ADVERTISEMENT
Something wasn't right. From the first workout, he struggled for breath while he ran, and after practices he collapsed in bed. No amount of sleep was enough.
"Even when you feel your best day, you're still so tired," he says. "You can't really keep up. You can't do anything."
As it became harder to function, doubt seeped in. Maybe something was happening to him, or maybe it was something else. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, "it was almost to the point where I just felt lazy," he says.
What Foster did not know, and would not know for months, was that he was a part of the COVID-19 population that was only beginning to reveal itself. He was a long-hauler, someone whose symptoms persevere for more than four weeks after the initial infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You feel like you're supposed to will your way out of it, show some gumption or get-up-and-go, and your body just ... won't. And like Foster, you start to think you're just lazy, and you worry that people don't believe you. Because often you don't believe yourself.
I didn't. I caught COVID-19 in March 2020, and by June I couldn't understand why I couldn't get myself together. I haven't felt like myself for a single day since.
He's a 22-year-old athlete from North Carolina who had aspirations for the NFL. I'm a 52-year-old journalist who lives in New Jersey and likes to run.
From our first conversation, we connected about what it was like to suddenly no longer be yourself, and the constant self-doubt that came with it. If we can't do the things we used to do, then who are we?
You spend your life running into limits and defining yourself by how you react to them. Then long-haul COVID hits you with limits that you don't know how to deal with, or didn't expect to deal with for years. And no one can tell you whether it will be one more week of this or the rest of your life.
Before the 2020 college football season, Clemson defensive end Justin Foster was a likely fourth- to seventh-round NFL draft pick. Then COVID-19 sidelined him. Jeff Silva/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
JUSTIN FOSTER IS a "yes, ma'am/yes, sir" sort of Southern kid who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a town of about 20,000 just west of Charlotte.
He was quiet, he says, like his parents. He's still pretty quiet. He wasn't a natural athlete, and he wasn't one of those kids driven to play sports.
"Most of the time I was forced to play, just because I was larger than everyone else. I was very clumsy, not coordinated at all," he says. "I was pretty good at football, just because they'd just tell me to tackle the person with the ball."
In high school he was a linebacker, gaining national attention as a junior when he had 67 tackles during Crest High School's perfect 2015 season. (He had 10 tackles in the state championship.) One day his coach, Mark Barnes, handed him a phone and said someone wanted to speak to him. It was Dabo Swinney, who offered him a scholarship.
Only one member of Foster's immediate family had gone to college, he says, and it hadn't occurred to him that football could make him the second. He had been thinking about trade school or the military, some arena where he could use his skill to take any machine, figure out what was wrong with it and then put it back together.
"Everyone else looked at me as a ballplayer, but for me personally it really hadn't set in that that was my identity and that's what I really wanted to do," he says.
Clemson moved him to defensive end, and for his first three seasons, Foster was mostly a role player on a stacked team, showing ability as a pass rusher. The possibility of the NFL was becoming real, though. In 2019 he was honorable mention All-ACC and made the All-ACC Academic Team. (In December 2020, he graduated with a degree in construction sciences with a 3.24 GPA.)
His teammates describe the two sides of Foster they've come to know. There's "Mater," named for the rusty tow truck in the animated movie "Cars." "Mater" Foster fixes their vehicles and changes flat tires and is, in their words, an easygoing country boy.
Then there's the Foster who takes his place on the edge of the defensive line.
"He's a straight power rusher," teammate Myles Murphy says. "Loves to go through the tackle, go through people. Very aggressive player. We like that on the edge."
Before the 2020 season, a number of scouting websites said Foster was a credible "Day 3" NFL draft pick, meaning somewhere between the fourth and seventh rounds. A solid season could push him up the list.
On June 25, 2020, Foster was at his home in Clemson when the text came from the team training staff saying he had tested positive for COVID-19. All he felt at the time was a runny nose that he assumed was allergies.
When he returned to practice two weeks later, the struggle began. He'd had asthma his whole life but felt like it was always under control -- he rarely used an inhaler. Now, he was short of breath all day long. And he felt like he had to do something that went against every part of his personality: ask for help.
"There's some guys that maybe have a little something that's wrong with them and they drag it out for a period of time," says Danny Poole, the team's director of sports medicine, and an athletic trainer for 40 years. "With Justin, he's one of those guys that if he comes and tells you there's something going on, you better believe it."
When Justin Foster returned to practice following his positive COVID-19 test, he wondered why he was the only one of his teammates who hadn't fully recuperated from the virus. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
EVERY DISCUSSION OF long-haul COVID has to start with the caveat that no one fully understands it. Almost two years into the pandemic, experts still have multiple theories about what long-haul COVID is and how to define it.
When Foster and I realized more than a year ago we weren't recovering, there was no consensus that there even was such a thing as long-haul COVID. Some doctors thought their patients were still sick with the disease but that the virus was somehow avoiding detection; some doctors thought patients were suffering from PTSD.
Researchers from the University of Washington estimate that roughly 30% of people infected with COVID-19 develop long-haul syndrome. The severity and symptoms range wildly. Some people feel a little off, while others are unable to get out of bed for days at a time.
What experts have come to believe is that for some unknown reason, long-haulers' immune systems act as though they're still under attack from the virus. Physical or emotional stress, even good stress, disturbs the entire system like a hornet's nest. Doctors want their patients moving so they don't become completely sedentary. But if you have the driven personality of, say, a college football player, accustomed to ignoring pain and fatigue, that drive can make the symptoms worse.
How it all happens and how to treat it, however, are still the subject of widespread debate.
"We all would agree that something is wrong with the immune system," says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Columbia University. "To this day I still don't think we've gotten to why the immune system hasn't reset itself."
When I was infected, I was never hospitalized, never had problems breathing or with my heart. I was sick for three weeks, the worst of it a four-day period when I slept about 18 hours a day. A couple of weeks after I had been sick, I assumed that as soon as I could get my running legs back, I'd feel like myself. On my first run, I felt out of shape, but no more than that. Then, about 36 hours later, my lungs began to ache as though I had been breathing smoke. I was exhausted. I spent the better part of the next couple of days in bed, wondering why I was so tired, wondering if I had grown too comfortable being in bed all day. I began a pattern of recovering, trying to run, then having the same delayed reaction that shut me down all over again. I tried going for walks, but the result was the same.
A friend who survived the virus after 35 days on a ventilator had returned to his pre-COVID strength, but I hadn't. It made no sense. I just need to get back into shape, I repeated. I need to push through it. And that's one of the first things that sets in with long-haul, the question of whether you're imagining everything, or if, mentally, you're too weak to cope.
Throughout doctors' visits, Justin Foster said he had to manage his expectations about whether his health would improve. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
CLEMSON PLAYERS WHO had COVID-19 followed a series of steps before they returned to full workouts. They started with light jogging, then sprinting, then practicing in a green jersey, which signified no contact, always checking in with the trainer at the end of the day.
The main concern, Poole says, was making sure players hadn't contracted myocarditis, a rare but potentially fatal heart inflammation that doctors at the time were concerned was linked to COVID-19. Usually, players were back to full speed a month after being infected. Of the players who were infected, all reported complete recoveries. Except for Foster.
Teammates noticed that Foster was raising his hand during drills, asking coaches to rotate him out so he could catch his breath. They hadn't seen that before.
"If he takes the time to step out, that means something serious," teammate K.J. Henry says. "He has a great grasp on the difference between pain and injury."
Foster says the harder he drove himself, the worse it got.
"I didn't want to be the one that wasn't working out or the one that's always having a problem and having to go to the training room and deal with it," he says. "It was just a lot mentally, pretty much just being down all the time. And I didn't know what was going to happen."
Foster and Swinney shared a shorthand to monitor how he felt. Swinney would wave his thumb in three positions -- up, sideways, down -- and Foster would respond with his own thumb to reflect where he was. Too often it was sideways or down.
After a couple of weeks, he wasn't able to practice at all. Day after day, when his teammates came into the training room to get taped up or treated, they saw Foster sitting in the corner with a nebulizer strapped to his face.
"I just remember him coming to me and he just was kind of was broken down. He said, 'Coach, I can't do it,'" Swinney says. "As an athlete and especially as a football player, we're kind of all wired to go and [be] like, 'Hey, snap out of it.' But this was something you couldn't see. It's not like you got a torn ACL, or you got a broken bone or something like that."
Foster says he worried his teammates thought he was lazy. No, they say. Quite the opposite. The fact that it was Foster who was struggling unnerved them. "No one thought he was lazy at all. We knew that he does what he needs to do every day to prepare," Murphy says.
"The entire team had no idea what was happening: 'Am I going to be next? Why did he react like that to COVID? And if I get COVID, am I going to react the same way?'"
Foster got to the point at which walking up the stairs in the football facility was too much. "It was just a very dark place for a long time," Foster says.
One night during the summer of 2020, Foster went to lie down a little after 11 p.m., when he felt an asthma attack coming on. He did what he usually does during an episode and took a puff from his inhaler. It didn't work.
He didn't want to call 911 and go to an emergency room in the middle of a pandemic, so he called Poole, the trainer.
Poole says he was struck by the fear in Foster's voice and told him to get to the team facility. Poole and the team physician put Foster on a nebulizer and talked him through breathing drills until, finally, a few hours later, the attack subsided.
In the weeks that followed, the training staff took Foster to several local doctors, each of whom came to the same conclusion, that there was no medical problem they could identify.
"It's like, am I crazy?" Foster says. "Is something going on with me mentally that I just can't push through this?"
Clemson teammates and trainers say Justin Foster is not one to exaggerate injuries. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
IT WASN'T JUST his body. Foster took summer classes, and when he sat at a computer or tried to read a book, his mind couldn't grasp what was in front of him. This from someone who was an All-ACC Academic Team selection.
"There was a time where I was probably three weeks behind in class. I'm never a person not to do my work," he says.
The mental fog can be more destabilizing for some people than the physical symptoms. You don't recognize yourself, but you look normal to everyone else. I had plenty of evenings with friends or family when I could rally for a few hours, but I knew I'd be wiped out for the next two days. In my lower moments, it became too difficult to read because simple words didn't make sense. When I wrote, I might forget what I was writing in the middle of a sentence.
Over and over, I went through the process of researching something for an article, writing that portion, polishing it and then discovering that I had already done all that hours earlier. I had no memory of writing the same material. I learned to use outlines and checklists to do what I'd relied on my mind to do for 30 years. I had to lean heavily on colleagues to make sure that my work was clean.
In conversation, I frequently lost thoughts in mid-sentence, and then worried people thought I was being melodramatic. There were times watching TV when my mind couldn't keep up with the dialogue and I had to hit pause. Twice I got lost driving near my home and had to use Waze to get back.
And many nights I hit that wall and had to leave the dinner table as my family watched knowingly, not saying anything because they knew I didn't want the attention. I'd be in bed the rest of the night.
Most of the time I felt like I was possessed by someone dumber and more irritable. The cuts to my sense of self were relentless, with the wild, vivid dreams I had every morning, my inability to smell or taste, the strange things I found myself saying, the words I couldn't come up with, the loss of desire for longtime passions, the difficulty of small talk. Experiencing the minutiae of the day and thinking, "This just isn't me," over and over for months.
When I shared that with Foster he nodded and said, "Exactly."
My low point might have come after a weekend in November visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C., the most active two days I'd had in months. When I got home that Monday night, I saw a story from my colleague Jeff Passan about Tony La Russa's DUI. Something was vaguely familiar about it, and it hit me that Jeff and I had spoken three days earlier. I called him and was blunt. "I need to know, did I f--- something up? Was there something you asked me to do?"
"Actually," he said, "there was."
It turned out to be inconsequential, and Jeff couldn't have been better about it, but I had no memory of the conversation. It was like being told about a drunken blackout. And then the thought hit me that I had no way of knowing how many times this had happened over the previous eight months.
I felt like a writer who couldn't write, a reader who couldn't read, a runner who couldn't go for a walk, a father and husband who disappeared into his own head every night. Lesser in every way I could measure. I kept repeating to myself, "Useless."
Justin Foster's search for answers ultimately led him to Duke University's post-COVID-19 clinic, one of several that had cropped up during the pandemic to study long-haulers. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE FIRST TIME Foster heard the term "long haul" was in August 2020, from head trainer Poole. Foster then went to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where, finally, a doctor said his issues were indeed probably related to his COVID-19 infection, and they were real. No one could explain why his asthma attacks had become so intense, and no one could say when or if he would get better. But just hearing about "long haul" was a massive relief.
"Someone telling me that I'm not crazy and that there's actually something going on, that was the first time that I realized that I could relax," he says. "I knew that there was actually something going on that was causing me to be like this."
For the first two months after I'd been sick, convinced I had fallen into some rut of laziness that I couldn't break out of, I wondered if I'd even had COVID at all. In those early pandemic days in North Jersey, you couldn't get a test unless you needed to be hospitalized. I might be imagining this whole thing, I thought.
Ultimately, I took my sons with me to get antibody tests, and even as the nurse drew blood from my arm, I felt like I was on a path to being exposed as a fraud. A few days later the call came and someone read me results. Michael Quinn ... negative. Liam Quinn ... negative. Thomas Quinn ...
As I waited to hear my result my heart was pounding so violently my shirt was moving. "Positive," she said.
The wave of relief that went through me felt like anesthesia. I teared up. I wasn't crazy. I had no idea what would happen, but for the moment it was enough to know it was all real. She sent me a copy of the test result, and I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
AS THE 2020 football season began, knowing he was fighting an illness and not his own mind, Foster still had hopes of rallying. But week by week, nothing changed, and his nights became lessons in terror.
"There were multiple nights where I would lay down and I would be choking in my sleep. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could barely breathe," he says. "That's when I was at my lowest point because I just didn't know what was going to happen. ... If I was going to go to sleep one day and not wake up."
Midway through the season, Foster and Swinney agreed that he needed to focus on his health. There was always next year. Foster went to practices and home games but didn't dress, speaking up when the defensive line gathered, maybe sharing a certain move that would work against an offensive tackle.
"At practice, even in games, he'd be right there, pretty much just coaching us up," Murphy says.
And when the defense was on the field, Foster found a spot on the sideline where he was unlikely to encounter players tumbling out of bounds. "I knew if something did happen I couldn't run fast enough to get out of the way, and I didn't want to cause a scene," he says.
But he says it was killing him not to participate or know whether he might play again. The idea began to sink in that he had to walk away from football altogether, just to be able to move on mentally and emotionally to the next part of his life. To become whatever he was going to be after football. There was always going to be an end to his career; maybe this was it.
He says he made the decision in December but didn't make it official for two months. "I couldn't really bring myself to do it, just because of all the work I'd put in," he says.
On Feb. 24 this year, Foster went to the Clemson football facility and sat outside Swinney's office for 90 minutes until the coach was free. Foster told him he needed to step away from football. Swinney said he understood and told Foster he would have a place on the team if he wanted to come back.
Foster told the rest of the world that day on social media.
"Today is a difficult day for me, but it is also a day of reflection and gratitude," he wrote. "With sadness but no regret, I have decided it is in my best interest to call it a career and hang up football."
A week later, Foster told me about the frustration he felt.
"The question I would ask when I went to the doctor is, 'You guys say you don't see anything; you guys say that things are getting better. I don't feel better. So is this a new life for me? Is this my life now?' And if it is, just tell me that. And I will be fine what that, and I'll just have to deal with it.
"I don't want to get my hopes up and keep hoping and hoping and hoping that I'm going to be back to normal."
We were experiencing something akin to sudden aging, leaping past what we saw as the coming vital years. You had to fight the urge to dwell on what had been lost or whether you could ever get it back. You had to learn that patience and acceptance weren't weaknesses, they were the only strengths you had left at times. This is what I can do today. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Long-haul COVID-19 ended up jeopardizing Justin Foster's entire football career. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE SAME DAY Foster announced his retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, announced a new federal initiative to study long-haul COVID, and dubbed the syndrome with an official name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.
By that point, several prominent hospitals had established post-COVID clinics to both treat patients and gather data. Foster attended one at Duke, and I went to the one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan -- an appointment I had to make five months in advance.
