Linda Dalton hopes more can be done to treat long Covid The 45-year-old, who (pre-lockdown) worked as a retail assistant, carries a hot water bottle around with her all day to try and ease the pain and says her memory is very bad and she cannot complete two simple tasks simultaneously. “My doctor has diagnosed me with long Covid and said he is not sure when I will recover but that it may take months or years,” she says. “I am not coping and my family is not coping. I’m sick of being sick. At Christmas time I had the symptoms of someone who had a stroke, with weakness in my right side, I couldn’t move my arm and my speech was affected. I was sent for an MRI scan of my brain and it came back clear. I was then sent for a CT scan of my chest and this displayed scarring on my lungs, an enlarged thyroid and a mass growing in my right rib cage near my spinal cord.