By Alyssia Rubertucci March 9, 2021
MONTREAL – When Montreal opera composer Luna Pearl Woolf isn’t deep into her music work, she’s doing things like monitoring her heart rate just to keep her COVID-19 long-haul symptoms at bay.
And after a whirlwind of a year dealing with the virus, her album Fire and Flood was nominated for a Grammy, only making it harder for her to keep her heart from pumping too hard.
“That was just insane!” said Woolf.
“I was at one of my worst points in the long-haul COVID. I’d practically been in bed for a month at that point or maybe and I had been [thinking], ‘This can’t go on. I don’t know how I’m going to continue.’ Then I learned this album nominated for a Grammy. I had no idea that that was even going to be possible,” she said.
The album is nominated in the category of Best Classical Compendium.
The album was released last year in January ahead of her Toronto opera and travels to New York where she contracted COVID-19. Her symptoms came through on Mar. 12. And now, a year later, fatigue, headaches, brain fog, and more still affect her.
“It has become really difficult to do anything that uses cardio,” she explained.
She says rehearsals have been taxing.
Keeping her heart rate under 100 beats per minute has helped mitigate her symptoms.
“If I spend a week without ever really stressing my heart, I don’t get chills, I don’t get headaches. I can find a few hours a day to work.”
Woolf is waiting to be called by the Montreal clinic studying the long-term effects of COVID-19 nearly a year after her initial diagnosis.
“They’re asking people like myself to volunteer our data and I definitely will be willing to be part of that. If they can find something that’s wrong with me, turn that into something that resembles a treatment, I’ll be very happy.”
Another thing that would make her happy is a Grammy win. But Woolf says a nod from the recording academy is almost just as good and has been helping her through her recovery
“These really hard months have taught me I can’t think of it like a cold… I have to think of it like a long-time effort by discipline.”
Read it at City News Montreal
Luna Pearl Woolf 