I met with a "functional medicine" doctor, who said the goal was to get my body's inflammation down so my autonomic nervous system would switch back to its normal state. I later learned not all experts believe the nervous system is even involved, but I was advised to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, take a number of supplements to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation, wear compression clothing to help circulation, get a lot of rest when I needed it. I couldn't tell you if any of it has helped, but I do it.
Before COVID, I was in obnoxiously good health. But like many long-haulers, my blood pressure and cholesterol hit inexplicably high levels after I got sick.
Part of the Mt. Sinai program is visiting with a cardiologist, and the day I saw her in March my blood pressure was 155/110, a fairly alarming number. I hadn't had any cardiac symptoms, but as she listened to my chest she said, "I think I hear a murmur."
An echocardiogram showed that she was right. The aortic valve in my heart was slightly dilated, allowing some blood flow back into the chamber. The good news was the condition is mild and completely manageable. It's possible it had been there for years but eluded detection. But it's possible, she said, that the elevated blood pressure I'd had for a year at that point caused it to dilate. However it got that way, I needed to get my blood pressure under control and will have to control it for the rest of my life to prevent more serious problems.
When Foster went to Duke's clinic for the first time, most of the focus was on his lungs. His pulmonologist there, Dr. Loretta Que, said during one test he was using only 49% of his lung capacity. She and the team there put him on a regimen of new medications.
"Prior to COVID, he hardly ever had to use an inhaler, and now he's on a chronic medication," she says. "I can't predict whether or not he's going to be able to come off of those in the future, but that's something that we're going to need to evaluate for."
THERE WAS A ray of hope out there for both of us in early 2021. At first the results were anecdotal, but long-haulers around the country were reporting dramatic recoveries after getting vaccinated. As data began to roll in, Columbia's Griffin estimated that 40% of long-haulers were seeing improvement.
I got my first shot in March and didn't notice any difference. A couple of weeks later, Foster got his. When I was headed to get my second injection, I texted him to see how he was doing. He wrote back, "1.5 mile jog this morning."
I woke up the day after my second shot feeling the sickest I'd ever felt in my life. The worst of it passed after two days, and over the course of the next two weeks I realized I might be feeling worse overall than I had before the shot.
But something had changed for Foster. Maybe it was the vaccine and maybe it was the progress he had felt since changing medications. Maybe it was just the passage of time. But suddenly a comeback seemed possible.
He began to push himself. His runs got a little longer, and he started to lift weights again. In April, he went back to Duke and got more good news. That 49% lung output was now 102%. Dr. Que put him on a new inhaler and said he was ready to attempt a comeback.
"She was telling me, what do I have to lose? She's like, 'You go back, you try to play again, and if you can't play, you just can't play.' And I was like, 'It's not a bad option,'" he says.
As Foster walked out of the appointment, his phone rang. It was Swinney, just checking on him. That was the moment, Foster says, when he decided he was ready to try, although he didn't share that on the phone call. He wanted to take some time to be sure.
A few days later, he called Swinney. He was ready, he said. Swinney beamed and told Foster he could go at his own pace, and if he's able to play only 10 snaps a game, so be it. Foster had a place on the team.
He started out doing drills at half speed, then continued to build until he was able to complete full workouts. Sometimes he has to take long naps when he finishes, but he's able to do the work. Occasionally during a sprint, he says, his throat will start to close up, but he keeps his inhaler handy and knows to drop out if he needs to.
"You break it down to almost every hour of the day: This is what I do now, this is what I do in an hour. It takes a lot of the mental stress out of it," he says. "When you look at goals that are maybe a year down the line, and you look at your situation, it puts a lot of mental stress on you."
He says he's ready to play, and his coach agrees, without hesitation. "He's back," Swinney says.
But Foster is still a long-hauler, still missing a sense of smell, still struck by occasional shortness of breath or pains in his chest, still prone to brain fog when he's tired. Since COVID-19, he has intense reactions to any bug bites. Last week during practice, he started to feel lightheaded and his throat started to close. He used an EpiPen -- one he's carried since a pre-COVID allergy to bees -- to make it stop. He and the medical staff couldn't figure out if it was related to food or a bug bite, but Foster chalks it up to "the new normal."
"When I get setbacks I stay positive about them," he says. "It could be worse: I could not be playing. I could be struggling a lot worse than I am, but I keep getting better."
And he still has a full season ahead of him, with another chance at the NFL.
"It's almost like it's not real," he says. "I mean, most of the time you get one shot, one chance, and once it's done, it's done."
Yet on Saturday night, 436 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Foster will take the field with his teammates to play the University of Georgia.
Justin Foster will return to the field for the 2021 college football season, and he still has his sights set on the NFL. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
IN MID-JULY, I was feeling out of options. The vaccine hadn't done the trick, and I didn't know what else to try. I remembered I had a methylprednisolone prescription that a doctor had written for me nine months earlier, but for whatever reason I hadn't taken it. I decided to give it a try, a medical Hail Mary, thinking another assault on my body's inflammation couldn't hurt.
I discussed it briefly with my cardiologist, and she agreed it was worth trying. I began the six-day steroid pack, and for the next six days I had a migraine every day. When it was over, something had changed.
I drove to North Carolina to meet with Foster in person for the first time. The trip from New Jersey should've laid me out for days. It didn't. I still hit the wall in the evenings, but later and not as badly. Maybe it was the methylprednisolone, maybe it was the supplements, maybe it was the meditation or the acupuncture, maybe it was time. On the Saturday after I met Foster in person, I went for a run.
On July 19, I texted him and said I had completed my fifth run in eight days. They were slow and short and ugly and I was fatigued and sore at night, but I was doing it. He wrote back, "That's what's up."
I took a chapter from the same book he did: Let go of expectations. Do what you can right now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Walk a quarter mile, run a quarter mile, repeat until you can do more. Keep going.
When I went back to my cardiologist with the news, she beamed. "I think I'm more excited than you are," she said. I told her I was just trying to keep an even keel after 16 months of hope and setbacks.
"You're going to get there," she said. "It might take you another year, but you're going to get there."
A year and a half after the long haul began, after wondering if this is what the rest of my life will be, "one more year" sounds like early parole. There are no promises. I still have days when I feel like hell, and I don't know what to make of them. But I get up each day and check my blood pressure, I take my supplements, I eat my heart-healthy diet, I exercise when I can and I'm starting another course of steroids.
Today, I finished this story. Tomorrow, I'll do something else. On Saturday, I'll watch Justin. And then we'll both see what's next.
ESPN feature producer Damien Esparza and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
When Clemson defensive end Justin Foster returned to the field following a COVID-19 diagnosis last year, he wasn't himself. He'd become a COVID long-hauler, and the symptoms would test his physical and mental limits. It's a struggle I can relate with.
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
FOR TWO WEEKS last summer, Justin Foster puttered around his Clemson apartment, working out as best he could, waiting for the 14 days of his COVID-19 quarantine to pass. He was one of more than 40 Clemson football players to test positive, and, like most of them, his symptoms were barely noticeable.
The 14 days passed, and he headed back to the field, officially recovered.
ADVERTISEMENT
Something wasn't right. From the first workout, he struggled for breath while he ran, and after practices he collapsed in bed. No amount of sleep was enough.
"Even when you feel your best day, you're still so tired," he says. "You can't really keep up. You can't do anything."
As it became harder to function, doubt seeped in. Maybe something was happening to him, or maybe it was something else. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, "it was almost to the point where I just felt lazy," he says.
What Foster did not know, and would not know for months, was that he was a part of the COVID-19 population that was only beginning to reveal itself. He was a long-hauler, someone whose symptoms persevere for more than four weeks after the initial infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You feel like you're supposed to will your way out of it, show some gumption or get-up-and-go, and your body just ... won't. And like Foster, you start to think you're just lazy, and you worry that people don't believe you. Because often you don't believe yourself.
I didn't. I caught COVID-19 in March 2020, and by June I couldn't understand why I couldn't get myself together. I haven't felt like myself for a single day since.
He's a 22-year-old athlete from North Carolina who had aspirations for the NFL. I'm a 52-year-old journalist who lives in New Jersey and likes to run.
From our first conversation, we connected about what it was like to suddenly no longer be yourself, and the constant self-doubt that came with it. If we can't do the things we used to do, then who are we?
You spend your life running into limits and defining yourself by how you react to them. Then long-haul COVID hits you with limits that you don't know how to deal with, or didn't expect to deal with for years. And no one can tell you whether it will be one more week of this or the rest of your life.
Before the 2020 college football season, Clemson defensive end Justin Foster was a likely fourth- to seventh-round NFL draft pick. Then COVID-19 sidelined him. Jeff Silva/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
JUSTIN FOSTER IS a "yes, ma'am/yes, sir" sort of Southern kid who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a town of about 20,000 just west of Charlotte.
He was quiet, he says, like his parents. He's still pretty quiet. He wasn't a natural athlete, and he wasn't one of those kids driven to play sports.
"Most of the time I was forced to play, just because I was larger than everyone else. I was very clumsy, not coordinated at all," he says. "I was pretty good at football, just because they'd just tell me to tackle the person with the ball."
In high school he was a linebacker, gaining national attention as a junior when he had 67 tackles during Crest High School's perfect 2015 season. (He had 10 tackles in the state championship.) One day his coach, Mark Barnes, handed him a phone and said someone wanted to speak to him. It was Dabo Swinney, who offered him a scholarship.
Only one member of Foster's immediate family had gone to college, he says, and it hadn't occurred to him that football could make him the second. He had been thinking about trade school or the military, some arena where he could use his skill to take any machine, figure out what was wrong with it and then put it back together.
"Everyone else looked at me as a ballplayer, but for me personally it really hadn't set in that that was my identity and that's what I really wanted to do," he says.
Clemson moved him to defensive end, and for his first three seasons, Foster was mostly a role player on a stacked team, showing ability as a pass rusher. The possibility of the NFL was becoming real, though. In 2019 he was honorable mention All-ACC and made the All-ACC Academic Team. (In December 2020, he graduated with a degree in construction sciences with a 3.24 GPA.)
His teammates describe the two sides of Foster they've come to know. There's "Mater," named for the rusty tow truck in the animated movie "Cars." "Mater" Foster fixes their vehicles and changes flat tires and is, in their words, an easygoing country boy.
Then there's the Foster who takes his place on the edge of the defensive line.
"He's a straight power rusher," teammate Myles Murphy says. "Loves to go through the tackle, go through people. Very aggressive player. We like that on the edge."
Before the 2020 season, a number of scouting websites said Foster was a credible "Day 3" NFL draft pick, meaning somewhere between the fourth and seventh rounds. A solid season could push him up the list.
On June 25, 2020, Foster was at his home in Clemson when the text came from the team training staff saying he had tested positive for COVID-19. All he felt at the time was a runny nose that he assumed was allergies.
When he returned to practice two weeks later, the struggle began. He'd had asthma his whole life but felt like it was always under control -- he rarely used an inhaler. Now, he was short of breath all day long. And he felt like he had to do something that went against every part of his personality: ask for help.
"There's some guys that maybe have a little something that's wrong with them and they drag it out for a period of time," says Danny Poole, the team's director of sports medicine, and an athletic trainer for 40 years. "With Justin, he's one of those guys that if he comes and tells you there's something going on, you better believe it."
When Justin Foster returned to practice following his positive COVID-19 test, he wondered why he was the only one of his teammates who hadn't fully recuperated from the virus. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
EVERY DISCUSSION OF long-haul COVID has to start with the caveat that no one fully understands it. Almost two years into the pandemic, experts still have multiple theories about what long-haul COVID is and how to define it.
When Foster and I realized more than a year ago we weren't recovering, there was no consensus that there even was such a thing as long-haul COVID. Some doctors thought their patients were still sick with the disease but that the virus was somehow avoiding detection; some doctors thought patients were suffering from PTSD.
Researchers from the University of Washington estimate that roughly 30% of people infected with COVID-19 develop long-haul syndrome. The severity and symptoms range wildly. Some people feel a little off, while others are unable to get out of bed for days at a time.
What experts have come to believe is that for some unknown reason, long-haulers' immune systems act as though they're still under attack from the virus. Physical or emotional stress, even good stress, disturbs the entire system like a hornet's nest. Doctors want their patients moving so they don't become completely sedentary. But if you have the driven personality of, say, a college football player, accustomed to ignoring pain and fatigue, that drive can make the symptoms worse.
How it all happens and how to treat it, however, are still the subject of widespread debate.
"We all would agree that something is wrong with the immune system," says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Columbia University. "To this day I still don't think we've gotten to why the immune system hasn't reset itself."
When I was infected, I was never hospitalized, never had problems breathing or with my heart. I was sick for three weeks, the worst of it a four-day period when I slept about 18 hours a day. A couple of weeks after I had been sick, I assumed that as soon as I could get my running legs back, I'd feel like myself. On my first run, I felt out of shape, but no more than that. Then, about 36 hours later, my lungs began to ache as though I had been breathing smoke. I was exhausted. I spent the better part of the next couple of days in bed, wondering why I was so tired, wondering if I had grown too comfortable being in bed all day. I began a pattern of recovering, trying to run, then having the same delayed reaction that shut me down all over again. I tried going for walks, but the result was the same.
A friend who survived the virus after 35 days on a ventilator had returned to his pre-COVID strength, but I hadn't. It made no sense. I just need to get back into shape, I repeated. I need to push through it. And that's one of the first things that sets in with long-haul, the question of whether you're imagining everything, or if, mentally, you're too weak to cope.
Throughout doctors' visits, Justin Foster said he had to manage his expectations about whether his health would improve. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
CLEMSON PLAYERS WHO had COVID-19 followed a series of steps before they returned to full workouts. They started with light jogging, then sprinting, then practicing in a green jersey, which signified no contact, always checking in with the trainer at the end of the day.
The main concern, Poole says, was making sure players hadn't contracted myocarditis, a rare but potentially fatal heart inflammation that doctors at the time were concerned was linked to COVID-19. Usually, players were back to full speed a month after being infected. Of the players who were infected, all reported complete recoveries. Except for Foster.
Teammates noticed that Foster was raising his hand during drills, asking coaches to rotate him out so he could catch his breath. They hadn't seen that before.
"If he takes the time to step out, that means something serious," teammate K.J. Henry says. "He has a great grasp on the difference between pain and injury."
Foster says the harder he drove himself, the worse it got.
"I didn't want to be the one that wasn't working out or the one that's always having a problem and having to go to the training room and deal with it," he says. "It was just a lot mentally, pretty much just being down all the time. And I didn't know what was going to happen."
Foster and Swinney shared a shorthand to monitor how he felt. Swinney would wave his thumb in three positions -- up, sideways, down -- and Foster would respond with his own thumb to reflect where he was. Too often it was sideways or down.
After a couple of weeks, he wasn't able to practice at all. Day after day, when his teammates came into the training room to get taped up or treated, they saw Foster sitting in the corner with a nebulizer strapped to his face.
"I just remember him coming to me and he just was kind of was broken down. He said, 'Coach, I can't do it,'" Swinney says. "As an athlete and especially as a football player, we're kind of all wired to go and [be] like, 'Hey, snap out of it.' But this was something you couldn't see. It's not like you got a torn ACL, or you got a broken bone or something like that."
Foster says he worried his teammates thought he was lazy. No, they say. Quite the opposite. The fact that it was Foster who was struggling unnerved them. "No one thought he was lazy at all. We knew that he does what he needs to do every day to prepare," Murphy says.
"The entire team had no idea what was happening: 'Am I going to be next? Why did he react like that to COVID? And if I get COVID, am I going to react the same way?'"
Foster got to the point at which walking up the stairs in the football facility was too much. "It was just a very dark place for a long time," Foster says.
One night during the summer of 2020, Foster went to lie down a little after 11 p.m., when he felt an asthma attack coming on. He did what he usually does during an episode and took a puff from his inhaler. It didn't work.
He didn't want to call 911 and go to an emergency room in the middle of a pandemic, so he called Poole, the trainer.
Poole says he was struck by the fear in Foster's voice and told him to get to the team facility. Poole and the team physician put Foster on a nebulizer and talked him through breathing drills until, finally, a few hours later, the attack subsided.
