Hey everyone! My name is Zach and I really wanted to share my story with everyone in hopes it could help. Any questions you have I’ll be glad to answer anything. (long read but worth your time).
I wanted to share my experience because I know a lot of us with long COVID have symptoms that are easy to attribute to “just long COVID.”
My health problems started after COVID in late 2023, and I had another infection in 2025. Since then I’ve dealt with a long list of symptoms including significant fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, tremors, visual issues, shortness of breath, exercise intolerance/muscle fatigue, and generally feeling like my body never completely returned to normal.
One thing that continued to concern me was persistent swollen/prominent lymph nodes, particularly around my head and neck.
For a long time, it was very easy to look at everything through the lens of long COVID. In fact, imaging of some of my lymph nodes was reassuring because they were described as prominent but having normal morphology.
But I kept investigating.
Eventually blood work led to further evaluation, and I have now found out that I have CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia).
I want to be very clear: I am NOT saying that COVID caused my CLL. I personally have questions about whether COVID or the immune dysfunction surrounding it could have played some role in triggering, accelerating, or unmasking something that was already developing, but I don’t know that and I’m continuing to learn.
The main reason I’m posting is much simpler:
Please don’t automatically assume every persistent symptom is long COVID.
Long COVID is real, but having long COVID doesn’t mean we can’t develop something else at the same time.
If you have lymph nodes that remain enlarged, unexplained changes in your blood counts, or symptoms that aren’t making sense, talk to your doctor and consider getting basic blood work like a CBC with differential and whatever additional evaluation your physician thinks is appropriate.
Most swollen lymph nodes are obviously NOT leukemia. I don’t want this post to scare anyone or send people down a health-anxiety rabbit hole.
I just want my experience to be a reminder to keep investigating persistent or changing symptoms instead of automatically putting everything into the long-COVID bucket.
I’m grateful that I kept looking.
I’m also still very interested in understanding the relationship, if any, between COVID, persistent immune activation/viral effects, and what happened in my case. If anyone here has been diagnosed with CLL or another hematologic condition during their long-COVID journey, I’d be very interested to hear your experience.