Ok, well here are some more details.I mostly had fatigue, headaches, brain fog and PEM. HBOT involves sitting or lying in a small chamber for an hour. The air in the chamber is gradually pressurized, and you breath oxygen in some way via some kind of mask. That's it. The idea is that the extra pressure and the extra oxygen both increase the amount of oxygen dissolved in your blood plasma, which then is somehow beneficial (but no-one really knows why). It's used to treat lots of things other than LC too. There is a vast amount of information on the internet.There are some risks, especially if you do it for too long (e.g. many hours at once) or have certain health conditions.I did that 5 days/week for the last 4 weeks, one hour per day. It's not unpleasant, but it's a bit boring, takes a chunk of time out of your day, and I find it wipes me out for the rest of the day (so I try and book it late afternoon rather than morning). But I'm ever so glad I did it.There are a couple of places locally where you can do that.I mostly went to Simplyoxygen, which is located in a small room inside the stoop in Twickenham. Very easy to get to from Chiswick if you have a car, although you will learn to hate the A316 pretty quickly. The Harlequin players use it to speed up their recovery from injuries.I also went to a clinic called 360 in Surbiton high street a couple of times. There are various other clinics around london, and some in central london are very expensive.At simplyoxygen you can do a mild version of HBOT, in which you sit in a small tent, which is inflated to +30% of regular atmospheric pressure, and then you breath a bit of extra oxygen thru a small mask. You can take a book or ipad to pass the time. You can also rent the tents and do it at home.Or you can do a more intense version, in which you lie down in a metal chamber which is inflated to +100% of atmospheric pressure, and you breath oxygen thru a top-gun style mask. This one is boring because you are lying down and can't really do anything to pass the the time. I started with the mild one, but switched to the intense one, according to the principle of in for a penny in for a pound, and because I figured it would work quicker. It took 17 sessions before I was well enough to start doing exercise again, so it's definitely not immediate. You need a bit of patience, a bit of faith that it's going to work, time to spare, and some money in your bank account, to keep going.At simplyoxygen, the intense version costs just over £100/session. Ouch. But for me it's a no-brainer, even at that cost, because of the detrimental impact of LC on my ability to work, and because I've had it so long with no apparent trend towards recovery. At 360 they do a version in-between the mild and intense versions, and offer big discounts if you buy many sessions at once. If you contact simplyoxygen, you could mention my name to Russell. That's about it, but if you have any questions let me know.It's something you have to decide to commit to. But there's certainly some good evidence (apart from my experience) that it might work. You can google 'long covid hbot' to read a scientific paper written by some folk who ran a reasonably proper test, and concluded that it worked, based on the 10 patients they tested. I have a colleague who was very sick with LC, and she was cured, but only after 40 sessions. It was her experience that motivated me to do it.
Stephen Jewson ● 1548d