In the weeks that followed, the training staff took Foster to several local doctors, each of whom came to the same conclusion, that there was no medical problem they could identify.
"It's like, am I crazy?" Foster says. "Is something going on with me mentally that I just can't push through this?"
Clemson teammates and trainers say Justin Foster is not one to exaggerate injuries. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
IT WASN'T JUST his body. Foster took summer classes, and when he sat at a computer or tried to read a book, his mind couldn't grasp what was in front of him. This from someone who was an All-ACC Academic Team selection.
"There was a time where I was probably three weeks behind in class. I'm never a person not to do my work," he says.
The mental fog can be more destabilizing for some people than the physical symptoms. You don't recognize yourself, but you look normal to everyone else. I had plenty of evenings with friends or family when I could rally for a few hours, but I knew I'd be wiped out for the next two days. In my lower moments, it became too difficult to read because simple words didn't make sense. When I wrote, I might forget what I was writing in the middle of a sentence.
Over and over, I went through the process of researching something for an article, writing that portion, polishing it and then discovering that I had already done all that hours earlier. I had no memory of writing the same material. I learned to use outlines and checklists to do what I'd relied on my mind to do for 30 years. I had to lean heavily on colleagues to make sure that my work was clean.
In conversation, I frequently lost thoughts in mid-sentence, and then worried people thought I was being melodramatic. There were times watching TV when my mind couldn't keep up with the dialogue and I had to hit pause. Twice I got lost driving near my home and had to use Waze to get back.
And many nights I hit that wall and had to leave the dinner table as my family watched knowingly, not saying anything because they knew I didn't want the attention. I'd be in bed the rest of the night.
Most of the time I felt like I was possessed by someone dumber and more irritable. The cuts to my sense of self were relentless, with the wild, vivid dreams I had every morning, my inability to smell or taste, the strange things I found myself saying, the words I couldn't come up with, the loss of desire for longtime passions, the difficulty of small talk. Experiencing the minutiae of the day and thinking, "This just isn't me," over and over for months.
When I shared that with Foster he nodded and said, "Exactly."
My low point might have come after a weekend in November visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C., the most active two days I'd had in months. When I got home that Monday night, I saw a story from my colleague Jeff Passan about Tony La Russa's DUI. Something was vaguely familiar about it, and it hit me that Jeff and I had spoken three days earlier. I called him and was blunt. "I need to know, did I f--- something up? Was there something you asked me to do?"
"Actually," he said, "there was."
It turned out to be inconsequential, and Jeff couldn't have been better about it, but I had no memory of the conversation. It was like being told about a drunken blackout. And then the thought hit me that I had no way of knowing how many times this had happened over the previous eight months.
I felt like a writer who couldn't write, a reader who couldn't read, a runner who couldn't go for a walk, a father and husband who disappeared into his own head every night. Lesser in every way I could measure. I kept repeating to myself, "Useless."
Justin Foster's search for answers ultimately led him to Duke University's post-COVID-19 clinic, one of several that had cropped up during the pandemic to study long-haulers. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE FIRST TIME Foster heard the term "long haul" was in August 2020, from head trainer Poole. Foster then went to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where, finally, a doctor said his issues were indeed probably related to his COVID-19 infection, and they were real. No one could explain why his asthma attacks had become so intense, and no one could say when or if he would get better. But just hearing about "long haul" was a massive relief.
"Someone telling me that I'm not crazy and that there's actually something going on, that was the first time that I realized that I could relax," he says. "I knew that there was actually something going on that was causing me to be like this."
For the first two months after I'd been sick, convinced I had fallen into some rut of laziness that I couldn't break out of, I wondered if I'd even had COVID at all. In those early pandemic days in North Jersey, you couldn't get a test unless you needed to be hospitalized. I might be imagining this whole thing, I thought.
Ultimately, I took my sons with me to get antibody tests, and even as the nurse drew blood from my arm, I felt like I was on a path to being exposed as a fraud. A few days later the call came and someone read me results. Michael Quinn ... negative. Liam Quinn ... negative. Thomas Quinn ...
As I waited to hear my result my heart was pounding so violently my shirt was moving. "Positive," she said.
The wave of relief that went through me felt like anesthesia. I teared up. I wasn't crazy. I had no idea what would happen, but for the moment it was enough to know it was all real. She sent me a copy of the test result, and I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
AS THE 2020 football season began, knowing he was fighting an illness and not his own mind, Foster still had hopes of rallying. But week by week, nothing changed, and his nights became lessons in terror.
"There were multiple nights where I would lay down and I would be choking in my sleep. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could barely breathe," he says. "That's when I was at my lowest point because I just didn't know what was going to happen. ... If I was going to go to sleep one day and not wake up."
Midway through the season, Foster and Swinney agreed that he needed to focus on his health. There was always next year. Foster went to practices and home games but didn't dress, speaking up when the defensive line gathered, maybe sharing a certain move that would work against an offensive tackle.
"At practice, even in games, he'd be right there, pretty much just coaching us up," Murphy says.
And when the defense was on the field, Foster found a spot on the sideline where he was unlikely to encounter players tumbling out of bounds. "I knew if something did happen I couldn't run fast enough to get out of the way, and I didn't want to cause a scene," he says.
But he says it was killing him not to participate or know whether he might play again. The idea began to sink in that he had to walk away from football altogether, just to be able to move on mentally and emotionally to the next part of his life. To become whatever he was going to be after football. There was always going to be an end to his career; maybe this was it.
He says he made the decision in December but didn't make it official for two months. "I couldn't really bring myself to do it, just because of all the work I'd put in," he says.
On Feb. 24 this year, Foster went to the Clemson football facility and sat outside Swinney's office for 90 minutes until the coach was free. Foster told him he needed to step away from football. Swinney said he understood and told Foster he would have a place on the team if he wanted to come back.
Foster told the rest of the world that day on social media.
"Today is a difficult day for me, but it is also a day of reflection and gratitude," he wrote. "With sadness but no regret, I have decided it is in my best interest to call it a career and hang up football."
A week later, Foster told me about the frustration he felt.
"The question I would ask when I went to the doctor is, 'You guys say you don't see anything; you guys say that things are getting better. I don't feel better. So is this a new life for me? Is this my life now?' And if it is, just tell me that. And I will be fine what that, and I'll just have to deal with it.
"I don't want to get my hopes up and keep hoping and hoping and hoping that I'm going to be back to normal."
We were experiencing something akin to sudden aging, leaping past what we saw as the coming vital years. You had to fight the urge to dwell on what had been lost or whether you could ever get it back. You had to learn that patience and acceptance weren't weaknesses, they were the only strengths you had left at times. This is what I can do today. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Long-haul COVID-19 ended up jeopardizing Justin Foster's entire football career. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE SAME DAY Foster announced his retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, announced a new federal initiative to study long-haul COVID, and dubbed the syndrome with an official name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.
By that point, several prominent hospitals had established post-COVID clinics to both treat patients and gather data. Foster attended one at Duke, and I went to the one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan -- an appointment I had to make five months in advance.
I met with a "functional medicine" doctor, who said the goal was to get my body's inflammation down so my autonomic nervous system would switch back to its normal state. I later learned not all experts believe the nervous system is even involved, but I was advised to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, take a number of supplements to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation, wear compression clothing to help circulation, get a lot of rest when I needed it. I couldn't tell you if any of it has helped, but I do it.
Before COVID, I was in obnoxiously good health. But like many long-haulers, my blood pressure and cholesterol hit inexplicably high levels after I got sick.
Part of the Mt. Sinai program is visiting with a cardiologist, and the day I saw her in March my blood pressure was 155/110, a fairly alarming number. I hadn't had any cardiac symptoms, but as she listened to my chest she said, "I think I hear a murmur."
An echocardiogram showed that she was right. The aortic valve in my heart was slightly dilated, allowing some blood flow back into the chamber. The good news was the condition is mild and completely manageable. It's possible it had been there for years but eluded detection. But it's possible, she said, that the elevated blood pressure I'd had for a year at that point caused it to dilate. However it got that way, I needed to get my blood pressure under control and will have to control it for the rest of my life to prevent more serious problems.
When Foster went to Duke's clinic for the first time, most of the focus was on his lungs. His pulmonologist there, Dr. Loretta Que, said during one test he was using only 49% of his lung capacity. She and the team there put him on a regimen of new medications.
"Prior to COVID, he hardly ever had to use an inhaler, and now he's on a chronic medication," she says. "I can't predict whether or not he's going to be able to come off of those in the future, but that's something that we're going to need to evaluate for."
THERE WAS A ray of hope out there for both of us in early 2021. At first the results were anecdotal, but long-haulers around the country were reporting dramatic recoveries after getting vaccinated. As data began to roll in, Columbia's Griffin estimated that 40% of long-haulers were seeing improvement.
I got my first shot in March and didn't notice any difference. A couple of weeks later, Foster got his. When I was headed to get my second injection, I texted him to see how he was doing. He wrote back, "1.5 mile jog this morning."
I woke up the day after my second shot feeling the sickest I'd ever felt in my life. The worst of it passed after two days, and over the course of the next two weeks I realized I might be feeling worse overall than I had before the shot.
But something had changed for Foster. Maybe it was the vaccine and maybe it was the progress he had felt since changing medications. Maybe it was just the passage of time. But suddenly a comeback seemed possible.
He began to push himself. His runs got a little longer, and he started to lift weights again. In April, he went back to Duke and got more good news. That 49% lung output was now 102%. Dr. Que put him on a new inhaler and said he was ready to attempt a comeback.
"She was telling me, what do I have to lose? She's like, 'You go back, you try to play again, and if you can't play, you just can't play.' And I was like, 'It's not a bad option,'" he says.
As Foster walked out of the appointment, his phone rang. It was Swinney, just checking on him. That was the moment, Foster says, when he decided he was ready to try, although he didn't share that on the phone call. He wanted to take some time to be sure.
A few days later, he called Swinney. He was ready, he said. Swinney beamed and told Foster he could go at his own pace, and if he's able to play only 10 snaps a game, so be it. Foster had a place on the team.
He started out doing drills at half speed, then continued to build until he was able to complete full workouts. Sometimes he has to take long naps when he finishes, but he's able to do the work. Occasionally during a sprint, he says, his throat will start to close up, but he keeps his inhaler handy and knows to drop out if he needs to.
"You break it down to almost every hour of the day: This is what I do now, this is what I do in an hour. It takes a lot of the mental stress out of it," he says. "When you look at goals that are maybe a year down the line, and you look at your situation, it puts a lot of mental stress on you."
He says he's ready to play, and his coach agrees, without hesitation. "He's back," Swinney says.
But Foster is still a long-hauler, still missing a sense of smell, still struck by occasional shortness of breath or pains in his chest, still prone to brain fog when he's tired. Since COVID-19, he has intense reactions to any bug bites. Last week during practice, he started to feel lightheaded and his throat started to close. He used an EpiPen -- one he's carried since a pre-COVID allergy to bees -- to make it stop. He and the medical staff couldn't figure out if it was related to food or a bug bite, but Foster chalks it up to "the new normal."
"When I get setbacks I stay positive about them," he says. "It could be worse: I could not be playing. I could be struggling a lot worse than I am, but I keep getting better."
And he still has a full season ahead of him, with another chance at the NFL.
"It's almost like it's not real," he says. "I mean, most of the time you get one shot, one chance, and once it's done, it's done."
Yet on Saturday night, 436 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Foster will take the field with his teammates to play the University of Georgia.
Justin Foster will return to the field for the 2021 college football season, and he still has his sights set on the NFL. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
IN MID-JULY, I was feeling out of options. The vaccine hadn't done the trick, and I didn't know what else to try. I remembered I had a methylprednisolone prescription that a doctor had written for me nine months earlier, but for whatever reason I hadn't taken it. I decided to give it a try, a medical Hail Mary, thinking another assault on my body's inflammation couldn't hurt.
I discussed it briefly with my cardiologist, and she agreed it was worth trying. I began the six-day steroid pack, and for the next six days I had a migraine every day. When it was over, something had changed.
I drove to North Carolina to meet with Foster in person for the first time. The trip from New Jersey should've laid me out for days. It didn't. I still hit the wall in the evenings, but later and not as badly. Maybe it was the methylprednisolone, maybe it was the supplements, maybe it was the meditation or the acupuncture, maybe it was time. On the Saturday after I met Foster in person, I went for a run.
On July 19, I texted him and said I had completed my fifth run in eight days. They were slow and short and ugly and I was fatigued and sore at night, but I was doing it. He wrote back, "That's what's up."
I took a chapter from the same book he did: Let go of expectations. Do what you can right now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Walk a quarter mile, run a quarter mile, repeat until you can do more. Keep going.
When I went back to my cardiologist with the news, she beamed. "I think I'm more excited than you are," she said. I told her I was just trying to keep an even keel after 16 months of hope and setbacks.
"You're going to get there," she said. "It might take you another year, but you're going to get there."
A year and a half after the long haul began, after wondering if this is what the rest of my life will be, "one more year" sounds like early parole. There are no promises. I still have days when I feel like hell, and I don't know what to make of them. But I get up each day and check my blood pressure, I take my supplements, I eat my heart-healthy diet, I exercise when I can and I'm starting another course of steroids.
Today, I finished this story. Tomorrow, I'll do something else. On Saturday, I'll watch Justin. And then we'll both see what's next.
ESPN feature producer Damien Esparza and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
Last edited:
Indianapolis Colts GM Chris Ballard: 'Consequences' for players unvaccinated against COVID-19
Sep 1, 2021
Ballard, in his annual media session before the start of the regular season, spent a significant amount of time answering questions about a number of his players not being vaccinated after quarterback Carson Wentz, center Ryan Kelly and receiver Zach Pascal were placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list Monday after coming in close contact with a Colts staff member who tested positive.
ADVERTISEMENT
Wentz, Kelly and Pascal can return to facility on the sixth day after the close contact if they have negative tests and remain asymptomatic. The fact that the three players were placed on the list as close contacts is an indication they are not vaccinated for the coronavirus as, per NFL protocols, vaccinated players would be placed on the list only for a positive test result.
"It can help you from ending up in the hospital in a critical situation. And it helps stop some of the spread, and those are positive things. But for the guys who have chosen to not get vaccinated, they still understand they're still part of this team, it's their decision, but they're still part of our team and they have to take care of the team."
The Colts have had one of the lowest percentages of vaccinated players in the NFL. Ballard declined to say what that percentage is currently after trimming the roster down to 53 players Tuesday. Many players, including Wentz, have declined to say if they're vaccinated or why they chose not to be vaccinated.
"Look, I can beat my head against the wall," Ballard said. "I can go in there and raise all kinds of hell and go off. That's not how we roll. I believe in our guys. I believe in what they stand for and I'll stand by them. We'll continue to work on the vaccinations. It's not like we're done educating. ... But they understand they have to take care of the protocols at hand and they have to live by them. And we'll do that at the best of the ability we can do it."
The Colts have been hit hard with players placed on the COVID-19 list since the start of training camp. They removed guard Quenton Nelson from the list Monday after he was in close contact with somebody who tested positive. Left tackle Eric Fisher, who is recovering from a torn Achilles, was placed on the COVID-19 list Aug. 26. Cornerback T.J. Carrie, offensive lineman Julien Davenport, defensive lineman Al-Quadin Muhammad and cornerback Xavier Rhodes have also spent time on the list. Reich and defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus tested positive for COVID-19 at different points in training camp.
The Colts, like every team in the league, will have to adjust on the fly if a player is forced to miss time due to the pandemic. No player will be under more scrutiny than Wentz, whom the Colts acquired from Philadelphia during the offseason, because of his unvaccinated status. He's coming off a season where he lost his starting job with the Eagles and he has participated in only five practices -- full and individual -- since the start of training camp due to left foot surgery on Aug. 2.
"He's worked his butt off, been a good teammate," Ballard said. "When the foot thing happened. I could see the frustration, but also saw another look. 'I'm playing. Let's get [the bone out] and let's go to work.' That's a good thing."
A player who won't be back anytime soon is receiver T.Y. Hilton. The veteran recently had surgery to address a disk injury. The Colts plan to put him on the injured reserve list, which means he'll miss at least the first three regular-season games. Hilton aggravated the injury in practice Aug. 25.
