BUFFALO, N.Y. — For many, the pandemic might feel like a thing of the past. While new cases pop up here and there, there are still countless people dealing with the fallout of long COVID.

One of them is Liina Sarapik.

“Some of it I don't remember writing at all,” she said, reading from journal entries a year and a half ago," Sarapik said.

A couple of years almost seems like a different lifetime for Sarapik.

“There were points in time that I thought things were getting better,” she said.

Ever since a fall and ankle injury in February 2023, things got weird for her.

“My foot and my leg would turn a different color," she recalled. "That was one of the things that I had written about right away, that this was happening and doctors couldn't figure out why.”

Months later, she got a diagnosis: long COVID.

“Looking back, it seemed like maybe there were a couple signs [...] but at the time, I thought it was just exhausted from work because I was working for the Ukraine response,” she recalled.

Sarapik was working in Poland at the time and was pretty active.

“I would speed walk to work. I was hiking in the mountains,” she said.

Since then, she’s come back to the U.S. for a more extensive slew of doctors and specialists, ER visits and tests. Her life is on pause.

“Even to get down the street to go to the park here, that's like my tolerance," she said. "Ten minutes there and then I would sit in the park for like an hour."

She started posting about her journey not too long ago, explaining the fatigue, balance issues, cognitive deficits, bradycardia, difficulty swallowing, and so much more. It’s spreading awareness.

“I've been in the mental health field for so long," she explained. "Just having someone to write about what's going on and everything seems to make a difference.”

However, that doesn’t change how she feels on a day-to-day basis.

“When you don't know anything about what's going on in your body, it's really scary,” Sarapik said.

That's a sentiment the University at Buffalo’s Long COVID Center understands. It continues to see consistent numbers of patients.

Their numbers are still in the high 200s and, despite all the research going on, there are tons of unknowns, from diagnosis to treatment. Most of their patients still have symptoms one year later.

“Up to 4000 milligrams of sodium a day, I have to wear compression socks every day," said Sarapik, gesturing to her new routines. "These are electrolytes I have to take.”

Seventeen months in, Sarapik is managing the best she can, leaning on family and strangers in online long COVID groups.

“It felt like every symptom that I had, I could go into a search and find people who had that,” she explained.

On the one hand, it's a comfort.

“The fact that there are people, like thousands, millions of people who are experiencing the same thing is already validation enough that like okay, it's not just me," she said.

But as life carries on, seemingly without her, it’s a mystery that couldn’t be solved soon enough.

“I think just trying to somehow stay hopeful that they'll figure it out more to try to make things better,” Sarapik added.

Doctors at UBMD’s COVID Center say physical therapy, when done correctly, seems very helpful for patients, but if it’s too much exercise, it could make them worse, and so it has to be a careful plan.

Anyone who thinks they could be dealing with long COVID is encouraged to take the center’s online survey. It is free. Their follow-up care is covered by insurance and grants.