When Anneke Jansma flew in to Aberdeen from Barcelona last year, friends waiting at the airport almost didn’t recognise her.
Bent over, confused and walking with a stick, the 56-year-old Dutch woman was struggling to cope with the effects of long covid.
The condition, which remains little understood but affects an estimated 36 million people in Europe, had turned Anneke from a globe-trotting coordinator for Moto GP races into someone who could barely leave her home.
“My friends knew me from my extremely active life before,” says Anneke, now 57. “And now they saw me like a shadow of myself.”
Oxygen therapy in Aberdeen was last hope for Anneke’s long covid ordeal
Anneke’s flight to Aberdeen was a last-ditch attempt to salvage her old life.
In Barcelona, where she has a home, she was part of a research study into long covid and its potential treatment by oxygen therapy.
She caught Covid just before much of Europe went into lockdown in March 2020.
But two months later she still felt ill. There was coughing, cold sweats and body aches.
She lost her voice and it was difficult to walk even a few steps. Whole days were spent in bed or on the sofa. Breathing, she says, was like having a “bag over my head”.
After seeing cardiologists, internists and two lung specialists, in 2021 she started treatment at the Barcelona hyperbaric chamber.
Once a week, she sat in a giant tube – the kind of machine used to treat the decompression sickness, or the bends, suffered by deep-sea divers.
With a mask strapped to her face, Anneke would breathe 97% pure oxygen as the pressure in the chamber dropped to levels roughly equivalent to that in the cabin of a long-haul air flight.
The idea is to get as much oxygen into the blood stream as possible, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, as the treatment is known, is used in health care for injury recovery; getting more oxygen into the lungs has been shown to improve healing time.
Elite sports people also use it to shorten the time needed to recover between training.
Footballer Christiano Ronaldo supposedly had one installed in his home when he played for Manchester United.
Over the past few years, however, people with severe and long-term illnesses have discovered HBOT.
A section of those with multiple sclerosis, for example, swear by the treatment, saying that it gives them the energy and vitality to lead a more normal life.
And, since the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 introduced long covid, some sufferers have witnessed improvements from repeated sessions in an oxygen chamber.
Medical professionals still have yet to fully endorse the treatment. Like many things around long covid, multiple viewpoints exist.
But long covid sufferers such as Anneke don’t care about any of that. All they know is that their sometimes life-changing ailments can be helped through HBOT.
“It’s a physical change, it’s an attitude change, it’s an energy change,” Anneke says. “I don’t care if they call it placebo effect, which I don’t think it is. It helped me.”
When the Barcelona centre became a no-go, flying to Aberdeen was the solution
The Barcelona HBOT brought Anneke back to 70%, she says. But two months after completing her course, her symptoms returned after a Covid vaccine booster shot.
She was told she could no longer be treated in Barcelona for free because the chamber was oversubscribed.
Meanwhile, her insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, amid what Anneke says was health-care scepticism over long covid.
“Nobody believed me,” Anneke says. “All the doctors in the hospitals, they didn’t believe me.”
There was just one thing for it. Fly to Cults.
What makes the oxygen therapy in Cults so good for Anneke and her long covid?
Why Cults?
Well, the Aberdeen suburb was at that time about to welcome a privately-run hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber.
O2Worx, which runs a network of chambers throughout the UK, was coming to Aberdeen and had picked Cults as its location.
Meanwhile, Anneke had friends in the area who would let her stay. It was perfect.
The Cults venue – which earlier this month moved to Westhill – even agreed to let Anneke use its chamber two weeks before it officially opened.
So, in the summer of last year, Anneke made the trip to Aberdeen airport, where her friends saw just how much she had deteriorated.
Cults oxygen chamber is cheaper than a Barcelona beauty salon
It wasn’t long before she was being treated at Cults O2Worx. As the very first customer, she was able to try it before anyone else.
The chamber was smaller than the one in Barcelona, just four seats compared to 12.
Also, privately-operated capsules tend not to have the same grunt ones in hospitals.
At O2Worx, the pressure was less than what Anneke was used to – equivalent to a transatlantic plane at half its cruising height.
But she loved the little chamber in Cults, which was run out of a small premises in The Courtyard shopping centre.
She could be dropped off just outside the door, where she was always given a warm welcome by staff.
“They were special people,” says Anneke, who still remembers the empathy she was shown.
She also liked the price. One session, which lasts about an hour, cost £60.
“In Barcelona you pay double in a beauty salon,” she laughs. “It was cheaper for me to go to Aberdeen than go to Seville or Madrid, where there was a chamber like this.”
Anneke swears by treatment she received for her long covid
She started to improve. Anneke made two separate trips to Cults, each consisting of 20 sessions, with two every day.
The brain fog that had descended on this second stage of long covid, and which meant she still hardly remembers the flight to Aberdeen, slowly lifted.
Her improvement wasn’t as marked as in the high-powered Barcelona chamber. Also, she only had two weeks of therapy in Cults compared to six weeks in Spain.
But she says her time in Aberdeen “got me out of nowhere land and back in the land of the living”.
She even says it helped save her life.
“I was on a downhill slope,” she goes on to say. “What the doctors tell me now is that besides having the symptoms, your body gets weaker due to being inactive. You’re surviving.
“And if you are in survival mode for so long you go down.”
How long does long Covid last? One year on… and Anneke isn’t perfect, but better
One year on from her last session in Cults, Anneke is back in Barcelona. She has dealt with a lot in those 12 months, including a PTSD diagnosis from her body having been in constant fight or flight mode.
But she is much improved, and continuing to get better through a form of integrated medicine that includes ozone blood therapy, a treatment similar to HBOT.
“I’m around 70%,” she says.
She realises, however, that her old life in Barcelona is gone. Walks with her beloved dogs, qigong sessions on the beach and meeting friends for coffee and shopping – she no longer has the energy.
“The lesson is that there’s no old Anneke anymore,” she says.
“It’s now almost three-and-a-half years ago that I was that person. And that person is gone.”