Hilton, 31, has been the Colts' No. 1 receiver throughout his nine seasons in Indianapolis, which include five 1,000-yard campaigns.
"He has a ton of relief, feels better," Ballard said. "One thing about T.Y. is, he's a pretty quick healer. I think he'll be back whenever he's ready to go. Always sooner rather than later with him."
Sep 1, 2021
Ballard, in his annual media session before the start of the regular season, spent a significant amount of time answering questions about a number of his players not being vaccinated after quarterback Carson Wentz, center Ryan Kelly and receiver Zach Pascal were placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list Monday after coming in close contact with a Colts staff member who tested positive.
ADVERTISEMENT
Wentz, Kelly and Pascal can return to facility on the sixth day after the close contact if they have negative tests and remain asymptomatic. The fact that the three players were placed on the list as close contacts is an indication they are not vaccinated for the coronavirus as, per NFL protocols, vaccinated players would be placed on the list only for a positive test result.
"It can help you from ending up in the hospital in a critical situation. And it helps stop some of the spread, and those are positive things. But for the guys who have chosen to not get vaccinated, they still understand they're still part of this team, it's their decision, but they're still part of our team and they have to take care of the team."
The Colts have had one of the lowest percentages of vaccinated players in the NFL. Ballard declined to say what that percentage is currently after trimming the roster down to 53 players Tuesday. Many players, including Wentz, have declined to say if they're vaccinated or why they chose not to be vaccinated.
"Look, I can beat my head against the wall," Ballard said. "I can go in there and raise all kinds of hell and go off. That's not how we roll. I believe in our guys. I believe in what they stand for and I'll stand by them. We'll continue to work on the vaccinations. It's not like we're done educating. ... But they understand they have to take care of the protocols at hand and they have to live by them. And we'll do that at the best of the ability we can do it."
The Colts have been hit hard with players placed on the COVID-19 list since the start of training camp. They removed guard Quenton Nelson from the list Monday after he was in close contact with somebody who tested positive. Left tackle Eric Fisher, who is recovering from a torn Achilles, was placed on the COVID-19 list Aug. 26. Cornerback T.J. Carrie, offensive lineman Julien Davenport, defensive lineman Al-Quadin Muhammad and cornerback Xavier Rhodes have also spent time on the list. Reich and defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus tested positive for COVID-19 at different points in training camp.
The Colts, like every team in the league, will have to adjust on the fly if a player is forced to miss time due to the pandemic. No player will be under more scrutiny than Wentz, whom the Colts acquired from Philadelphia during the offseason, because of his unvaccinated status. He's coming off a season where he lost his starting job with the Eagles and he has participated in only five practices -- full and individual -- since the start of training camp due to left foot surgery on Aug. 2.
"He's worked his butt off, been a good teammate," Ballard said. "When the foot thing happened. I could see the frustration, but also saw another look. 'I'm playing. Let's get [the bone out] and let's go to work.' That's a good thing."
A player who won't be back anytime soon is receiver T.Y. Hilton. The veteran recently had surgery to address a disk injury. The Colts plan to put him on the injured reserve list, which means he'll miss at least the first three regular-season games. Hilton aggravated the injury in practice Aug. 25.
Hilton, 31, has been the Colts' No. 1 receiver throughout his nine seasons in Indianapolis, which include five 1,000-yard campaigns.
"He has a ton of relief, feels better," Ballard said. "One thing about T.Y. is, he's a pretty quick healer. I think he'll be back whenever he's ready to go. Always sooner rather than later with him."
Colts' Darius Leonard on not getting COVID-19 vaccine: 'I want to get more educated about it'
In early August, Leonard and the Colts agreed to a five-year deal worth $99.25 million
By Daniel Canova | Fox News
Fox News Flash top headlines for September 2
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.
Indianapolis Colts linebacker Darius Leonard spoke to reporters on Thursday about being unvaccinated. The three-time All-Pro said not getting the COVID-19 vaccine is a "personal decision" and he believes in getting "comfortable with something" before putting it into your body.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
"I’m just a down South guy. I want to see more. I want to learn more," Leonard said via The Athletic. "I want to get more educated about it. Just got to think about it. Don’t want to rush into it. I’ve got to see everything. I’m listening to all the vaccinated guys here. I’m not – you see on social media – I’m not pro-vaxx. I’m not anti-vaxx. I’ve got to learn.
"When you don’t know about something, you’ve got to educate yourself more about it and figure out what it is, and you’ve got to make a decision from there. You’ve got to make sure you understand your decision and understand what’s going in your body and the long-term effects and stuff like that.
COLTS' CARSON WENTZ ELABORATES ON NOT BEING VACCINATED: 'IT'S A PERSONAL DECISION'
"I think once I get a grasp of it – just like the playbook – you’ve got to get comfortable with something. You can say, ‘OK, I’m going to put this in my body.’"
In early August, Leonard and the Colts agreed to a five-year deal worth $99.25 million, including $52.5 million guaranteed, which made him the highest-paid inside linebacker in the league.
Taken with the No. 36 overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, Leonard had a league-high 163 tackles and was named honored as the Defensive Rookie of the Year. He was a first-team All-Pro in 2018 and 2020, and a second-team All-Pro in 2019.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Since entering the NFL, Leonard leads all inside linebackers with an average of 9.9 tackles per game, 15 sacks, and nine forced fumbles. He also has seven interceptions, which ranks second in the league at his position.
Last season, Leonard piled up 132 tackles and three sacks.
www.foxnews.com
In early August, Leonard and the Colts agreed to a five-year deal worth $99.25 million
By Daniel Canova | Fox News
Fox News Flash top headlines for September 2
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.
Indianapolis Colts linebacker Darius Leonard spoke to reporters on Thursday about being unvaccinated. The three-time All-Pro said not getting the COVID-19 vaccine is a "personal decision" and he believes in getting "comfortable with something" before putting it into your body.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
"I’m just a down South guy. I want to see more. I want to learn more," Leonard said via The Athletic. "I want to get more educated about it. Just got to think about it. Don’t want to rush into it. I’ve got to see everything. I’m listening to all the vaccinated guys here. I’m not – you see on social media – I’m not pro-vaxx. I’m not anti-vaxx. I’ve got to learn.
"When you don’t know about something, you’ve got to educate yourself more about it and figure out what it is, and you’ve got to make a decision from there. You’ve got to make sure you understand your decision and understand what’s going in your body and the long-term effects and stuff like that.
COLTS' CARSON WENTZ ELABORATES ON NOT BEING VACCINATED: 'IT'S A PERSONAL DECISION'
"I think once I get a grasp of it – just like the playbook – you’ve got to get comfortable with something. You can say, ‘OK, I’m going to put this in my body.’"
In early August, Leonard and the Colts agreed to a five-year deal worth $99.25 million, including $52.5 million guaranteed, which made him the highest-paid inside linebacker in the league.
Taken with the No. 36 overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, Leonard had a league-high 163 tackles and was named honored as the Defensive Rookie of the Year. He was a first-team All-Pro in 2018 and 2020, and a second-team All-Pro in 2019.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Since entering the NFL, Leonard leads all inside linebackers with an average of 9.9 tackles per game, 15 sacks, and nine forced fumbles. He also has seven interceptions, which ranks second in the league at his position.
Last season, Leonard piled up 132 tackles and three sacks.
Colts' Darius Leonard on not getting COVID-19 vaccine: 'I want to get more educated about it'
Indianapolis Colts linebacker Darius Leonard spoke to reporters on Thursday about being unvaccinated. The three-time All-Pro said not getting the COVID-19 vaccine is a "personal decision" and he believes in getting "comfortable with something" before putting it into your body.
Carson Wentz weighing 'every pro and con' of vaccine after return from COVID list
Jason Owens
Thu, September 2, 2021, 4:28 PM·3 min read
A day after Indianapolis Colts general manager Chris Ballard spoke of the "consequences" of not being vaccinated, Carson Wentz returned to practice from the COVID-19 list.
He's still not sure about receiving a vaccine.
The Colts quarterback spoke at length with reporters on Thursday, describing his vaccination status as "a fluid process."
Wentz declined to address the perceived cons of receiving a safe, FDA-approved vaccine that's proven highly efficacious against the impact and slows the transmission of a virus that's killed more than 640,000 Americans. He admitted that he doesn't know much about it.
Carson Wentz returned from COVID-19 quarantine on Thursday after a close contact. (Marc Lebryk/Reuters)
'Frustrated' Colts brass urges players to get vaccinated
Wentz hasn't actually said whether or not he's received a vaccine. But his placement in a five-day quarantine this week after a close contact with an infected person is a status reserved for unvaccinated players. His All-Pro teammate linebacker Darius Leonard hasn't been vaccinated. He told reporters on Thursday he still needs more information.
As Wentz and some of his teammates missed practice this week while on the COVID-19 list, both Ballard and Colts head coach Frank Reich urged their players to get vaccinated.
Jason Owens
Thu, September 2, 2021, 4:28 PM·3 min read
A day after Indianapolis Colts general manager Chris Ballard spoke of the "consequences" of not being vaccinated, Carson Wentz returned to practice from the COVID-19 list.
He's still not sure about receiving a vaccine.
The Colts quarterback spoke at length with reporters on Thursday, describing his vaccination status as "a fluid process."
'I'm not going to act like I'm an expert'
Wentz declined to address the perceived cons of receiving a safe, FDA-approved vaccine that's proven highly efficacious against the impact and slows the transmission of a virus that's killed more than 640,000 Americans. He admitted that he doesn't know much about it.
Carson Wentz returned from COVID-19 quarantine on Thursday after a close contact. (Marc Lebryk/Reuters)
'Frustrated' Colts brass urges players to get vaccinated
Wentz hasn't actually said whether or not he's received a vaccine. But his placement in a five-day quarantine this week after a close contact with an infected person is a status reserved for unvaccinated players. His All-Pro teammate linebacker Darius Leonard hasn't been vaccinated. He told reporters on Thursday he still needs more information.
As Wentz and some of his teammates missed practice this week while on the COVID-19 list, both Ballard and Colts head coach Frank Reich urged their players to get vaccinated.
After starters Ryan Kelly, Eric Fisher and Zach Pascal joined Wentz on the COVID-19 list, Reich had this to say:
In addition to the risks to public and personal health, declining a COVID-19 vaccine has the potential of significant football consequences in the NFL. Had Wentz been placed in quarantine during the regular season that starts next week, the Colts could've been without their starting quarterback for a game. If Wentz and enough of his unvaccinated teammates were part of an outbreak during the regular season, the Colts would forfeit a game, and players from both teams would forfeit their checks for the canceled game.
Report: NFL's COVID-19 vaccine rate at 93% after roster cuts
Jason Owens
Fri, September 3, 2021, 3:20 PM·1 min read
With less than a week before the NFL kicks off its season, the league's COVID-19 vaccination rate among players sits at 93%, NFL Network's Tom Pelissero reports.
The updated number reflect rates after Tuesday's deadline to cut rosters to 53 players and 16-man practice squads. The number represents no effective change from the pre-deadline rate of 93% reported on Aug. 26.
While Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer admitted that vaccination status played a role in roster decisions amid assumptions that the increased availability afforded by vaccines would do so league-wide, it appears that any such decisions didn't move the needle on the overall vaccination rate.
2 teams at 100%
Friday's report arrives a day after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the second team to announce a 100% vaccination rate among players. The Atlanta Falcons were the first to do so on Aug. 16.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wears a sticker that reads "COVID-19 Vaccinated" at the NFL draft. (Kirby Lee/Reuters)
The Indianapolis Colts were among the league's laggards at 75% earlier this week, according to the Indianapolis Star. The Colts placed four starters in COVID-19 protocols this week, including quarterback Carson Wentz, whose placement in a five-day quarantine as a close contact indicated that he was not vaccinated. All-Pro linebacker Darius Leonard told reporters on Thursday that he's not vaccinated.
Declining a COVID-19 vaccine opens the door to significant football consequences in the NFL in addition to the inherent public and personal health risks. Teams with outbreaks among unvaccinated players that prompt a game cancelation will forfeit that game. Players from both teams would forfeit their checks for the canceled game.
Jason Owens
Fri, September 3, 2021, 3:20 PM·1 min read
With less than a week before the NFL kicks off its season, the league's COVID-19 vaccination rate among players sits at 93%, NFL Network's Tom Pelissero reports.
The updated number reflect rates after Tuesday's deadline to cut rosters to 53 players and 16-man practice squads. The number represents no effective change from the pre-deadline rate of 93% reported on Aug. 26.
While Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer admitted that vaccination status played a role in roster decisions amid assumptions that the increased availability afforded by vaccines would do so league-wide, it appears that any such decisions didn't move the needle on the overall vaccination rate.
2 teams at 100%
Friday's report arrives a day after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the second team to announce a 100% vaccination rate among players. The Atlanta Falcons were the first to do so on Aug. 16.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wears a sticker that reads "COVID-19 Vaccinated" at the NFL draft. (Kirby Lee/Reuters)
The Indianapolis Colts were among the league's laggards at 75% earlier this week, according to the Indianapolis Star. The Colts placed four starters in COVID-19 protocols this week, including quarterback Carson Wentz, whose placement in a five-day quarantine as a close contact indicated that he was not vaccinated. All-Pro linebacker Darius Leonard told reporters on Thursday that he's not vaccinated.
Declining a COVID-19 vaccine opens the door to significant football consequences in the NFL in addition to the inherent public and personal health risks. Teams with outbreaks among unvaccinated players that prompt a game cancelation will forfeit that game. Players from both teams would forfeit their checks for the canceled game.
Oscar De La Hoya tests positive for COVID-19, replaced by Evander Holyfield for Vitor Belfort fight
Triller’s Ryan Kavanaugh confirmed the promotion is attempting to secure former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield’s services as a replacement.
Texas teacher trying to decide about Covid vaccine dies three days after testing positive | CNN
One of two teachers at a Texas junior high school who died last week of Covid-19 was nervous about returning to school because of the Delta variant, her sister told CNN.
www.cnn.com
@easy_b @Quek9 @Camille
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
When Clemson defensive end Justin Foster returned to the field following a COVID-19 diagnosis last year, he wasn't himself. He'd become a COVID long-hauler, and the symptoms would test his physical and mental limits. It's a struggle I can relate with.
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
FOR TWO WEEKS last summer, Justin Foster puttered around his Clemson apartment, working out as best he could, waiting for the 14 days of his COVID-19 quarantine to pass. He was one of more than 40 Clemson football players to test positive, and, like most of them, his symptoms were barely noticeable.
The 14 days passed, and he headed back to the field, officially recovered.
ADVERTISEMENT
Something wasn't right. From the first workout, he struggled for breath while he ran, and after practices he collapsed in bed. No amount of sleep was enough.
"Even when you feel your best day, you're still so tired," he says. "You can't really keep up. You can't do anything."
As it became harder to function, doubt seeped in. Maybe something was happening to him, or maybe it was something else. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, "it was almost to the point where I just felt lazy," he says.
What Foster did not know, and would not know for months, was that he was a part of the COVID-19 population that was only beginning to reveal itself. He was a long-hauler, someone whose symptoms persevere for more than four weeks after the initial infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Beyond the fatigue, long-haulers have reported an odd collection of symptoms -- headaches, sore joints, shortness of breath, itchy skin, sore teeth, strange rashes, muscle spasms, mental fog -- but for many people, there is another side effect that's harder to deal with: You feel like you're losing your mind.
You feel like you're supposed to will your way out of it, show some gumption or get-up-and-go, and your body just ... won't. And like Foster, you start to think you're just lazy, and you worry that people don't believe you. Because often you don't believe yourself.
I didn't. I caught COVID-19 in March 2020, and by June I couldn't understand why I couldn't get myself together. I haven't felt like myself for a single day since.
He's a 22-year-old athlete from North Carolina who had aspirations for the NFL. I'm a 52-year-old journalist who lives in New Jersey and likes to run.
From our first conversation, we connected about what it was like to suddenly no longer be yourself, and the constant self-doubt that came with it. If we can't do the things we used to do, then who are we?
