Reclaiming My Life from Long COVID: Mitochondrial Damage and the Four-Part Recovery Protocol with Dr. Jolene Brighten

Dr. Brighten: [00:00:00] Back in early 2020, I got sick with what we would later know as COVID-19. And the really strange thing about how this story began is that I didn't have the typical symptoms that everyone was talking about. So I never developed a cough, I never had a high fever. Instead, it was this gradual onset of difficulty breathing, and not because it felt like I couldn't get l- the oxygen into my lungs.

I could. It just felt like I couldn't get the oxygen to where it needed to go, and day by day, it was becoming harder to breathe. And where I was living at the time, there was sargassum, there were other things going on that I, I started to tell myself stories. Like, because this was so subtle, maybe it was because of the sargassum.

That's a type of seaweed that puts off really awful smell, but awful gas as well. Then I thought, like, you know, maybe I just need to rest more. Maybe I'm burning the candle at both ends. Maybe this is some kind of anxiety. And then it became impossible to ignore. [00:01:00] And I remember waking up one morning and thinking, like, "Something is so wrong here that maybe I'm gonna have to go to the hospital."

I went outside. I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna sit in the sun. I'm gonna do deep breathing. I'm going to meditate." And so I was focusing on slow, deep breathing because I truly was thinking, like, "Maybe if I can calm my nervous system, then these symptoms are not gonna be so bad." Like, you know, because it couldn't be COVID.

But the meditation didn't work, the sitting in the sunlight didn't work, the chilling out my nervous system didn't work, because as the day went on, my breathing was getting harder and harder. And I remember just a couple days before that, I was on a webinar with a group of women, women I've known for, like, over a decade.

And when I was talking and it was my time to present, we were on Zoom, and I was getting these DMs, like the direct chat messages from people i- being like, "Are you okay? What's going on with you? [00:02:00] I've never heard you talk so slow in your life." And a friend of mine, she was so concerned that she texted me, and she's like, "You're not breathing right.

Like, it seems like you can't catch your breath." here I am a few days later, trying the deep breathing, trying the meditation, sitting out in the sun, and I just had this thought of, like, " I feel like I need to take a photo here and memorialize this moment because I am so scared."

Like, there's this fear deep inside me of, like, I don't know what is gonna come next. And what came next was me passing out on the way to the bathroom, just walking to the bathroom. I later call a friend of mine who's an ER doctor. He's like, "I know you're stubborn. I know you don't wanna hear this, but you need to go to the hospital."

And I'm like, "I don't wanna go to the hospital 'cause everybody at the hospital has COVID, and I don't have COVID, and I don't wanna get COVID." Well, as it turned out, I did have COVID

And I'm gonna talk to you about what came next to going to the hospital. But this episode was prompted by your [00:03:00] request when I shared on social media my journey, my story, and I said I really focused on mitochondrial support to help me with my long COVID journey. Yes, plot spoiler, there was long COVID as part of this journey.

Many of you asked, "Would you please share this story and share what you used?" So I'm going to do that because as it is today, I am no longer struggling with the long COVID symptoms. I don't have the debilitating fatigue, the brain fog, the nerve pain, the POTS. I mean, it was a journey. So if you're new here, I'm Dr. Jolene Brighten. I'm board certified in naturopathic endocrinology. I'm a nutrition scientist, a certified menopause practitioner through the Menopause Society, and I struggled with long COVID. I am a doctor. I'm licensed as a physician, but that doesn't make me your doctor.

And so I say this because I'm gonna share my journey. I'm gonna share this as part of my perspective, and anything you learn is not medical advice here. [00:04:00] We're still learning so much about COVID. I finally agree to go to the hospital, and I am stubborn. Most doctors are pretty stubborn. And my husband drove me there, but because it was early in the pandemic, he was not allowed to come inside. I had to just be dropped off on a bench and wait for someone to come out. And I remember wondering if that was gonna be the last time I saw him for a while, maybe forever.

It was just a really awful feeling. And at this point, we knew so little about this virus. We watched hospitals on television, people reporting, like, you know, h- uh, people dying, intubation. We watched physicians trying desperately to save people without knowing what actually worked or, or what was going to be effective.

