Until Elizabeth Kenny shuffled into Dr. David M. Systrom’s clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in May 2022, she’d pretty much given up hope.
Two years earlier, the 50-something actress took to her bed with COVID-19, feverish and exhausted, to wait for her body to repair itself. Instead, Kenny’s 101-degree fever lasted 70 days and left behind a series of life-altering symptoms that perplexed every doctor she’d consulted. She’d stopped sweating. Her body fluctuated between feeling hot and freezing cold. She had so much trouble digesting food that she became malnourished. She developed a stutter. Bright lights made her vision blur. The back of her head often felt like someone had whacked it with a frying pan. Her heart raced. But the worst part was the relentless, soul-crushing exhaustion.
Systrom, she recalls, “was the first person that when I was describing my symptoms, wasn’t going ‘weird,’ ” said Kenny, who lives in Arlington. “He was like, ‘Yep.’ And then asking me questions that nobody had asked.”
