After suffering at the hands of long COVID for over 12 months, Dawson's Creek writer, Heidi Ferrer, has committed suicide.
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Physical and neurological symptoms
The 50-year-old California resident contracted the virus in April of 2020 after first experiencing body aches–including severe pain in her feet and ankles—fatigue and flu-like symptoms. Unfortunately for the mother-of-one, her symptoms only degenerated and by June of last year, she was completely bedridden.
Besides the initial symptoms that lingered onwards, Ferrer also became crippled with neurological tremors leaving her, as she described in a blogpost, unable to look forward to the future:
The monster is real and it came for me. Recovering from COVID-19 has been one of the hardest things I've ever gone through and I've been through a lot.
In my darkest moments, I told my husband that if I didn't get better, I did not want to live like this. I wasn't suicidal, I just couldn't see any quality of life long term and there was no end in sight.
One of the cruelest things COVID did to me was to take away my ability to have dreams. I don't mean dreams in my sleep, I mean I completely stopped dreaming about my future because I couldn't picture it. It was a wall.
And added:
Yes, everyone had lost our trips, our events, our free lives during the shutdown, but I had lost all of that and also became suddenly crippled with scary neurological programs.
'She fought it like she lived, ferociously'
Though the writer and sometimes actress remained optimistic, urging all those suffering from long-COVID to keep moving forward, her condition only deteriorated rapidly in the last couple of months of her life.
In a Facebook post, screenwriter, director and producer husband Nick Guthe, made the announcement of his now late wife's death following her 13-month battle with the virus:
She fought it like she lived, ferociously, but in the end it was relentless and took away everything from her.