So walking into the emergency room, I genuinely didn't know if I was coming home. And then it was a really odd experience. Nobody wanted to touch me, talk to me, have anything to [00:05:00] do with me. They put oxygen on me. They set an IV line. I didn't see people for hours. They came in with an X-ray machine, like, and just blasted me with an X-ray, and they were like, "You can't go to another room.

You're not getting a lead apron to cover your organs. Like, you're not getting any of that. Like, we just need to do this X-ray." I was just left in this deserted part of the hospital. And on YouTube, I will put up an image so you can see what I'm talking about, because there were beds there that had been occupied but then abandoned, and there was just paper everywhere.

They weren't cleaning up after anyone. They weren't coming to check on me. I mean, I was there all day, and no food, no water, nothing offered to me. And I had packed my own snacks and my own stuff, and thankfully I did, because literally no one wanted to come near me

Eventually, somebody comes to draw blood, and hours later I get results. And what happened [00:06:00] next still feels really surreal when I think about it today. So they told me, "Go outside and wait." Literally just walked in and said, "Go outside and wait." So I went out into this parking lot and just stood there, and a physician walked into the parking lot wearing full personal protective equipment and stayed as far away from me as he could possibly be, and he yelled my diagnosis across the parking lot.

And he said, "You know, your COVID is positive." I remember asking him, uh, you know, the only question that seemed to matter in that moment to me is like, "So what's the treatment?" Like, "What do I do? What do I do next?" And here I am, like, can't breathe. My pulse ox had been really low. I, you know, and he said to me the answer that really just, I mean, was like a punch in the gut.

There isn't one. He explained that my lungs were clear. I wasn't in respiratory failure from pneumonia or anything like that, so the only [00:07:00] intervention they had if I continued to deteriorate was intubation. Otherwise, they had nothing. There was no medication. There was no treatment. There, there was nothing.

And then he looked at me, and he said something that I will never forget, and it honestly changed everything about how I went forward in living my life, and he said, "You'll either get better in a couple weeks or you won't, and you should probably get your affairs in order." Okay, so here I am. I- I've spent my career studying nutrition, hormones, inflammation, chronic disease.

I am young. I am healthy. I exercise. I eat well Not a smoker, no cardiometabolic disease. I didn't have diabetes. You know, all of these things that we were told, these are the risk factors. These are the people who get sick. These are the people who have to worry Everything we believed at this point was that people at the greatest risk were older adults and people with significant underlying medical [00:08:00] conditions.

And I remember thinking, " How is this happening to me? How could someone who has dedicated her life to health suddenly become one of the sickest people she knew?"

So I leave the hospital, my husband comes and picks me up. They're like, "You should quarantine from your whole family." I'm like, "It's too late for that, honestly." My husband, thankfully, the next day, he advocates for supplemental oxygen, and I am on oxygen daily for months. There wasn't a real treatment plan.

There wasn't a protocol. There wasn't a roadmap. There was just oxygen and waiting.

I can honestly say that as both a doctor and a patient, that was one of the most helpless experiences of my life because it wasn't just about being afraid of dying, it was also about being afraid that if I survived, like, this might be my life now. Like, I might be on oxygen. And I had no idea that the hardest part wasn't even this initial part, this acute infection.

The [00:09:00] hardest part was what came next

Because while my body was fighting this virus, the, my body took a hit, and it never fully recovered, you know, in that, in those initial months. And that was the beginning of my journey with what we now know as long COVID

And, you know, I know as they say this, there's a very real possibility that this podcast, uh, this video, social media could get shadowbanned for all of this, and I say that as somebody who went through shadowbanning. So because early in the pandemic, I had different symptoms, so one of the first things, other than the inability to breathe, is that my left armpit swelled up, like mastitis swelled up.

If you know, you know, having mastitis. Uh, I had really, really painful lymph nodes just in my armpit. So bizarre. As things progressed, so there was the breathing issue. Weeks later, what comes next is [00:10:00] shooting pains, so just throughout my body randomly, like I'm being electrocuted, pains going down my legs, my sacrum burning all the time, shooting pains in my face, trigeminal neuralgia, migraines.

Okay? Serious, serious migraines. Um, feeling like, uh, my legs couldn't hold still because they were just so achy and painful and shooting pains, and so I'd have to constantly be moving my legs. Then things progressed further to where it was like, oh yeah, I can't breathe, like, and get oxygen without being on oxygen, and in addition to that, I now get a racing heart.

