Early last year, Wollongong-born dancer Riley Lapham was one of the rising stars of Australian ballet.
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One of five young dancers vying for a $25,000 prize in the Telstra Ballet Dancer of the Year Award, the 23-year-old did interviews and photoshoots showing a glamorous day-in-the-life of a full time dancer.
"I was young, fit, an athlete," she said.
"Seven-to-eight hours a day of rehearsals and classes, an hour of pilates, strength training, and performing eight shows a week for two thirds of the year."
She'd been nominated for hard work, improvement and potential within the Australian Ballet Company and was looking forward to a year performing her first principal role, dancing in her favourite ballet Swan Lake, and travelling to London with the company for her first overseas performances.
But then a bout of COVID knocked her out.
And it never went away.
Now nine months in, Riley is one of hundreds of thousands of Australians who are estimated to have long COVID.
She wants people to know what she's been through to increase the awareness of the new and little understood condition.
'Why have I got long COIVD?'
Riley started dancing at age 6, at Corrimal's Beverley Rowles School of Dance, attending after-school classes and performing in local eisteddfods.
At 11, her teacher suggested she audition for the Australian Ballet School interstate training program, and by 14 joined the school full-time and moved to Melbourne, where she received the annual Award for Excellence every year of her schooling.
Four years later she was accepted into the Australian Ballet Company as a professional dancer, where she was among the leading dancers in the corps de ballet.
When she got COVID for the fourth time in April, she was young and healthy, with her career demanding a dedication to looking after her body.
"If there's anyone that takes care of themselves best it's ballet dancers," she said.
"We eat well, we sleep well, because we have to for work and I'm only 23 - so why have I got long COVID?"
She said her initially symptoms were more severe than she had experienced with previous COVID infections, with all the symptoms - cough, sinusitis, fatigue, sore throat, swollen glands, headache, a wheeze in the chest - knocking her out.
"Then I was acutely sick with those symptoms for six months really," she said.
"I felt like I was going to be sick forever. I still feel like that sometimes - like my career is over, my ballet career is done and my life as I know it is done and I'm just going to be stuck in this kind of state of suffering for the rest of my life."
By late September, there had been a gradual reduction in some of her respiratory symptoms, but she remains too sick to work or - on some days - live a normal life.
"I'm nowhere near ready or able to go back to work, especially because my work is so physically demanding," she said.
"I am able be on my feet, but I have to pace myself and make sure I finish the day with something in the tank.
"I can cook, grocery shop, shower - very basic things which for so long were struggles. It's a very, very long road."
A year of constant dashed hopes
With long COVID not yet well recognised or understood, it took several months for Riley to connect with a health team who specialised in the illness.
She was eventually diagnosed with POTS or 'postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome', which has become well-known since the rise of long COVID.
"For me, every time I would stand up after lying down for a period of time, my vision would tunnel and black out and then open up after like 10 seconds and my heart would race and I would feel nauseous throughout the day."
She was also referred to a long COVID clinic called Clinic 19, a national telehealth service with a six month waiting list.
"I finally saw them in November and they are the frontier of the most recent treatments because there's no official treatment for this," she said.
"We don't actually know physiologically why long COVID happens. There are lots of theories and there are different treatment approaches for each theory, but even many of those treatments are just still experimental."
She said this felt frustrating and hopeless at times, and describes "constant dashed hopes" as she has continued not to get better.
All of last year, she found herself missing milestone after milestone - her first role as principal dancer, the trip to London and performing Swan Lake, which she'd been dreaming about since she was a six-year-old dancer in Corrimal.
"Last year was like a huge loss to come to terms with," she said.
"I'm still processing that grief, of like losing something that you thought you were going to have on top of your health, your career, your friends, your independence and your autonomy."
"I feel kind of stuck in space and time, but I've learned the only helpful comparison is for me to look forward with blinkers on, and look at what's possible for me and my own trajectory and just be excited about that day where I return to work and that day that I get to perform again."
Shocking complacency
With the latest "wave upon a wave" of COVID raging, Ms Lapham says she's stunned by the complacency about the virus given the devastating consequences it's had on her health.
"Nobody seems to care - no one wears masks and there was a new vaccination released in December that no one seems to know about," she said.
"I think there's a lot of COVID complacency now and I don't want to fear-monger but people should know that there are bigger dangers to it.
"For so long the message was avoid hospitalisation and anyone that wasn't at high risk was like, 'oh, I'm fine' but I was that person and now my life has totally been pulled apart and will be forever changed by it."
She says her medical team has since informed her that she has some risk factors for long COVID - like being a woman, an athlete and having hypermobile joints.
"I'm in the advantageous situation of being 3 or 4 years into the pandemic," she said.
"There are people with COVID still suffering that got it in March of 2020.
"If people know nothing now, people really knew nothing then and there was so much gaslighting."
A small bright spot after a challenging year, Ms Lapham's mum who still lives in Wollongong nominated her for the 2024 City of Wollongong awards after she was approached by organisers.
Riley says the award reinforced what Wollongong meant to her as home.
"I spent 14 years growing up there and I'm really proud to be able to say that I'm from Wollongong," she said.
"It helped me to reflect on the part that Wollongong has played in my life and in my career, and still the specialness it holds that it holds. It's a place that just never leaves you really."