Dr. Drew Pinsky — a media personality and addiction medicine specialist — recently explained what his COVID-19 symptoms felt like, comparing it to leukemia.
What’s happening?
Pinsky recently spoke with Dr. Mehmet Oz on “The Dr. Oz Show” about his experience with COVID-19, describing his myriad symptoms, according to Yahoo! Entertainment.
- “I had three days of fever and prostration. I was out of it. I had terrible back pain, really that was a striking feature, and three days of fever. I was negative the entire time,” he said, according to Yahoo! Entertainment. “And so my doctor brain jumped into the worst possible thing it could be, and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s acute lymphocytic leukemia. I’m ready for a bone marrow in the morning. It’s gonna be OK.’ I was preparing myself for the worst possible thing.”
But, according to Pinsky, it turned out to be COVID-19. And it was something he couldn’t wrap his brain around.
- “It felt uncanny to me. That was the word I kept using, it’s uncanny, I can’t quite describe it,” Pinsky said, according to Yahoo! Entertainment. “It was fatigue, like, I couldn’t have this conversation. I would have to lie down after, like, immediately. I was foggy. I had word-finding difficulty. I had a very strange relationship with sequences. If my wife came in the room and said, ‘Move this pillow. Sit down and take your socks off.’ I literally said to her several times, ‘I know you’re talking. I have no idea what you just said.’ As I got better, I kept telling people, ‘This must be what a traumatic brain injury feels like.’”
Flashback
Per CNN, Dr. Drew once called the pandemic “press-induced.” He later apologized for saying that the pandemic started because of the press and for his comparisons of COVID-19 to the flu, according to Deadline.
“My early comments about equating coronavirus and influenza were wrong. They were incorrect. I was part of a chorus that was saying that, and we were wrong. And I want to apologize for that,” he said, per Deadline.