You spend your life running into limits and defining yourself by how you react to them. Then long-haul COVID hits you with limits that you don't know how to deal with, or didn't expect to deal with for years. And no one can tell you whether it will be one more week of this or the rest of your life.
Before the 2020 college football season, Clemson defensive end Justin Foster was a likely fourth- to seventh-round NFL draft pick. Then COVID-19 sidelined him. Jeff Silva/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
JUSTIN FOSTER IS a "yes, ma'am/yes, sir" sort of Southern kid who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a town of about 20,000 just west of Charlotte.
He was quiet, he says, like his parents. He's still pretty quiet. He wasn't a natural athlete, and he wasn't one of those kids driven to play sports.
"Most of the time I was forced to play, just because I was larger than everyone else. I was very clumsy, not coordinated at all," he says. "I was pretty good at football, just because they'd just tell me to tackle the person with the ball."
In high school he was a linebacker, gaining national attention as a junior when he had 67 tackles during Crest High School's perfect 2015 season. (He had 10 tackles in the state championship.) One day his coach, Mark Barnes, handed him a phone and said someone wanted to speak to him. It was Dabo Swinney, who offered him a scholarship.
Only one member of Foster's immediate family had gone to college, he says, and it hadn't occurred to him that football could make him the second. He had been thinking about trade school or the military, some arena where he could use his skill to take any machine, figure out what was wrong with it and then put it back together.
"Everyone else looked at me as a ballplayer, but for me personally it really hadn't set in that that was my identity and that's what I really wanted to do," he says.
Clemson moved him to defensive end, and for his first three seasons, Foster was mostly a role player on a stacked team, showing ability as a pass rusher. The possibility of the NFL was becoming real, though. In 2019 he was honorable mention All-ACC and made the All-ACC Academic Team. (In December 2020, he graduated with a degree in construction sciences with a 3.24 GPA.)
His teammates describe the two sides of Foster they've come to know. There's "Mater," named for the rusty tow truck in the animated movie "Cars." "Mater" Foster fixes their vehicles and changes flat tires and is, in their words, an easygoing country boy.
Then there's the Foster who takes his place on the edge of the defensive line.
"He's a straight power rusher," teammate Myles Murphy says. "Loves to go through the tackle, go through people. Very aggressive player. We like that on the edge."
Before the 2020 season, a number of scouting websites said Foster was a credible "Day 3" NFL draft pick, meaning somewhere between the fourth and seventh rounds. A solid season could push him up the list.
On June 25, 2020, Foster was at his home in Clemson when the text came from the team training staff saying he had tested positive for COVID-19. All he felt at the time was a runny nose that he assumed was allergies.
When he returned to practice two weeks later, the struggle began. He'd had asthma his whole life but felt like it was always under control -- he rarely used an inhaler. Now, he was short of breath all day long. And he felt like he had to do something that went against every part of his personality: ask for help.
"There's some guys that maybe have a little something that's wrong with them and they drag it out for a period of time," says Danny Poole, the team's director of sports medicine, and an athletic trainer for 40 years. "With Justin, he's one of those guys that if he comes and tells you there's something going on, you better believe it."
When Justin Foster returned to practice following his positive COVID-19 test, he wondered why he was the only one of his teammates who hadn't fully recuperated from the virus. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
EVERY DISCUSSION OF long-haul COVID has to start with the caveat that no one fully understands it. Almost two years into the pandemic, experts still have multiple theories about what long-haul COVID is and how to define it.
When Foster and I realized more than a year ago we weren't recovering, there was no consensus that there even was such a thing as long-haul COVID. Some doctors thought their patients were still sick with the disease but that the virus was somehow avoiding detection; some doctors thought patients were suffering from PTSD.
Researchers from the University of Washington estimate that roughly 30% of people infected with COVID-19 develop long-haul syndrome. The severity and symptoms range wildly. Some people feel a little off, while others are unable to get out of bed for days at a time.
What experts have come to believe is that for some unknown reason, long-haulers' immune systems act as though they're still under attack from the virus. Physical or emotional stress, even good stress, disturbs the entire system like a hornet's nest. Doctors want their patients moving so they don't become completely sedentary. But if you have the driven personality of, say, a college football player, accustomed to ignoring pain and fatigue, that drive can make the symptoms worse.
How it all happens and how to treat it, however, are still the subject of widespread debate.
"We all would agree that something is wrong with the immune system," says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Columbia University. "To this day I still don't think we've gotten to why the immune system hasn't reset itself."
When I was infected, I was never hospitalized, never had problems breathing or with my heart. I was sick for three weeks, the worst of it a four-day period when I slept about 18 hours a day. A couple of weeks after I had been sick, I assumed that as soon as I could get my running legs back, I'd feel like myself. On my first run, I felt out of shape, but no more than that. Then, about 36 hours later, my lungs began to ache as though I had been breathing smoke. I was exhausted. I spent the better part of the next couple of days in bed, wondering why I was so tired, wondering if I had grown too comfortable being in bed all day. I began a pattern of recovering, trying to run, then having the same delayed reaction that shut me down all over again. I tried going for walks, but the result was the same.
A friend who survived the virus after 35 days on a ventilator had returned to his pre-COVID strength, but I hadn't. It made no sense. I just need to get back into shape, I repeated. I need to push through it. And that's one of the first things that sets in with long-haul, the question of whether you're imagining everything, or if, mentally, you're too weak to cope.
Throughout doctors' visits, Justin Foster said he had to manage his expectations about whether his health would improve. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
CLEMSON PLAYERS WHO had COVID-19 followed a series of steps before they returned to full workouts. They started with light jogging, then sprinting, then practicing in a green jersey, which signified no contact, always checking in with the trainer at the end of the day.
The main concern, Poole says, was making sure players hadn't contracted myocarditis, a rare but potentially fatal heart inflammation that doctors at the time were concerned was linked to COVID-19. Usually, players were back to full speed a month after being infected. Of the players who were infected, all reported complete recoveries. Except for Foster.
Teammates noticed that Foster was raising his hand during drills, asking coaches to rotate him out so he could catch his breath. They hadn't seen that before.
"If he takes the time to step out, that means something serious," teammate K.J. Henry says. "He has a great grasp on the difference between pain and injury."
Foster says the harder he drove himself, the worse it got.
"I didn't want to be the one that wasn't working out or the one that's always having a problem and having to go to the training room and deal with it," he says. "It was just a lot mentally, pretty much just being down all the time. And I didn't know what was going to happen."
Foster and Swinney shared a shorthand to monitor how he felt. Swinney would wave his thumb in three positions -- up, sideways, down -- and Foster would respond with his own thumb to reflect where he was. Too often it was sideways or down.
After a couple of weeks, he wasn't able to practice at all. Day after day, when his teammates came into the training room to get taped up or treated, they saw Foster sitting in the corner with a nebulizer strapped to his face.
"I just remember him coming to me and he just was kind of was broken down. He said, 'Coach, I can't do it,'" Swinney says. "As an athlete and especially as a football player, we're kind of all wired to go and [be] like, 'Hey, snap out of it.' But this was something you couldn't see. It's not like you got a torn ACL, or you got a broken bone or something like that."
Foster says he worried his teammates thought he was lazy. No, they say. Quite the opposite. The fact that it was Foster who was struggling unnerved them. "No one thought he was lazy at all. We knew that he does what he needs to do every day to prepare," Murphy says.
"The entire team had no idea what was happening: 'Am I going to be next? Why did he react like that to COVID? And if I get COVID, am I going to react the same way?'"
Foster got to the point at which walking up the stairs in the football facility was too much. "It was just a very dark place for a long time," Foster says.
One night during the summer of 2020, Foster went to lie down a little after 11 p.m., when he felt an asthma attack coming on. He did what he usually does during an episode and took a puff from his inhaler. It didn't work.
He didn't want to call 911 and go to an emergency room in the middle of a pandemic, so he called Poole, the trainer.
Poole says he was struck by the fear in Foster's voice and told him to get to the team facility. Poole and the team physician put Foster on a nebulizer and talked him through breathing drills until, finally, a few hours later, the attack subsided.
In the weeks that followed, the training staff took Foster to several local doctors, each of whom came to the same conclusion, that there was no medical problem they could identify.
"It's like, am I crazy?" Foster says. "Is something going on with me mentally that I just can't push through this?"
Clemson teammates and trainers say Justin Foster is not one to exaggerate injuries. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
IT WASN'T JUST his body. Foster took summer classes, and when he sat at a computer or tried to read a book, his mind couldn't grasp what was in front of him. This from someone who was an All-ACC Academic Team selection.
"There was a time where I was probably three weeks behind in class. I'm never a person not to do my work," he says.
The mental fog can be more destabilizing for some people than the physical symptoms. You don't recognize yourself, but you look normal to everyone else. I had plenty of evenings with friends or family when I could rally for a few hours, but I knew I'd be wiped out for the next two days. In my lower moments, it became too difficult to read because simple words didn't make sense. When I wrote, I might forget what I was writing in the middle of a sentence.
Over and over, I went through the process of researching something for an article, writing that portion, polishing it and then discovering that I had already done all that hours earlier. I had no memory of writing the same material. I learned to use outlines and checklists to do what I'd relied on my mind to do for 30 years. I had to lean heavily on colleagues to make sure that my work was clean.
In conversation, I frequently lost thoughts in mid-sentence, and then worried people thought I was being melodramatic. There were times watching TV when my mind couldn't keep up with the dialogue and I had to hit pause. Twice I got lost driving near my home and had to use Waze to get back.
And many nights I hit that wall and had to leave the dinner table as my family watched knowingly, not saying anything because they knew I didn't want the attention. I'd be in bed the rest of the night.
Most of the time I felt like I was possessed by someone dumber and more irritable. The cuts to my sense of self were relentless, with the wild, vivid dreams I had every morning, my inability to smell or taste, the strange things I found myself saying, the words I couldn't come up with, the loss of desire for longtime passions, the difficulty of small talk. Experiencing the minutiae of the day and thinking, "This just isn't me," over and over for months.
When I shared that with Foster he nodded and said, "Exactly."
My low point might have come after a weekend in November visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C., the most active two days I'd had in months. When I got home that Monday night, I saw a story from my colleague Jeff Passan about Tony La Russa's DUI. Something was vaguely familiar about it, and it hit me that Jeff and I had spoken three days earlier. I called him and was blunt. "I need to know, did I f--- something up? Was there something you asked me to do?"
"Actually," he said, "there was."
It turned out to be inconsequential, and Jeff couldn't have been better about it, but I had no memory of the conversation. It was like being told about a drunken blackout. And then the thought hit me that I had no way of knowing how many times this had happened over the previous eight months.
I felt like a writer who couldn't write, a reader who couldn't read, a runner who couldn't go for a walk, a father and husband who disappeared into his own head every night. Lesser in every way I could measure. I kept repeating to myself, "Useless."
Justin Foster's search for answers ultimately led him to Duke University's post-COVID-19 clinic, one of several that had cropped up during the pandemic to study long-haulers. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE FIRST TIME Foster heard the term "long haul" was in August 2020, from head trainer Poole. Foster then went to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where, finally, a doctor said his issues were indeed probably related to his COVID-19 infection, and they were real. No one could explain why his asthma attacks had become so intense, and no one could say when or if he would get better. But just hearing about "long haul" was a massive relief.
"Someone telling me that I'm not crazy and that there's actually something going on, that was the first time that I realized that I could relax," he says. "I knew that there was actually something going on that was causing me to be like this."
For the first two months after I'd been sick, convinced I had fallen into some rut of laziness that I couldn't break out of, I wondered if I'd even had COVID at all. In those early pandemic days in North Jersey, you couldn't get a test unless you needed to be hospitalized. I might be imagining this whole thing, I thought.
Ultimately, I took my sons with me to get antibody tests, and even as the nurse drew blood from my arm, I felt like I was on a path to being exposed as a fraud. A few days later the call came and someone read me results. Michael Quinn ... negative. Liam Quinn ... negative. Thomas Quinn ...
As I waited to hear my result my heart was pounding so violently my shirt was moving. "Positive," she said.
The wave of relief that went through me felt like anesthesia. I teared up. I wasn't crazy. I had no idea what would happen, but for the moment it was enough to know it was all real. She sent me a copy of the test result, and I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
AS THE 2020 football season began, knowing he was fighting an illness and not his own mind, Foster still had hopes of rallying. But week by week, nothing changed, and his nights became lessons in terror.
"There were multiple nights where I would lay down and I would be choking in my sleep. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could barely breathe," he says. "That's when I was at my lowest point because I just didn't know what was going to happen. ... If I was going to go to sleep one day and not wake up."
Midway through the season, Foster and Swinney agreed that he needed to focus on his health. There was always next year. Foster went to practices and home games but didn't dress, speaking up when the defensive line gathered, maybe sharing a certain move that would work against an offensive tackle.
"At practice, even in games, he'd be right there, pretty much just coaching us up," Murphy says.
And when the defense was on the field, Foster found a spot on the sideline where he was unlikely to encounter players tumbling out of bounds. "I knew if something did happen I couldn't run fast enough to get out of the way, and I didn't want to cause a scene," he says.
But he says it was killing him not to participate or know whether he might play again. The idea began to sink in that he had to walk away from football altogether, just to be able to move on mentally and emotionally to the next part of his life. To become whatever he was going to be after football. There was always going to be an end to his career; maybe this was it.
He says he made the decision in December but didn't make it official for two months. "I couldn't really bring myself to do it, just because of all the work I'd put in," he says.
On Feb. 24 this year, Foster went to the Clemson football facility and sat outside Swinney's office for 90 minutes until the coach was free. Foster told him he needed to step away from football. Swinney said he understood and told Foster he would have a place on the team if he wanted to come back.
Foster told the rest of the world that day on social media.
"Today is a difficult day for me, but it is also a day of reflection and gratitude," he wrote. "With sadness but no regret, I have decided it is in my best interest to call it a career and hang up football."
A week later, Foster told me about the frustration he felt.
"The question I would ask when I went to the doctor is, 'You guys say you don't see anything; you guys say that things are getting better. I don't feel better. So is this a new life for me? Is this my life now?' And if it is, just tell me that. And I will be fine what that, and I'll just have to deal with it.
"I don't want to get my hopes up and keep hoping and hoping and hoping that I'm going to be back to normal."
We were experiencing something akin to sudden aging, leaping past what we saw as the coming vital years. You had to fight the urge to dwell on what had been lost or whether you could ever get it back. You had to learn that patience and acceptance weren't weaknesses, they were the only strengths you had left at times. This is what I can do today. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Long-haul COVID-19 ended up jeopardizing Justin Foster's entire football career. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE SAME DAY Foster announced his retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, announced a new federal initiative to study long-haul COVID, and dubbed the syndrome with an official name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.
By that point, several prominent hospitals had established post-COVID clinics to both treat patients and gather data. Foster attended one at Duke, and I went to the one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan -- an appointment I had to make five months in advance.
I met with a "functional medicine" doctor, who said the goal was to get my body's inflammation down so my autonomic nervous system would switch back to its normal state. I later learned not all experts believe the nervous system is even involved, but I was advised to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, take a number of supplements to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation, wear compression clothing to help circulation, get a lot of rest when I needed it. I couldn't tell you if any of it has helped, but I do it.
Before COVID, I was in obnoxiously good health. But like many long-haulers, my blood pressure and cholesterol hit inexplicably high levels after I got sick.
Part of the Mt. Sinai program is visiting with a cardiologist, and the day I saw her in March my blood pressure was 155/110, a fairly alarming number. I hadn't had any cardiac symptoms, but as she listened to my chest she said, "I think I hear a murmur."
An echocardiogram showed that she was right. The aortic valve in my heart was slightly dilated, allowing some blood flow back into the chamber. The good news was the condition is mild and completely manageable. It's possible it had been there for years but eluded detection. But it's possible, she said, that the elevated blood pressure I'd had for a year at that point caused it to dilate. However it got that way, I needed to get my blood pressure under control and will have to control it for the rest of my life to prevent more serious problems.
