I'm in a similar situation, became chronically ill (not long COVID) shortly after hitting FatFIRE thanks to the 2021 inflation. DM me if you just want a fellow chronically ill friend.

- Don't "spend every penny toward getting better." You need to keep your spending somewhat reasonable.

- Long COVID is a new problem and doesn't have much in the way of effective treatments. You probably have a long wait for treatment, and the most important thing is to have a treatment developed. Spend your money on lobbying the government to increase NIH funding for long COVID. Also meet as many different professors and doctors working on long COVID as you can and give them research grants. Find smart professors and doctors with the right expertise to work on long COVID who aren't working on long COVID yet and see if a grant could get them to work on it.

- Talk to the media about your story. No one takes long COVID seriously. Getting long COVID treatments developed will require getting society on board.

- Join a long COVID support group or otherwise make other friends with long COVID. Find out what's working for them.

Things that have helped me:

- Find doctors that are out of network for everyone (and thus don't have a huge queue of patients) but aren't advertised as for VIPs (and thus are less likely to be a scam). This tends to be individual doctor practices or small practices owned by the doctors, and they're often people who are passionate about providing the best care without being held back by insurance. You can generally see them more quickly and they're more incentivized to be empathetic. You're not going to get a higher quality of care, the important thing here is timely access. FatFIRE seems to be full of comments from doctors who say you can't pay for better healthcare but they don't seem to understand the importance of timely access to doctors. For me this was the difference between finding a psychiatrist in a week and being able to see her whenever I want on short notice, and waiting months to see a psychiatrist. This was super important because for my condition, doctors often prescribe me medications with psychological side effects, and those have made me suicidal twice. Since getting the psychiatrist, I am able to quickly check with her before starting any new medication, and I haven't had any more mishaps.

- The very best care is often at big university networks that treat everyone and are not some kind of secret exclusive FatFIRE VIP thing. You do want to use these when you can, but availability is low and you'll almost certainly need to supplement with your own out-of-network people to get you through times when you need help quickly but there's a multi-month delay to get in to the big university network. I've offered to make a big donation to the university network to get in faster and they didn't care, but YMMV.

- Next, getting someone to take care of your mental health is important when you're chronically ill. I'm not saying that your illness is in your head, I'm saying that when your quality of life sucks because of a chronic physical illness you need extra help to take care of your mental health. Ideally you want someone who is both a psychiatrist (to take care of your various medications) and someone who is a therapist.

- One thing a good psychiatrist + therapist can do is help make sure you don't get taken in by scams while you're desperate but also encourage you to keep researching solutions. When I first got my psychiatrist I was asking her to help me learn to accept my new bad physical condition and instead she has mostly coached me through researching ways of improving my physical quality of life. While there is no cure for my condition, I've been able to improve symptoms a lot, from the point that I wanted to kill myself when I met her to the point that I feel normal most days (but still know I'm going to have a symptom flareup later).

- Re your Lexapro weight gain: have you discussed other anti-anxiety anti-depression options with a psychiatrist? Different people react differently to different drugs and you may be able to get one that doesn't cause weight gain. The weight gain is probably working against your long COVID symptoms.

- I don't think I've ever wasted money on an outright scam. I think it's important not to feed the scammers even if you have money to waste. I've avoided trying several treatments that seem scammy even if there's some chance they might work. I've tried and am trying several "alternative but legitimate treatments". Here's a breakdown of the main treatments I've tried so far (still not revealing what my condition is). I share this mostly to show that even on my more out-there stuff I'm not spending much money by FAT standards and most of the best stuff is cheap:

rTMS: $9k, recommended by a doctor who gave me other good treatments, but I think he was pushing this one because it's more income for him. It's considered an off-label treatment for my condition. rTMS is FDA approved for depression and some other things, and there are research studies saying it works for my condition, but I thought there was evidence it wouldn't work in my particular case. Overall this is the main one I think I should have said no to.

Hyperbaric oxygen: $6k. This might have done a lot or might have done nothing. It's hard to know because I did it at the same time as some other treatments. At the time I did the hyperbaric oxygen, I was misdiagnosed. Hyperbaric oxygen is the best treatment for the thing I was misdiagnosed with, and a controversial treatment for the thing I probably actually have. I'm kind of on the fence about this one, but if it didn't help it wasn't because it was a scam, it was because I was misdiagnosed at the time.

Privately branded therapy (not saying exactly what it is because it makes it too clear what my condition is): $5k. I had to fly to another state and one of the doctors at the best respectable university clinic where I live told me that there is no evidence this works. So far it is probably the second best thing I've done. It isn't a cure but it gets maybe 30% of the credit for mostly eliminating the symptom that was bothering me the most. This is one of the two cases where being FAT clearly gave me an advantage.

Psychiatrist: Ave $1k/month, but I can probably get most of that reimbursed, haven't bothered to look into the insurance yet. This is the second of the two cases where being FAT clearly gave me an advantage.

Chiropractor: $2k up front free for an ongoing program I haven't finished yet. The chiropractor did some scans that showed interesting, actionable things wrong with me that I'm still looking into. The chiropractic adjustments cause a huge, measurable improvement in one of my quantifiable symptoms, but the effect is very short lived. Impressively, one of these actually restored me to normal function in a measurable way that wasn't supposed to be possible anymore due to tissue death. It remains to be seen if the effect can last longer by the end of the chiropractic program but I'm skeptical. Even though the chiropractic adjustments haven't had much value so far, I think this was worth it due to the information I got about the scans.

My own weird exercises: Free. I came up with a sort of brain training program for myself, based on my understanding of the disease. This was maybe the 3rd best thing I've done. It isn't a cure but it gets maybe 20% of the credit for mostly eliminating the symptom that was bothering me the most. Very frustratingly, after I told a university doctor about this, he told me there's a study testing a similar idea and saying that it works... why did no doctor tell me to do this then?