Warner Robins grad highlights community battling long-term effects of COVID in new book
A Warner Robins High School graduate is returning to the school for a special event in celebration of his new book about people who suffer from the long-term effects of COVID.
Journalist and author Ryan Prior’s new book, “The Long Haul,” was released Nov. 15. It explores what Prior calls a patient-led movement advocating for the healthcare system to recognize, research and treat “long COVID.”
“The book tells the story of the patient advocates who first experienced long COVID, identified it and then built a community around it,” Prior said. “They led research and ultimately got the attention of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, Congress and the White House ... One of the key themes is that patients are the experts in their own diseases and need to have their rightful place at the table in discussing how to design clinical trials and quality research studies.
“The book also goes into the history of post-viral diseases and why they’ve been poorly funded by medical research agencies and misunderstood by doctors and there has not been a lot of education about it in medical schools.”
“The Long Haul” discusses Prior’s personal experience with post-viral disease that started when he was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) in 2006.
“[It] came about when I was a junior at Warner Robins High,” he said. “I saw about 15 doctors and all of them had a really challenging time diagnosing the disease.”
The book also details how the patient advocates who first identified long COVID could change healthcare for decades.
“[They] really are at the cutting edge of how human-centered biomedical innovation will take place in the 21st century. I want to use that as a method for thinking about how we can solve other complex problems … I think putting the people who have lived experience of the problem at the center and using those voices as the way to rethink how institutions solve problems is a key part of this.”
Prior looks forward to returning to Warner Robins High School on Dec. 7 for an event about “The Long Haul.”
“It’s very fulfilling to be able to see an arc from me having a strange illness and thinking I was, in some ways, the only one in the world who had it,” Prior said. “And then understanding that there was a more than a decade long arc, that ultimately leads to first me discovering a whole community of people with ME/CFS, which is about a million Americans. Then with the pandemic, knowing that the numbers of people who had this post-viral illness is likely to rise by five or tenfold. There are estimates now that there are more than 100 million people with long COVID.
“And being able to track the arc from those first experiences in 2006, all the way up through this global experience in 2022 and understanding that that’s all part of one cohesive story is kind of a beautiful, like simple expression of what it means for me to be a writer, to be a human, to be a student. It’s exciting for me to come back to [WRHS,] partly to explain to teachers what their contributions to my life meant to me, and then to hopefully inspire other students who want to become writers, scientists, doctors, politicians.”
The Dec. 7 event will take place at 6:30 pm in the WRHS Performing Arts Center.