When Foster went to Duke's clinic for the first time, most of the focus was on his lungs. His pulmonologist there, Dr. Loretta Que, said during one test he was using only 49% of his lung capacity. She and the team there put him on a regimen of new medications.
"Prior to COVID, he hardly ever had to use an inhaler, and now he's on a chronic medication," she says. "I can't predict whether or not he's going to be able to come off of those in the future, but that's something that we're going to need to evaluate for."
THERE WAS A ray of hope out there for both of us in early 2021. At first the results were anecdotal, but long-haulers around the country were reporting dramatic recoveries after getting vaccinated. As data began to roll in, Columbia's Griffin estimated that 40% of long-haulers were seeing improvement.
I got my first shot in March and didn't notice any difference. A couple of weeks later, Foster got his. When I was headed to get my second injection, I texted him to see how he was doing. He wrote back, "1.5 mile jog this morning."
I woke up the day after my second shot feeling the sickest I'd ever felt in my life. The worst of it passed after two days, and over the course of the next two weeks I realized I might be feeling worse overall than I had before the shot.
But something had changed for Foster. Maybe it was the vaccine and maybe it was the progress he had felt since changing medications. Maybe it was just the passage of time. But suddenly a comeback seemed possible.
He began to push himself. His runs got a little longer, and he started to lift weights again. In April, he went back to Duke and got more good news. That 49% lung output was now 102%. Dr. Que put him on a new inhaler and said he was ready to attempt a comeback.
"She was telling me, what do I have to lose? She's like, 'You go back, you try to play again, and if you can't play, you just can't play.' And I was like, 'It's not a bad option,'" he says.
As Foster walked out of the appointment, his phone rang. It was Swinney, just checking on him. That was the moment, Foster says, when he decided he was ready to try, although he didn't share that on the phone call. He wanted to take some time to be sure.
A few days later, he called Swinney. He was ready, he said. Swinney beamed and told Foster he could go at his own pace, and if he's able to play only 10 snaps a game, so be it. Foster had a place on the team.
He started out doing drills at half speed, then continued to build until he was able to complete full workouts. Sometimes he has to take long naps when he finishes, but he's able to do the work. Occasionally during a sprint, he says, his throat will start to close up, but he keeps his inhaler handy and knows to drop out if he needs to.
"You break it down to almost every hour of the day: This is what I do now, this is what I do in an hour. It takes a lot of the mental stress out of it," he says. "When you look at goals that are maybe a year down the line, and you look at your situation, it puts a lot of mental stress on you."
He says he's ready to play, and his coach agrees, without hesitation. "He's back," Swinney says.
But Foster is still a long-hauler, still missing a sense of smell, still struck by occasional shortness of breath or pains in his chest, still prone to brain fog when he's tired. Since COVID-19, he has intense reactions to any bug bites. Last week during practice, he started to feel lightheaded and his throat started to close. He used an EpiPen -- one he's carried since a pre-COVID allergy to bees -- to make it stop. He and the medical staff couldn't figure out if it was related to food or a bug bite, but Foster chalks it up to "the new normal."
"When I get setbacks I stay positive about them," he says. "It could be worse: I could not be playing. I could be struggling a lot worse than I am, but I keep getting better."
And he still has a full season ahead of him, with another chance at the NFL.
"It's almost like it's not real," he says. "I mean, most of the time you get one shot, one chance, and once it's done, it's done."
Yet on Saturday night, 436 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Foster will take the field with his teammates to play the University of Georgia.
Justin Foster will return to the field for the 2021 college football season, and he still has his sights set on the NFL. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
IN MID-JULY, I was feeling out of options. The vaccine hadn't done the trick, and I didn't know what else to try. I remembered I had a methylprednisolone prescription that a doctor had written for me nine months earlier, but for whatever reason I hadn't taken it. I decided to give it a try, a medical Hail Mary, thinking another assault on my body's inflammation couldn't hurt.
I discussed it briefly with my cardiologist, and she agreed it was worth trying. I began the six-day steroid pack, and for the next six days I had a migraine every day. When it was over, something had changed.
I drove to North Carolina to meet with Foster in person for the first time. The trip from New Jersey should've laid me out for days. It didn't. I still hit the wall in the evenings, but later and not as badly. Maybe it was the methylprednisolone, maybe it was the supplements, maybe it was the meditation or the acupuncture, maybe it was time. On the Saturday after I met Foster in person, I went for a run.
On July 19, I texted him and said I had completed my fifth run in eight days. They were slow and short and ugly and I was fatigued and sore at night, but I was doing it. He wrote back, "That's what's up."
I took a chapter from the same book he did: Let go of expectations. Do what you can right now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Walk a quarter mile, run a quarter mile, repeat until you can do more. Keep going.
When I went back to my cardiologist with the news, she beamed. "I think I'm more excited than you are," she said. I told her I was just trying to keep an even keel after 16 months of hope and setbacks.
"You're going to get there," she said. "It might take you another year, but you're going to get there."
A year and a half after the long haul began, after wondering if this is what the rest of my life will be, "one more year" sounds like early parole. There are no promises. I still have days when I feel like hell, and I don't know what to make of them. But I get up each day and check my blood pressure, I take my supplements, I eat my heart-healthy diet, I exercise when I can and I'm starting another course of steroids.
Today, I finished this story. Tomorrow, I'll do something else. On Saturday, I'll watch Justin. And then we'll both see what's next.
ESPN feature producer Damien Esparza and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
SMH. And these folks think being young and healthy with a strong immune system is enough to save them.
BTW...
Me and you gonna fight iffin you don't learn to use spoiler tags for long posts so I don't have to scroll a mile on my phone.
long-haul COVID? That's fucked up. He may have fucked up breaking his family's cycle of poverty. Did he get vaccinated?@easy_b @Quek9 @Camille
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
When Clemson defensive end Justin Foster returned to the field following a COVID-19 diagnosis last year, he wasn't himself. He'd become a COVID long-hauler, and the symptoms would test his physical and mental limits. It's a struggle I can relate with.
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
FOR TWO WEEKS last summer, Justin Foster puttered around his Clemson apartment, working out as best he could, waiting for the 14 days of his COVID-19 quarantine to pass. He was one of more than 40 Clemson football players to test positive, and, like most of them, his symptoms were barely noticeable.
The 14 days passed, and he headed back to the field, officially recovered.
ADVERTISEMENT
Something wasn't right. From the first workout, he struggled for breath while he ran, and after practices he collapsed in bed. No amount of sleep was enough.
"Even when you feel your best day, you're still so tired," he says. "You can't really keep up. You can't do anything."
As it became harder to function, doubt seeped in. Maybe something was happening to him, or maybe it was something else. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, "it was almost to the point where I just felt lazy," he says.
What Foster did not know, and would not know for months, was that he was a part of the COVID-19 population that was only beginning to reveal itself. He was a long-hauler, someone whose symptoms persevere for more than four weeks after the initial infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Beyond the fatigue, long-haulers have reported an odd collection of symptoms -- headaches, sore joints, shortness of breath, itchy skin, sore teeth, strange rashes, muscle spasms, mental fog -- but for many people, there is another side effect that's harder to deal with: You feel like you're losing your mind.
You feel like you're supposed to will your way out of it, show some gumption or get-up-and-go, and your body just ... won't. And like Foster, you start to think you're just lazy, and you worry that people don't believe you. Because often you don't believe yourself.
I didn't. I caught COVID-19 in March 2020, and by June I couldn't understand why I couldn't get myself together. I haven't felt like myself for a single day since.
He's a 22-year-old athlete from North Carolina who had aspirations for the NFL. I'm a 52-year-old journalist who lives in New Jersey and likes to run.
From our first conversation, we connected about what it was like to suddenly no longer be yourself, and the constant self-doubt that came with it. If we can't do the things we used to do, then who are we?
You spend your life running into limits and defining yourself by how you react to them. Then long-haul COVID hits you with limits that you don't know how to deal with, or didn't expect to deal with for years. And no one can tell you whether it will be one more week of this or the rest of your life.
Before the 2020 college football season, Clemson defensive end Justin Foster was a likely fourth- to seventh-round NFL draft pick. Then COVID-19 sidelined him. Jeff Silva/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
JUSTIN FOSTER IS a "yes, ma'am/yes, sir" sort of Southern kid who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a town of about 20,000 just west of Charlotte.
He was quiet, he says, like his parents. He's still pretty quiet. He wasn't a natural athlete, and he wasn't one of those kids driven to play sports.
"Most of the time I was forced to play, just because I was larger than everyone else. I was very clumsy, not coordinated at all," he says. "I was pretty good at football, just because they'd just tell me to tackle the person with the ball."
In high school he was a linebacker, gaining national attention as a junior when he had 67 tackles during Crest High School's perfect 2015 season. (He had 10 tackles in the state championship.) One day his coach, Mark Barnes, handed him a phone and said someone wanted to speak to him. It was Dabo Swinney, who offered him a scholarship.
Only one member of Foster's immediate family had gone to college, he says, and it hadn't occurred to him that football could make him the second. He had been thinking about trade school or the military, some arena where he could use his skill to take any machine, figure out what was wrong with it and then put it back together.
"Everyone else looked at me as a ballplayer, but for me personally it really hadn't set in that that was my identity and that's what I really wanted to do," he says.
Clemson moved him to defensive end, and for his first three seasons, Foster was mostly a role player on a stacked team, showing ability as a pass rusher. The possibility of the NFL was becoming real, though. In 2019 he was honorable mention All-ACC and made the All-ACC Academic Team. (In December 2020, he graduated with a degree in construction sciences with a 3.24 GPA.)
His teammates describe the two sides of Foster they've come to know. There's "Mater," named for the rusty tow truck in the animated movie "Cars." "Mater" Foster fixes their vehicles and changes flat tires and is, in their words, an easygoing country boy.
Then there's the Foster who takes his place on the edge of the defensive line.
"He's a straight power rusher," teammate Myles Murphy says. "Loves to go through the tackle, go through people. Very aggressive player. We like that on the edge."
Before the 2020 season, a number of scouting websites said Foster was a credible "Day 3" NFL draft pick, meaning somewhere between the fourth and seventh rounds. A solid season could push him up the list.
On June 25, 2020, Foster was at his home in Clemson when the text came from the team training staff saying he had tested positive for COVID-19. All he felt at the time was a runny nose that he assumed was allergies.
When he returned to practice two weeks later, the struggle began. He'd had asthma his whole life but felt like it was always under control -- he rarely used an inhaler. Now, he was short of breath all day long. And he felt like he had to do something that went against every part of his personality: ask for help.
"There's some guys that maybe have a little something that's wrong with them and they drag it out for a period of time," says Danny Poole, the team's director of sports medicine, and an athletic trainer for 40 years. "With Justin, he's one of those guys that if he comes and tells you there's something going on, you better believe it."
When Justin Foster returned to practice following his positive COVID-19 test, he wondered why he was the only one of his teammates who hadn't fully recuperated from the virus. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
EVERY DISCUSSION OF long-haul COVID has to start with the caveat that no one fully understands it. Almost two years into the pandemic, experts still have multiple theories about what long-haul COVID is and how to define it.
When Foster and I realized more than a year ago we weren't recovering, there was no consensus that there even was such a thing as long-haul COVID. Some doctors thought their patients were still sick with the disease but that the virus was somehow avoiding detection; some doctors thought patients were suffering from PTSD.
Researchers from the University of Washington estimate that roughly 30% of people infected with COVID-19 develop long-haul syndrome. The severity and symptoms range wildly. Some people feel a little off, while others are unable to get out of bed for days at a time.
What experts have come to believe is that for some unknown reason, long-haulers' immune systems act as though they're still under attack from the virus. Physical or emotional stress, even good stress, disturbs the entire system like a hornet's nest. Doctors want their patients moving so they don't become completely sedentary. But if you have the driven personality of, say, a college football player, accustomed to ignoring pain and fatigue, that drive can make the symptoms worse.
How it all happens and how to treat it, however, are still the subject of widespread debate.
"We all would agree that something is wrong with the immune system," says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Columbia University. "To this day I still don't think we've gotten to why the immune system hasn't reset itself."
When I was infected, I was never hospitalized, never had problems breathing or with my heart. I was sick for three weeks, the worst of it a four-day period when I slept about 18 hours a day. A couple of weeks after I had been sick, I assumed that as soon as I could get my running legs back, I'd feel like myself. On my first run, I felt out of shape, but no more than that. Then, about 36 hours later, my lungs began to ache as though I had been breathing smoke. I was exhausted. I spent the better part of the next couple of days in bed, wondering why I was so tired, wondering if I had grown too comfortable being in bed all day. I began a pattern of recovering, trying to run, then having the same delayed reaction that shut me down all over again. I tried going for walks, but the result was the same.
A friend who survived the virus after 35 days on a ventilator had returned to his pre-COVID strength, but I hadn't. It made no sense. I just need to get back into shape, I repeated. I need to push through it. And that's one of the first things that sets in with long-haul, the question of whether you're imagining everything, or if, mentally, you're too weak to cope.
Throughout doctors' visits, Justin Foster said he had to manage his expectations about whether his health would improve. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
CLEMSON PLAYERS WHO had COVID-19 followed a series of steps before they returned to full workouts. They started with light jogging, then sprinting, then practicing in a green jersey, which signified no contact, always checking in with the trainer at the end of the day.
The main concern, Poole says, was making sure players hadn't contracted myocarditis, a rare but potentially fatal heart inflammation that doctors at the time were concerned was linked to COVID-19. Usually, players were back to full speed a month after being infected. Of the players who were infected, all reported complete recoveries. Except for Foster.
Teammates noticed that Foster was raising his hand during drills, asking coaches to rotate him out so he could catch his breath. They hadn't seen that before.
"If he takes the time to step out, that means something serious," teammate K.J. Henry says. "He has a great grasp on the difference between pain and injury."
Foster says the harder he drove himself, the worse it got.
"I didn't want to be the one that wasn't working out or the one that's always having a problem and having to go to the training room and deal with it," he says. "It was just a lot mentally, pretty much just being down all the time. And I didn't know what was going to happen."
Foster and Swinney shared a shorthand to monitor how he felt. Swinney would wave his thumb in three positions -- up, sideways, down -- and Foster would respond with his own thumb to reflect where he was. Too often it was sideways or down.
After a couple of weeks, he wasn't able to practice at all. Day after day, when his teammates came into the training room to get taped up or treated, they saw Foster sitting in the corner with a nebulizer strapped to his face.
"I just remember him coming to me and he just was kind of was broken down. He said, 'Coach, I can't do it,'" Swinney says. "As an athlete and especially as a football player, we're kind of all wired to go and [be] like, 'Hey, snap out of it.' But this was something you couldn't see. It's not like you got a torn ACL, or you got a broken bone or something like that."
Foster says he worried his teammates thought he was lazy. No, they say. Quite the opposite. The fact that it was Foster who was struggling unnerved them. "No one thought he was lazy at all. We knew that he does what he needs to do every day to prepare," Murphy says.
"The entire team had no idea what was happening: 'Am I going to be next? Why did he react like that to COVID? And if I get COVID, am I going to react the same way?'"
Foster got to the point at which walking up the stairs in the football facility was too much. "It was just a very dark place for a long time," Foster says.
One night during the summer of 2020, Foster went to lie down a little after 11 p.m., when he felt an asthma attack coming on. He did what he usually does during an episode and took a puff from his inhaler. It didn't work.
He didn't want to call 911 and go to an emergency room in the middle of a pandemic, so he called Poole, the trainer.
Poole says he was struck by the fear in Foster's voice and told him to get to the team facility. Poole and the team physician put Foster on a nebulizer and talked him through breathing drills until, finally, a few hours later, the attack subsided.
In the weeks that followed, the training staff took Foster to several local doctors, each of whom came to the same conclusion, that there was no medical problem they could identify.
"It's like, am I crazy?" Foster says. "Is something going on with me mentally that I just can't push through this?"
Clemson teammates and trainers say Justin Foster is not one to exaggerate injuries. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
IT WASN'T JUST his body. Foster took summer classes, and when he sat at a computer or tried to read a book, his mind couldn't grasp what was in front of him. This from someone who was an All-ACC Academic Team selection.
"There was a time where I was probably three weeks behind in class. I'm never a person not to do my work," he says.
