What It's Like To Experience Hallucinations Linked To Covid-19
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On week 12 of a drawn-out battle with Covid-19, Georgia Walby saw what looked like a large, bright orange spider crawling across her white bedroom wall. “I knew instantly it couldn’t be real,” Walby, 53, from Cardiff, tells HuffPost UK. “It wasn’t life-like at all, it was animated and it was about six inches in size.”
Her coronavirus symptoms started in mid-March. In those first few weeks, she experienced intermittent shortness of breath with a rapid heartbeat, sore throat, fever, brain fog and fatigue. Tests weren’t widely available at the time, but her GP confirmed a clinical diagnosis of Covid-19.
Walby’s symptoms continued for two months. On the whole, she thought she was getting better week by week, but when she started to venture outside more, she noticed her lung capacity worsening. She struggled to do the short walk to her allotment, was constantly light-headed and her breathing was restricted.
It was around this time Walby started noticing things out of the corner of her eye. “I would think I’d see a cat, then look to find no cat there,” she says. “Sometimes the cat I thought I’d seen was one I used to own years ago. I also started to see flashes of light, always at the edge of my field of vision.”
And then she saw the spider.
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Walby was “totally taken aback” by the cartoon spider that appeared, clear as day, on her wall. She glanced away thinking when she looked back, it would be gone. But it wasn’t. It was still there. “I squinted but it didn’t disappear,” she recalls. “It was so odd looking at something I knew didn’t exist.”
Confused by what was happening – and exhausted by fatigue – she...
