**1. Introduction**

Back in March 2020 I took one of the last flights allowed in from Amsterdam, The Netherlands to Houston, Texas. I was a perfectly fit, healthy young woman who did not smoke. I was an active social epidemiologist with a tenure-track assistant professorship at an American university with my entire life ahead of me. The idea that I could die from an airborne illness before I turned 40 was not in my reality. I had no autoimmune diseases. I am not someone who has struggled with a chronic illness, in fact I have rarely been sick with the common cold or flu. I have never broken a bone and I had no co-morbidities. I have two healthy children and before COVID-19, I was a hands-on active mother. Women in my family have consistently lived into triple digits.

By the second week of March all of that changed. For me, Covid-19 started out like the flu. Initially I did not think I had COVID-19, but rather that I was coming down with a bad cold. But my symptoms progressed quickly. By March 15, 2020, I had arrived home from a two-hour car drive, I sat outside to rest in my backyard, and I had an intense pain in my chest-- it felt like an elephant had sat on my chest. I stumbled inside and lay on my bed. I took deep breaths and waited for the pain to pass. At this point I knew something was terribly wrong, my heart had never felt like it would pop out of my chest in my entire life. The next day my symptoms worsened. I developed a slight cough, a headache and a sore throat—my sore throat has been ongoing for the past 2 years. To this day (June 2022), I still have a light sore throat, that intensifies after eating or talking for an extended period. My health rapidly declined after my heart issues arose. By mid-March I landed in the hospital because I could not breathe, and by the beginning of May, I had a seizure. Covid-19 almost killed me several times.

Doctors did not know what to do with me. I never had a fever, and I did not have a persistent dry cough, so even with my severe shortness of breath I did not present symptoms of how doctors expected COVID-19 patients to present. At that time, the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said that in order to have COVID-19, the patient had to have a fever. And so began my journey down the rabbit hole of the American healthcare system. I was not listened to by doctors, not taken seriously and infantilized. At one appointment, the doctor spoke the entire time with my husband, instead of speaking with me--the actual patient who was a 38-year-old woman with a PhD in social epidemiology and public health.

I joined a COVID-19 online support group, where I witnessed woman after woman, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, race or country location, share stories about how doctors were not believing them about their COVID-19 symptoms. Early in the pandemic, sharing your COVID-19 status publicly was taboo in the rural Southeast Texas town where I reside. But I decided that I would use the small platform that I had as an assistant professor to come forward about my health status and shed light on the fact that doctors were not believing women, and that women of color were having a particularly hard time being believed. Women of color were being drug tested and getting the police called on them at the hospital. In my own experience, when I presented at the emergency room with shortness of breath, I was always asked by hospital staff if I had "taken something." I would get asked repeatedly if I had used drugs. I was not treated with compassion until after my drug test came back clean.

My goal is to transform my negative experience with COVID-19 and the American healthcare system into a positive teaching moment. I was one of the first people in Texas to be interviewed by the local news about my COVID-19 symptoms lasting longer than a few weeks. Following this, I wrote an article in The Conversation about my COVID-19 experience [1]. That article received over 400,000 views. My video diary that I made documenting my trip from Amsterdam to Houston during the pandemic was re-published across several media outlets and received over 20,000 views [2]. It was unexpected, but my COVID-19 advocacy work led to me being named by Health Magazine as one of seven African American women unsung heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic [3]. I was featured in several American media outlets, some including MSNBC, People Magazine, Washington Post, New York Times, and in international media outlets in the UK, Indonesia, Korea, and New Zealand. I presented a TEDx Talk where I spoke about the problem with doctors not believing patients with chronic illnesses and how doctors need to treat patients with compassion and drop their biases at the door [4].

*How COVID-19 Brought Medical Gaslighting to the Forefront and Made Invisible Illness Visible… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107936*

My TEDx Talk received over one million views. I started an online Facebook support group for BIPOC women with long COVID. The group was featured in the Washington Post in 2021 [5].

Today I am a COVID-19 survivor. It has been over 2 years and I am still in recovery [6]. I am not as sick as I once was, but I am not 100%. I have been diagnosed with post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (or long COVID). It is estimated that half of the people who survive COVID-19 will get long COVID [7]. Long COVID is a chronic debilitating condition that effects multiple organs, including the brain [8]. People with long COVID develop symptoms that are similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) [8]. We also have chronic pain, and some develop renal, kidney and heart issues. Many continue to have pulmonary and gastrointestinal problems even after initial COVID-19 infection. The list of health problems caused by long COVID is wide ranging and diverse. Brain fog, mild dementia, pins and needle sensation, vision problems teeth and hair loss are just to name a few [8]. Long COVID is a debilitating health condition that severely impacts women more often than men [9]. Women aged 40–60 tend to experience more severe symptoms of long COVID [9].

I have been invited to address President Biden's COVID-19 Taskforce team [10] and I am on the Publications Oversight Committee of RECOVER, a 470-milliondollar long COVID research project funded by the American National Institute of Health (NIH) [11]. In July 2021, because of my advocacy efforts and that of many other COVID-19 patient advocates, President Joe Biden announced that long COVID could qualify as a disability [8]. In this chapter, I discuss medical gaslighting during the pandemic, findings from the BIPOC Long COVID Study, and explain how long COVID made invisible illnesses like ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme disease, and Lupus visible.