The mental fog can be more destabilizing for some people than the physical symptoms. You don't recognize yourself, but you look normal to everyone else. I had plenty of evenings with friends or family when I could rally for a few hours, but I knew I'd be wiped out for the next two days. In my lower moments, it became too difficult to read because simple words didn't make sense. When I wrote, I might forget what I was writing in the middle of a sentence.
Over and over, I went through the process of researching something for an article, writing that portion, polishing it and then discovering that I had already done all that hours earlier. I had no memory of writing the same material. I learned to use outlines and checklists to do what I'd relied on my mind to do for 30 years. I had to lean heavily on colleagues to make sure that my work was clean.
In conversation, I frequently lost thoughts in mid-sentence, and then worried people thought I was being melodramatic. There were times watching TV when my mind couldn't keep up with the dialogue and I had to hit pause. Twice I got lost driving near my home and had to use Waze to get back.
And many nights I hit that wall and had to leave the dinner table as my family watched knowingly, not saying anything because they knew I didn't want the attention. I'd be in bed the rest of the night.
Most of the time I felt like I was possessed by someone dumber and more irritable. The cuts to my sense of self were relentless, with the wild, vivid dreams I had every morning, my inability to smell or taste, the strange things I found myself saying, the words I couldn't come up with, the loss of desire for longtime passions, the difficulty of small talk. Experiencing the minutiae of the day and thinking, "This just isn't me," over and over for months.
When I shared that with Foster he nodded and said, "Exactly."
My low point might have come after a weekend in November visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C., the most active two days I'd had in months. When I got home that Monday night, I saw a story from my colleague Jeff Passan about Tony La Russa's DUI. Something was vaguely familiar about it, and it hit me that Jeff and I had spoken three days earlier. I called him and was blunt. "I need to know, did I f--- something up? Was there something you asked me to do?"
"Actually," he said, "there was."
It turned out to be inconsequential, and Jeff couldn't have been better about it, but I had no memory of the conversation. It was like being told about a drunken blackout. And then the thought hit me that I had no way of knowing how many times this had happened over the previous eight months.
I felt like a writer who couldn't write, a reader who couldn't read, a runner who couldn't go for a walk, a father and husband who disappeared into his own head every night. Lesser in every way I could measure. I kept repeating to myself, "Useless."
Justin Foster's search for answers ultimately led him to Duke University's post-COVID-19 clinic, one of several that had cropped up during the pandemic to study long-haulers. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE FIRST TIME Foster heard the term "long haul" was in August 2020, from head trainer Poole. Foster then went to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where, finally, a doctor said his issues were indeed probably related to his COVID-19 infection, and they were real. No one could explain why his asthma attacks had become so intense, and no one could say when or if he would get better. But just hearing about "long haul" was a massive relief.
"Someone telling me that I'm not crazy and that there's actually something going on, that was the first time that I realized that I could relax," he says. "I knew that there was actually something going on that was causing me to be like this."
For the first two months after I'd been sick, convinced I had fallen into some rut of laziness that I couldn't break out of, I wondered if I'd even had COVID at all. In those early pandemic days in North Jersey, you couldn't get a test unless you needed to be hospitalized. I might be imagining this whole thing, I thought.
Ultimately, I took my sons with me to get antibody tests, and even as the nurse drew blood from my arm, I felt like I was on a path to being exposed as a fraud. A few days later the call came and someone read me results. Michael Quinn ... negative. Liam Quinn ... negative. Thomas Quinn ...
As I waited to hear my result my heart was pounding so violently my shirt was moving. "Positive," she said.
The wave of relief that went through me felt like anesthesia. I teared up. I wasn't crazy. I had no idea what would happen, but for the moment it was enough to know it was all real. She sent me a copy of the test result, and I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
AS THE 2020 football season began, knowing he was fighting an illness and not his own mind, Foster still had hopes of rallying. But week by week, nothing changed, and his nights became lessons in terror.
"There were multiple nights where I would lay down and I would be choking in my sleep. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could barely breathe," he says. "That's when I was at my lowest point because I just didn't know what was going to happen. ... If I was going to go to sleep one day and not wake up."
Midway through the season, Foster and Swinney agreed that he needed to focus on his health. There was always next year. Foster went to practices and home games but didn't dress, speaking up when the defensive line gathered, maybe sharing a certain move that would work against an offensive tackle.
"At practice, even in games, he'd be right there, pretty much just coaching us up," Murphy says.
And when the defense was on the field, Foster found a spot on the sideline where he was unlikely to encounter players tumbling out of bounds. "I knew if something did happen I couldn't run fast enough to get out of the way, and I didn't want to cause a scene," he says.
But he says it was killing him not to participate or know whether he might play again. The idea began to sink in that he had to walk away from football altogether, just to be able to move on mentally and emotionally to the next part of his life. To become whatever he was going to be after football. There was always going to be an end to his career; maybe this was it.
He says he made the decision in December but didn't make it official for two months. "I couldn't really bring myself to do it, just because of all the work I'd put in," he says.
On Feb. 24 this year, Foster went to the Clemson football facility and sat outside Swinney's office for 90 minutes until the coach was free. Foster told him he needed to step away from football. Swinney said he understood and told Foster he would have a place on the team if he wanted to come back.
Foster told the rest of the world that day on social media.
"Today is a difficult day for me, but it is also a day of reflection and gratitude," he wrote. "With sadness but no regret, I have decided it is in my best interest to call it a career and hang up football."
A week later, Foster told me about the frustration he felt.
"The question I would ask when I went to the doctor is, 'You guys say you don't see anything; you guys say that things are getting better. I don't feel better. So is this a new life for me? Is this my life now?' And if it is, just tell me that. And I will be fine what that, and I'll just have to deal with it.
"I don't want to get my hopes up and keep hoping and hoping and hoping that I'm going to be back to normal."
We were experiencing something akin to sudden aging, leaping past what we saw as the coming vital years. You had to fight the urge to dwell on what had been lost or whether you could ever get it back. You had to learn that patience and acceptance weren't weaknesses, they were the only strengths you had left at times. This is what I can do today. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Long-haul COVID-19 ended up jeopardizing Justin Foster's entire football career. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE SAME DAY Foster announced his retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, announced a new federal initiative to study long-haul COVID, and dubbed the syndrome with an official name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.
By that point, several prominent hospitals had established post-COVID clinics to both treat patients and gather data. Foster attended one at Duke, and I went to the one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan -- an appointment I had to make five months in advance.
I met with a "functional medicine" doctor, who said the goal was to get my body's inflammation down so my autonomic nervous system would switch back to its normal state. I later learned not all experts believe the nervous system is even involved, but I was advised to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, take a number of supplements to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation, wear compression clothing to help circulation, get a lot of rest when I needed it. I couldn't tell you if any of it has helped, but I do it.
Before COVID, I was in obnoxiously good health. But like many long-haulers, my blood pressure and cholesterol hit inexplicably high levels after I got sick.
Part of the Mt. Sinai program is visiting with a cardiologist, and the day I saw her in March my blood pressure was 155/110, a fairly alarming number. I hadn't had any cardiac symptoms, but as she listened to my chest she said, "I think I hear a murmur."
An echocardiogram showed that she was right. The aortic valve in my heart was slightly dilated, allowing some blood flow back into the chamber. The good news was the condition is mild and completely manageable. It's possible it had been there for years but eluded detection. But it's possible, she said, that the elevated blood pressure I'd had for a year at that point caused it to dilate. However it got that way, I needed to get my blood pressure under control and will have to control it for the rest of my life to prevent more serious problems.
When Foster went to Duke's clinic for the first time, most of the focus was on his lungs. His pulmonologist there, Dr. Loretta Que, said during one test he was using only 49% of his lung capacity. She and the team there put him on a regimen of new medications.
"Prior to COVID, he hardly ever had to use an inhaler, and now he's on a chronic medication," she says. "I can't predict whether or not he's going to be able to come off of those in the future, but that's something that we're going to need to evaluate for."
THERE WAS A ray of hope out there for both of us in early 2021. At first the results were anecdotal, but long-haulers around the country were reporting dramatic recoveries after getting vaccinated. As data began to roll in, Columbia's Griffin estimated that 40% of long-haulers were seeing improvement.
I got my first shot in March and didn't notice any difference. A couple of weeks later, Foster got his. When I was headed to get my second injection, I texted him to see how he was doing. He wrote back, "1.5 mile jog this morning."
I woke up the day after my second shot feeling the sickest I'd ever felt in my life. The worst of it passed after two days, and over the course of the next two weeks I realized I might be feeling worse overall than I had before the shot.
But something had changed for Foster. Maybe it was the vaccine and maybe it was the progress he had felt since changing medications. Maybe it was just the passage of time. But suddenly a comeback seemed possible.
He began to push himself. His runs got a little longer, and he started to lift weights again. In April, he went back to Duke and got more good news. That 49% lung output was now 102%. Dr. Que put him on a new inhaler and said he was ready to attempt a comeback.
"She was telling me, what do I have to lose? She's like, 'You go back, you try to play again, and if you can't play, you just can't play.' And I was like, 'It's not a bad option,'" he says.
As Foster walked out of the appointment, his phone rang. It was Swinney, just checking on him. That was the moment, Foster says, when he decided he was ready to try, although he didn't share that on the phone call. He wanted to take some time to be sure.
A few days later, he called Swinney. He was ready, he said. Swinney beamed and told Foster he could go at his own pace, and if he's able to play only 10 snaps a game, so be it. Foster had a place on the team.
He started out doing drills at half speed, then continued to build until he was able to complete full workouts. Sometimes he has to take long naps when he finishes, but he's able to do the work. Occasionally during a sprint, he says, his throat will start to close up, but he keeps his inhaler handy and knows to drop out if he needs to.
"You break it down to almost every hour of the day: This is what I do now, this is what I do in an hour. It takes a lot of the mental stress out of it," he says. "When you look at goals that are maybe a year down the line, and you look at your situation, it puts a lot of mental stress on you."
He says he's ready to play, and his coach agrees, without hesitation. "He's back," Swinney says.
But Foster is still a long-hauler, still missing a sense of smell, still struck by occasional shortness of breath or pains in his chest, still prone to brain fog when he's tired. Since COVID-19, he has intense reactions to any bug bites. Last week during practice, he started to feel lightheaded and his throat started to close. He used an EpiPen -- one he's carried since a pre-COVID allergy to bees -- to make it stop. He and the medical staff couldn't figure out if it was related to food or a bug bite, but Foster chalks it up to "the new normal."
"When I get setbacks I stay positive about them," he says. "It could be worse: I could not be playing. I could be struggling a lot worse than I am, but I keep getting better."
And he still has a full season ahead of him, with another chance at the NFL.
"It's almost like it's not real," he says. "I mean, most of the time you get one shot, one chance, and once it's done, it's done."
Yet on Saturday night, 436 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Foster will take the field with his teammates to play the University of Georgia.
Justin Foster will return to the field for the 2021 college football season, and he still has his sights set on the NFL. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
IN MID-JULY, I was feeling out of options. The vaccine hadn't done the trick, and I didn't know what else to try. I remembered I had a methylprednisolone prescription that a doctor had written for me nine months earlier, but for whatever reason I hadn't taken it. I decided to give it a try, a medical Hail Mary, thinking another assault on my body's inflammation couldn't hurt.
I discussed it briefly with my cardiologist, and she agreed it was worth trying. I began the six-day steroid pack, and for the next six days I had a migraine every day. When it was over, something had changed.
I drove to North Carolina to meet with Foster in person for the first time. The trip from New Jersey should've laid me out for days. It didn't. I still hit the wall in the evenings, but later and not as badly. Maybe it was the methylprednisolone, maybe it was the supplements, maybe it was the meditation or the acupuncture, maybe it was time. On the Saturday after I met Foster in person, I went for a run.
On July 19, I texted him and said I had completed my fifth run in eight days. They were slow and short and ugly and I was fatigued and sore at night, but I was doing it. He wrote back, "That's what's up."
I took a chapter from the same book he did: Let go of expectations. Do what you can right now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Walk a quarter mile, run a quarter mile, repeat until you can do more. Keep going.
When I went back to my cardiologist with the news, she beamed. "I think I'm more excited than you are," she said. I told her I was just trying to keep an even keel after 16 months of hope and setbacks.
"You're going to get there," she said. "It might take you another year, but you're going to get there."
A year and a half after the long haul began, after wondering if this is what the rest of my life will be, "one more year" sounds like early parole. There are no promises. I still have days when I feel like hell, and I don't know what to make of them. But I get up each day and check my blood pressure, I take my supplements, I eat my heart-healthy diet, I exercise when I can and I'm starting another course of steroids.
Today, I finished this story. Tomorrow, I'll do something else. On Saturday, I'll watch Justin. And then we'll both see what's next.
ESPN feature producer Damien Esparza and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
The bruhz their need to get in his ass. He is about to fuck up everything. I am about to put a bug in the ear of some bruhz that I know are in his vicinity.Colts' Darius Leonard on not getting COVID-19 vaccine: 'I want to get more educated about it'
In early August, Leonard and the Colts agreed to a five-year deal worth $99.25 million
By Daniel Canova | Fox News
Fox News Flash top headlines for September 2
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.
Indianapolis Colts linebacker Darius Leonard spoke to reporters on Thursday about being unvaccinated. The three-time All-Pro said not getting the COVID-19 vaccine is a "personal decision" and he believes in getting "comfortable with something" before putting it into your body.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
"I’m just a down South guy. I want to see more. I want to learn more," Leonard said via The Athletic. "I want to get more educated about it. Just got to think about it. Don’t want to rush into it. I’ve got to see everything. I’m listening to all the vaccinated guys here. I’m not – you see on social media – I’m not pro-vaxx. I’m not anti-vaxx. I’ve got to learn.
"When you don’t know about something, you’ve got to educate yourself more about it and figure out what it is, and you’ve got to make a decision from there. You’ve got to make sure you understand your decision and understand what’s going in your body and the long-term effects and stuff like that.
COLTS' CARSON WENTZ ELABORATES ON NOT BEING VACCINATED: 'IT'S A PERSONAL DECISION'
"I think once I get a grasp of it – just like the playbook – you’ve got to get comfortable with something. You can say, ‘OK, I’m going to put this in my body.’"
In early August, Leonard and the Colts agreed to a five-year deal worth $99.25 million, including $52.5 million guaranteed, which made him the highest-paid inside linebacker in the league.
Taken with the No. 36 overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, Leonard had a league-high 163 tackles and was named honored as the Defensive Rookie of the Year. He was a first-team All-Pro in 2018 and 2020, and a second-team All-Pro in 2019.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Since entering the NFL, Leonard leads all inside linebackers with an average of 9.9 tackles per game, 15 sacks, and nine forced fumbles. He also has seven interceptions, which ranks second in the league at his position.
Last season, Leonard piled up 132 tackles and three sacks.
Colts' Darius Leonard on not getting COVID-19 vaccine: 'I want to get more educated about it'
Indianapolis Colts linebacker Darius Leonard spoke to reporters on Thursday about being unvaccinated. The three-time All-Pro said not getting the COVID-19 vaccine is a "personal decision" and he believes in getting "comfortable with something" before putting it into your body.
Didnt get that but he caught it before the vaccine was available..
Damn...
Yes they work, and there is a different one each year because it mutates, just like Covid will.
@Camille
www.thecut.com
HERE COMES THE BRIDE SEPT. 2, 2021
‘My Parents Wouldn’t Get Vaxxed to Attend My Wedding’
Vaccine drama is tearing relationships apart — and the damage could be permanent.
By Angelina Chapin
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
Less than two weeks before her wedding day, Amy Bettys sat in her living room crying and drinking whiskey, the show 90 Day Fiancé playing in the background. She had a difficult phone call to make, and she took a long swig to steel herself. Then she inhaled deeply, let out a groan, and dialed the number.
Her mom picked up and immediately asked what was wrong. In a shaky voice, Bettys once again begged her parents to get the vaccine. Without the shots, they likely couldn’t come to the wedding in early September: Her fiancé’s mom and dad planned to bail on the reception if all guests weren’t jabbed, plus New York City had recently adopted a vaccine mandate for all bars and restaurants. Couldn’t they at least think it over? Bettys pleaded, hoping her mom might cave to a tear-soaked appeal.
