Matt McGorry , actor with an excellent video on Instagram re long COVID
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBra_TSRhpz/?igsh=MXBodmEybGh6bHMxMQ==
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBra_TSRhpz/?igsh=MXBodmEybGh6bHMxMQ==
The story of Fulcrum Defender begins following a trip Ma made to Vancouver, Canada in August 2023 to see Subset co-founder Matt Davis and a few other members of the studio in-person. At the time, the team was working on more than one game. According to Ma, one of the larger, more promising projects was "struggling," but the trip led to a breakthrough. Then, she caught Covid-19.
She returned to her home in Kyoto, Japan, quarantined and eventually recovered from the acute symptoms, but never bounced back completely. "I think it was the first day that I went out to be outside, bike, do normal things, and I just completely shut down," she said. "I couldn't get out of bed for like four days." She realized she was experiencing long Covid.
As we chatted over Google Meet, Ma frequently took long pauses to piece together her memories and find the right words to express her loss. "I'm a different person," she told me after one such break. "I walk around with a cane. I need to structure exactly how I do something outside. I need to know where all the chairs are. I walk at a grandma's pace, and I'm constantly forced to maintain awareness of my physical state, because if I do too much, it's already too late. It makes everything feel dangerous."
For the first four months of her illness, Ma couldn't work at all. "Even even when I was more used to needing to pace myself, not only was it harder to do things that used to come naturally to me, but I would also get lost in my own head," she said. She worried she might never make games again.
"I would wake up in the morning and think about the game and make progress every day – even if it was only a couple of hours – that did something really important for my psychological state," she said.
Ma hasn't found a doctor in Japan who knows enough about the illness to offer her a conclusive diagnosis, and the state of research on long Covid in general is nascent. "They hate to make uncertain calls," she explained.
"I feel like I need to live with the possibility that it won't go away, so I just sort of operate with that mindset," she told me. "This illness has shrunk my world and perception of time considerably. My memory is way worse. I'll forget what happened like a week ago, and I don't really think about the future at all. And so I'm just in a constant present. It feels like I'm being forced to train to be a monk."
Ma has been through so much, and yet Fulcrum Defender isn't a game about chronic health concerns, disability or memory loss. It seems to studiously avoid borrowing any biographical detail from Ma's life whatsoever. People will play and enjoy it knowing nothing of the challenging circumstances in which it was made.
Earlier this year, Porzingis dealt with an upper respiratory illness that forced him to miss eight games at the end of February and beginning of March. On Tuesday, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla hinted at the fact that Porzingis is still dealing with the lingering symptoms of that illness, which played a role in his limited action during Game 1.
"He had been working through it since he's gotten back, and he's done a great job of being available," Mazzulla said, via Noa Dalzell. "It was just hard for him to continue yesterday."
In March, Porzingis described what he dealt with when he first got the illness.
"I haven’t been this sick, probably ever, in my life," he said. "After each workout, I was — boom, big crash. Really fatigued. Not normal."
It is still unclear what illness exactly Porzingis has, but it seems as though it is something he will be dealing with in the playoffs moving forward. While Mazzulla declared both Porzingis and forward Sam Hauser as "day-to-day" on Tuesday, the Celtics declared Porzingis "probable" for Game 2 on Wednesday.