You're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce.

While some folks might try to forget it, we are still in an ongoing pandemic.

More than two and a half years in, people are still getting sick and not just four week or two.

According to the CDC, of the adults who have had COVID, and that's a lot of us,

one in five have developed long COVID symptoms, and it can really take a toll.

It was this feeling like I had been run over by a train and I couldn't get up from the tracks,

and I was screaming at people not to come to the train tracks.

That's Carla Monterozo. She's a contributor to a new book called the Long COVID Survival Guide.

The Long COVID Survival Guide is first and foremost for people dealing with long COVID.

And that's Fiona Lowenstein, the editor of the book. It offers emotional support for folks

going through long COVID, but also a lot of really practical advice for managing symptoms and finding

care. I think we also hope that people without long COVID read this book as well to really understand

what it's like to live with this disease and how they can provide help.

Some of the people that I love have long COVID, and I learned so much about how to support them

from talking to Carla and Fiona about the guide. Here's our chat.

The book really focused on the lived experiences of people who were not medical experts,

with people who had done a lot of research and read a lot.

Carla, it makes me think specifically about your onboarding document.

I mean, it's something I had COVID earlier this year, and it would have been great to have an

onboarding document at that time just to help me to understand what was happening with my body.

Talk to me about why you wanted to include that in the book.

Yeah, so I went to the hospital three different times over the course of my initial acute COVID

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