‘My Parents Wouldn’t Get Vaxxed to Attend My Wedding’
Vaccine drama is tearing relationships apart — and the damage could be permanent.
www.thecut.com
HERE COMES THE BRIDE SEPT. 2, 2021
‘My Parents Wouldn’t Get Vaxxed to Attend My Wedding’
Vaccine drama is tearing relationships apart — and the damage could be permanent.
By Angelina Chapin
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
Less than two weeks before her wedding day, Amy Bettys sat in her living room crying and drinking whiskey, the show 90 Day Fiancé playing in the background. She had a difficult phone call to make, and she took a long swig to steel herself. Then she inhaled deeply, let out a groan, and dialed the number.
Her mom picked up and immediately asked what was wrong. In a shaky voice, Bettys once again begged her parents to get the vaccine. Without the shots, they likely couldn’t come to the wedding in early September: Her fiancé’s mom and dad planned to bail on the reception if all guests weren’t jabbed, plus New York City had recently adopted a vaccine mandate for all bars and restaurants. Couldn’t they at least think it over? Bettys pleaded, hoping her mom might cave to a tear-soaked appeal.
Instead, her mother launched into familiar talking points plucked from the “rabbit hole of fake science” her parents had fallen down in small-town Pennsylvania. Didn’t her daughter know about the toxicity of protein spikes, or about how only obese people were in danger of being hospitalized? And besides, their chiropractor had said a shot wasn’t necessary. After Bettys cut her off to say that perhaps they should try taking advice from epidemiologists, her mom quipped, “We’re not changing our minds.” In the background, Bettys could hear her dad agreeing. Her mother then dug her heels in even deeper. “You know what?” she said. “We’re just not going to come.”
Bettys hung up the phone and ignored her dad’s follow-up call. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to the voice-mail and instead sat there crying, trying to process what had just happened. “My parents would rather not get vaxxed than attend my wedding,” Bettys said. “On the day, I’m worried I’m not going to feel that happy. I’ve told my fiancé a few times I don’t really want to do it anymore.”
Since shots of Moderna and Pfizer became available, a highly polarized America has been at war with itself. The fact that only half of the country is fully vaccinated has poured lighter fluid on the Delta variant’s spread, sowing deeper division and straining relationships between friends and family on opposite sides of the political spectrum. But nowhere is the battle playing out more dramatically than on the wedding industry’s front lines. While you can avoid talking politics at the dinner table and ignore your mother’s texts about being injected with microchips, planning nuptials forces opposing views into violent collision. In an effort to stave off superspreader events, many brides and grooms have adopted policies that boil down to “Get the shot or don’t come.” The requirement is setting off emotional bombs, torching relationships between couples and their closest friends or family who refuse to compromise their anti-vaxx stances even at the cost of missing an important milestone. In some cases, the damage can be devastating.
Making sure guests are vaccinated is tricky, uncharted territory. In the absence of widespread government mandates (only a few cities, such as New York and San Francisco, require proof of jabs for certain venues), the onus falls on individual businesses and the soon-to-wed couple to enforce any requirements. Countless etiquette blogs have popped up with templates to help nail that delicate-but-firm tone (“If you are choosing to not be vaccinated, please plan to celebrate our wedding in a different capacity”), and solutions range from RSVP questionnaires to hiring a “COVID safety officers” (a.k.a. a bouncers) to check everyone’s card at the venue’s door. But the central question couples are grappling with is how demanding they can be. Is asking for proof too intrusive? Or should you take guests at their word?
For Conner and his partner, Lexie, who asked to go by their first names only, the honor system failed. After discovering a couple had lied about their vaccination status on the RSVP, they started asking guests for proof and found out that Conner’s best man, whom we’ll call Jeff, also didn’t have the shot. Conner couldn’t fathom not having him at the wedding; they’d been friends for 20 years. “He’s the first person I’ve ever used the word ‘bromance’ with,” said Conner, 28, and the first person he told about falling in love with Lexie. It was just a given that, when they tied the knot, Jeff would be at his side, and Conner can’t bring himself to find a replacement best man: “He’s my guy,” said Conner. “Men don’t have that many friendships. It’s just really, really tough.”
Unlike other brides and grooms navigating vaccine tensions, the two men never had it out. Instead, since telling Conner he wouldn’t be getting the jab, Jeff hasn’t responded to further texts or explained why he’s so opposed to the shot. “He’s been really walled off,” said Conner. “It’s been radio silence.” For the first time in his life, he’s unsure about the future of their relationship. Can he still bring himself to show up as best man at Jeff’s wedding later this year after being abandoned at his own? “There’s definitely going to be this permanent awkwardness,” he said. “I just never imagined a future where he wouldn’t be there for me.”
On the day, I’m worried I’m not going to feel that happy. I’ve told my fiancé a few times I don’t really want to do it anymore.
While Conner’s taking what he calls a “stoic approach” to his buddy’s choice, other confrontations have become so explosive they’ve definitively killed relationships. That’s the case for Sam, who doesn’t plan on having any more contact with her former best friend, Neila, after their clash over vaccines. “It makes me really sad,” said the San Francisco–based editor, who asked to go by a pseudonym. “It’s not just the one day that she won’t be there. It’s the rest of my life.”
Sam had assumed Neila was vaccinated, until she asked the group celebrating her bachelorette party this summer to confirm their status. (“She was a science major in college,” explained Sam, though she admits to having felt a “small seed of doubt” about her friend’s beliefs after noticing Fox News playing in the background of her recent social media posts.) What followed was a 30-email chain in which Neila lashed out at Sam and the party’s organizer for not making the requirements more clear, questioned the value of a vaccine protocol, and demanded a refund for the $100 she had already chipped in for the Airbnb in New Orleans (which she didn’t get). Sam was shocked to learn her friend was so vehemently opposed to the vaccine. But most of all, she was hurt by the nasty, fervent tone of the emails, which left “no space for conversation.”
Their decades-long friendship could probably have survived a civil disagreement about politics. They’re 35-year-old women, after all, with lots of shared history. But to sacrifice her role as bridesmaid and express no remorse? “It’s basically saying that you don’t value the friendship,” said Sam, who is getting married in early September. “Because you know it can end things to not show up like that.”
For some brides and grooms, their guests’ anti-vaxx beliefs have tapped into deeper tensions that go beyond a dose of Moderna. When Amy sent her parents and siblings an email begging them to get vaccinated before her big day in September — as required by her ceremony venue, a synagogue in western Canada — her sister replied with a character assassination. In her “nuclear” message, she accused Amy of being a hateful person who loves to play the victim and belittle those she disagrees with. “It felt like the really angry email that you write and don’t send,” the 30-year-old said. “I felt like, Am I actually this really awful person that she seems to think I am?”
Amy, who wanted her last name withheld, was blindsided by her sister’s reaction. They were close, and she was depending on her, out of everyone in their conservative, Evangelical family, to show up and be a bridesmaid. Instead, her sister’s decision means Amy will get married without either her parents or three of her four siblings to toast her and appear in pictures. Though the lawyer has spent the past decade distancing herself from their views, she saw her wedding as a last-ditch effort to bring them together and bond over “fun, non-threatening” activities. It was a test of sorts, one they failed spectacularly. “My family had a real opportunity to demonstrate that even though we have different values, they still really care about me and want to be part of my life,” she said. “I’m sad they didn’t take it.” Amy plans to find proxy familial relationships in other places, since her own mom and dad “are clearly not interested in being my parents in a way that I need.”
It’s not just the one day that she won’t be there. It’s the rest of my life.
Political differences have a way of slowly poisoning dynamics. Friends hang out less, families avoid conversational minefields, and close connections become reliant on small talk. It’s not often two people trying to avoid conflict are forced to confront their opposing views head-on. But weddings have made the issue of vaccinations viscerally personal, turning a guest’s stance on the shot into a barometer for how much they care about whoever’s getting hitched. Bettys knew what her parents thought, but they mostly avoided talking about politics to keep the peace. That is until the nuptials made it impossible to hide their core conflicts under polite conversation.
In the end, her mom and dad decided they’ll show up to city hall, but without the vaccine they won’t be part of the wining, dining, and dancing at the reception after. Bettys’ glad they’ll hear her vows and be in family photos for posterity’s sake, but coming to the ceremony is still the “bare minimum” they can do, she tells me. Fundamentally, her own wedding day still wasn’t enough for them to put her first. While she has accepted they won’t ever change, that painful reality will haunt their relationship. “They’re stubborn and hardheaded,” she said. “They chose their belief system over me.”
Bettys hung up the phone and ignored her dad’s follow-up call. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to the voice-mail and instead sat there crying, trying to process what had just happened. “My parents would rather not get vaxxed than attend my wedding,” Bettys said. “On the day, I’m worried I’m not going to feel that happy. I’ve told my fiancé a few times I don’t really want to do it anymore.”
Since shots of Moderna and Pfizer became available, a highly polarized America has been at war with itself. The fact that only half of the country is fully vaccinated has poured lighter fluid on the Delta variant’s spread, sowing deeper division and straining relationships between friends and family on opposite sides of the political spectrum. But nowhere is the battle playing out more dramatically than on the wedding industry’s front lines. While you can avoid talking politics at the dinner table and ignore your mother’s texts about being injected with microchips, planning nuptials forces opposing views into violent collision. In an effort to stave off superspreader events, many brides and grooms have adopted policies that boil down to “Get the shot or don’t come.” The requirement is setting off emotional bombs, torching relationships between couples and their closest friends or family who refuse to compromise their anti-vaxx stances even at the cost of missing an important milestone. In some cases, the damage can be devastating.
Making sure guests are vaccinated is tricky, uncharted territory. In the absence of widespread government mandates (only a few cities, such as New York and San Francisco, require proof of jabs for certain venues), the onus falls on individual businesses and the soon-to-wed couple to enforce any requirements. Countless etiquette blogs have popped up with templates to help nail that delicate-but-firm tone (“If you are choosing to not be vaccinated, please plan to celebrate our wedding in a different capacity”), and solutions range from RSVP questionnaires to hiring a “COVID safety officers” (a.k.a. a bouncers) to check everyone’s card at the venue’s door. But the central question couples are grappling with is how demanding they can be. Is asking for proof too intrusive? Or should you take guests at their word?
For Conner and his partner, Lexie, who asked to go by their first names only, the honor system failed. After discovering a couple had lied about their vaccination status on the RSVP, they started asking guests for proof and found out that Conner’s best man, whom we’ll call Jeff, also didn’t have the shot. Conner couldn’t fathom not having him at the wedding; they’d been friends for 20 years. “He’s the first person I’ve ever used the word ‘bromance’ with,” said Conner, 28, and the first person he told about falling in love with Lexie. It was just a given that, when they tied the knot, Jeff would be at his side, and Conner can’t bring himself to find a replacement best man: “He’s my guy,” said Conner. “Men don’t have that many friendships. It’s just really, really tough.”
Unlike other brides and grooms navigating vaccine tensions, the two men never had it out. Instead, since telling Conner he wouldn’t be getting the jab, Jeff hasn’t responded to further texts or explained why he’s so opposed to the shot. “He’s been really walled off,” said Conner. “It’s been radio silence.” For the first time in his life, he’s unsure about the future of their relationship. Can he still bring himself to show up as best man at Jeff’s wedding later this year after being abandoned at his own? “There’s definitely going to be this permanent awkwardness,” he said. “I just never imagined a future where he wouldn’t be there for me.”
On the day, I’m worried I’m not going to feel that happy. I’ve told my fiancé a few times I don’t really want to do it anymore.
While Conner’s taking what he calls a “stoic approach” to his buddy’s choice, other confrontations have become so explosive they’ve definitively killed relationships. That’s the case for Sam, who doesn’t plan on having any more contact with her former best friend, Neila, after their clash over vaccines. “It makes me really sad,” said the San Francisco–based editor, who asked to go by a pseudonym. “It’s not just the one day that she won’t be there. It’s the rest of my life.”
Sam had assumed Neila was vaccinated, until she asked the group celebrating her bachelorette party this summer to confirm their status. (“She was a science major in college,” explained Sam, though she admits to having felt a “small seed of doubt” about her friend’s beliefs after noticing Fox News playing in the background of her recent social media posts.) What followed was a 30-email chain in which Neila lashed out at Sam and the party’s organizer for not making the requirements more clear, questioned the value of a vaccine protocol, and demanded a refund for the $100 she had already chipped in for the Airbnb in New Orleans (which she didn’t get). Sam was shocked to learn her friend was so vehemently opposed to the vaccine. But most of all, she was hurt by the nasty, fervent tone of the emails, which left “no space for conversation.”
Their decades-long friendship could probably have survived a civil disagreement about politics. They’re 35-year-old women, after all, with lots of shared history. But to sacrifice her role as bridesmaid and express no remorse? “It’s basically saying that you don’t value the friendship,” said Sam, who is getting married in early September. “Because you know it can end things to not show up like that.”
For some brides and grooms, their guests’ anti-vaxx beliefs have tapped into deeper tensions that go beyond a dose of Moderna. When Amy sent her parents and siblings an email begging them to get vaccinated before her big day in September — as required by her ceremony venue, a synagogue in western Canada — her sister replied with a character assassination. In her “nuclear” message, she accused Amy of being a hateful person who loves to play the victim and belittle those she disagrees with. “It felt like the really angry email that you write and don’t send,” the 30-year-old said. “I felt like, Am I actually this really awful person that she seems to think I am?”
Amy, who wanted her last name withheld, was blindsided by her sister’s reaction. They were close, and she was depending on her, out of everyone in their conservative, Evangelical family, to show up and be a bridesmaid. Instead, her sister’s decision means Amy will get married without either her parents or three of her four siblings to toast her and appear in pictures. Though the lawyer has spent the past decade distancing herself from their views, she saw her wedding as a last-ditch effort to bring them together and bond over “fun, non-threatening” activities. It was a test of sorts, one they failed spectacularly. “My family had a real opportunity to demonstrate that even though we have different values, they still really care about me and want to be part of my life,” she said. “I’m sad they didn’t take it.” Amy plans to find proxy familial relationships in other places, since her own mom and dad “are clearly not interested in being my parents in a way that I need.”
It’s not just the one day that she won’t be there. It’s the rest of my life.
Political differences have a way of slowly poisoning dynamics. Friends hang out less, families avoid conversational minefields, and close connections become reliant on small talk. It’s not often two people trying to avoid conflict are forced to confront their opposing views head-on. But weddings have made the issue of vaccinations viscerally personal, turning a guest’s stance on the shot into a barometer for how much they care about whoever’s getting hitched. Bettys knew what her parents thought, but they mostly avoided talking about politics to keep the peace. That is until the nuptials made it impossible to hide their core conflicts under polite conversation.
In the end, her mom and dad decided they’ll show up to city hall, but without the vaccine they won’t be part of the wining, dining, and dancing at the reception after. Bettys’ glad they’ll hear her vows and be in family photos for posterity’s sake, but coming to the ceremony is still the “bare minimum” they can do, she tells me. Fundamentally, her own wedding day still wasn’t enough for them to put her first. While she has accepted they won’t ever change, that painful reality will haunt their relationship. “They’re stubborn and hardheaded,” she said. “They chose their belief system over me.”
It is my sincerest desire to be of service to you, M'lord.
*curtsies*
appreciate you!
Da fuck going on round here?!
That golfer and everyone else claiming to be "young and healthy" needs to read this.
there's not too many peopleyounger and healthier than college football/basketball players.........and yet here he is.
Every mfkr thinks they'll just recover and all is well.......nah, not so
the crazy thing is?
All these dudes needing MORE INFORMATION?
All this is NOT NEW!
It is readily available
and it CONTINUES
Celtics' Tatum still feeling effects of COVID-19
Jayson Tatum says he's still feeling the lingering effects of COVID-19 more than a month after the Celtics star tested positive for the virus.
Home
All the latest DFS, fantasy, and sports betting news, analysis, and strategy for NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and NCAA
dknation.draftkings.com
Similar threads
