Why we exist
Maya’s story
A composite patient journey“Every test said I was fine. I couldn’t get through a single email.”
Maya was thirty-four, a product lead who ran half-marathons and managed a team of twelve. One winter she caught what everyone called a mild virus. She was back at work within a week.
Three weeks later, things began to slip. She would read the same paragraph four times. The office lights felt like pressure behind her eyes, and the sound of a dropped spoon made her flinch. The stairs to her flat left her short of breath. Migraines came two or three times a week. A good day was usually followed by two days in bed.
Her bloodwork was normal. Her heart scan was normal. Her brain MRI was normal. One doctor suggested burnout, another anxiety. She saw a neurologist, a cardiologist, a pulmonologist and an immunologist, and each examined the part of her that fell within their specialty.
What changed her thinking was meeting other people like her. Their symptoms were almost identical, but their responses were not: what helped one person did nothing for the next. It became hard to avoid the conclusion that they did not share one illness. They shared a set of symptoms sitting on top of several different ones.
That idea, that the same symptoms can come from different biology, is the reason Sequela Bio exists.
Maya is a composite based on experiences commonly reported by people living with post-viral illness. She is not a real person, and her story is illustrative.