If I stand up too quickly, my heart rate would jump up. I couldn't go to the bathroom without feeling like my heart was pounding out of my chest, and I was completely dizzy. I had no exercise tolerance left. I developed POTS. I wish I knew then what I know now, which is that I have [00:11:00] endometriosis and adenomyosis because I had thought my autoimmune disease is what made me susceptible to this.

I have Hashimoto's. That's what made me susceptible to this, and as it turns out, the research is now showing endometriosis leaves you susceptible to this. And something that I would have done differently in my protocol knowing that, now I took, like, a lot of nettles, a lot of quercetin, but I would have been on antihistamines because I do think there was a histamine component to this that we only now are beginning to understand.

I wasn't diagnosed yet with ADHD or autism. No, I did not acquire those from having COVID. I had those since childhood. Ask anyone who knew me as a child. They, they, uh, I would say they'd vouch for me, but they did vouch for me. Um, when you go through these evaluations, people have to write a narrative about their experience with you and looking back at, like, what you were like as a child

So when I started sharing all this stuff online, just sharing my experience, Meta shut me down. So Instagram wouldn't share [00:12:00] anything. I would literally have a story where I'm just talking about, like, food, for example, and the next story I say COVID, I say that, you know, that I'm sick or anything like that, and they just would not show it.

And I think they did a lot of harm. I think a- I think m- most people involved in the entire pandemic did a lot of harm with good intentions. The impact is still the same, but I think the intention was, like, they were trying to guard against misinformation. I feel like I still, my social media accounts have never recovered since this because I just, like, got a mark on me.

Um, because what I was talking about wasn't recognized yet. And I remember joining a long haulers group on Facebook because there were just thousands, I mean, I'm talking like, 100,000 of us who were like, "What is actually going on?" And doctors took to the internet to say we were malingering, we were attention-seeking, that there [00:13:00] was no evidence of this.

Then the same doctors flipped their story and said, "Well, we know Epstein-Barr virus can cause symptoms like this, so maybe that's normal." And I think it's things like that that made people start to lose trust in medicine early on, and we, we saw that. JAMA came out with an article showing that, like, public trust in medicine has dropped substantially, and I think we've got a, a lot of work to do to repair that public trust because, uh, there was never a, "Yeah, guys, sorry, we got it wrong.

Actually, listen to your patients. Actually, this was right. Hey, sorry, guys, we know we said this, but now it's actually this." There was never an owning of it. There was actually more of, like, uh, yeah, we, we totally made people who felt like garbage feel more like garbage, and then we pretended that we didn't do that...

and, and that we were experts of things and just moving on. And I get that, like, that was probably coming from a place of, like, I need, like, we need to have that confidence. Like, [00:14:00] we need to, like, fake it till we make it kind of confidence building, and I just, I don't think it worked out to be that way.

So this episode, though, I'm gonna bring it back on track 'cause I wanna talk about what we actually know and what I did.

So through this COVID journey, I was using antivirals. I was using, I mean, all kinds of medications and things that I can't even talk about, 'cause I definitely will get shadowbanned if I say that. But it was early on. We didn't know what would work. I was literally trying everything. So when I was first infected in 2020, we were treating COVID as an acute respiratory illness.

Months after my initial recovery, I found myself in a state of profound systemic exhaustion. . I had crushing brain fog that persisted, and I couldn't do anything really without a multi-day crash. And so whatever I did in that day, I knew I had to pay for it for like the next three days. And so, you know, [00:15:00] I had to step out of the role of being a patient and start to look at the clinical research.

But at the time, there wasn't much. And now the World Health Organization, WHO, it formally recognizes this constellation of lingering symptoms as post-COVID-19 condition. The WHO's working definition, it emphasizes that the condition impacts daily functioning, and it cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis.

And believe me, I tried to find every other diagnosis of, like, could I actually just explain this because how could I be so sick? So what I asked myself at the time is, like, what physiological mechanism explains a multi-system shutdown where my heart, my lungs, my brain are all structurally intact, yet they feel like they're completely energy starved?

And that answer brought me straight to the cellular level, which is the mitochondria. We often dismiss the mitochondria in medical school. It gets just called the powerhouse of the cell, and we [00:16:00] memorize the Krebs cycle for an exam. I don't actually know in medical school. I'm like, I definitely remember that in nutrition school.

