I feel like I lost a decade of my lifespan because of Long Covid

Even just speaking to someone for more than a few minutes gets me winded.

I used to work on my feet 8 hours/day making gears, and gear like objects.

This may indicate an onset of a postcovid syndrome. At the beginning, it is primarily characterized by a chronic fatigue and loosing the ability to work the full shift. Take a look [1].

[1] https://www.hormonesmatter.com/recovering-from-post-covid-mi...

Try to stay optimistic, eat healthy and exercise. With some luck, it might pass. Many people have reported recovering after a couple of months but I don't see why it couldn't take longer.

I don't mean to minimize your suffering, and I believe you.

But: how do you separate out the effects of the viral infection from the effects of the societal upheaval and stress of the last three years?

(If you somehow weren't exposed to the upheaval, then please forgive my assumption.)

No OP but similar situation. It's easy to make the difference: I've been in terribly stressfull situations before. I went to live in Mali, started business, got Malaria, lost everything to the war and had to start all over, going back to my country.

It's not the same. Covid got me bad.

But strangely, only after the third dose of vaccine. Right after it in fact, and ever since.

But it's possible we will learn we are coupounding effects on a lot of fronts: stress from the situation, covid itself, unexpected side effects from the vaccine, and maybe something else.

Hard to tell.

But yeah, this is not regular run of off the mill, stress response.

For myself: because I went through a couple of real world crises without batting an eye and the moment of onset coincides perfectly with the moment of onset of COVID-19.

As for the upheaval: some experienced it as such, for me it actually reduced stress considerably because I didn't have to travel for work anymore which normally would take about 25% of my time and was always super stressful, it also caused a lot of follow on stress because that 25% needed to be made up for somehow.

I'm no longer spending 2+ hours in traffic on 2 of the most busy expressways in the nation each day. We've had (until recently) enough funds to ignore the losses from not working.

My stress level really didn't rise, but my ability to move and do things fell off a cliff.

As someone in a similar (alrhough less acute) situation, what did the doctor said that gave you hope?

He actually knew about and discussed post-covid and long covid implications.

Do you have any other ageing symptoms not related to the cardio-respiratory system?

The linked paper focuses on telomeres and genetic markers for ageing. Since Covid directly impacts the lungs, I wonder if the symptoms you described are related to lung damage or to another mechanism such as the one the paper proposed.

Hope you get well!

It is. They see damage, and not enough time has elapsed to see if it heals. Assuming that the damage will heal is a huge claim, too.