But when you look at the emerging data, it becomes clear that SARS-CoV-2 severely compromises the mitochondria. So there was a landmark, uh, study that was published in Frontiers in Immunology. I will put this in the show notes. It examined prolonged tissue changes in post-COVID conditions, and the researchers discovered that there was a persistent suppression of oxidative phosphorylation.

What is that? That's the exact biochemical pathway our mitochondria use to make ATP, which is our energy. And this wasn't just a temporary lag. What the data showed was that there was ongoing mitochondrial fragmentation, impaired fatty acid oxidation, and massive oxidative stress for months after the virus was cleared.

So you no longer have the, [00:17:00] um, immune testing that shows that you have a virus. It'll show, like, the history of the virus, the memory of the virus, and yet the mitochondria still are struggling

And what I explain this as is that essentially the cellular power plant, that's the mitochondria, they were in a brown out state. The fuel was in the room, but the generators were structurally damaged by the initial viral and immune storm, because it's not just the virus, it's also how the immune system responds.

And so I started looking at my post-COVID condition through the framework of this being more of like a bioenergetic failure. And then I switched my entire approach to recovery to focus on how do I support my mitochondria? How do they start to optimize them? So once I viewed my long COVID through the lens of mitochondrial dysfunction, that changed my strategy completely.

And I wasn't looking for just one supplement that would magically make me feel better. I think that's important to understand. [00:18:00] Um, what I was looking at is what does a cell need to recover its ability to make energy? What does it actually need to make energy altogether? And that became the framework for everything I did.

And yes, I did use supplements because, y- yeah, I mean, there's concentrated versions of these things you can only get in supplement form.

The way I approached this, the framework was really like four key areas of what I started looking at. So I needed to reduce oxidative stress. I needed to restore nutrients that my body needed, the mitochondria needed for energy production, the ATP production. I needed to support the neuroendocrine environment so that healing could actually happen.

And then the fourth one I think is maybe one of the most important, is I had to shift my energy, my expectations, my mindset, and I had to learn to pace my energy instead of judging myself, hating on myself, constantly exceeding what my capacity was. So these are the four areas I want to dive into [00:19:00] here

Now, as somebody who now knows they have endometriosis, adenomyosis, ADHD, autism, and multiple autoimmune diseases, oxidative stress is always trying to get the best of me, and it did. It did in this story. But what I need you to understand is that one of the hallmarks of mitochondrial dysfunction is oxidative stress.

So as the mitochondria become damaged, they're gonna produce more reactive oxygen species. Those reactive oxygen species are what are damaging the mitochondria to begin with, and then the mitochondria makes more, and now you're gonna damage mitochondrial proteins, lipids, DNA. Makes your mitochondria less efficient at producing energy, and it's this self-perpetuating cycle.

So if I wanted my mitochondria to recover, I had to first reduce the oxidative burden, reduce what was making them dysfunctional. So one of the first supplements that I was using was N-acetylcysteine, or NAC. I chose NAC because it [00:20:00] is a rate-limiting precursor for glutathione synthesis. What does that mean?

It's necessary to make glutathione, which is the body's primary intracellular antioxidant. It's one of the most important defenses against oxidative stress.

And rather than simply adding more antioxidants from the outside, I wanted to support my body's ability to produce its own. Plus, N-acetylcysteine has so many benefits for neurological health, for gut health, so it's like one supplement to help all these systems. I also paired it with high-dose vitamin C.

Vitamin C works differently than glutathione. It functions as a potent water-soluble antioxidant. It's gonna donate electrons to neutralize free radicals before they can damage surrounding tissue, and it, it does that to the vitamin E that's in the lipid bilayer. So at the cellular level, so vitamin C's in the aqueous solution.

It's gonna donate electrons to help keep the cell membrane stable

I didn't use [00:21:00] vitamin C because it helps you get over a cold faster. That's not actually how vitamin C works. Vitamin C works, um, because it helps with oxidative stress, it helps with free radicals, and together, NAC and vitamin C, they supported a complementary aspect of antioxidant defense system overall.

A lot of people are not aware that when your immune system gets activated, it is gonna make free radicals as part of battling the viruses, bacteria, you know, any kind of infection that shouldn't be there.

I also increased EPA, rich omega-3 fatty acids. I still had DHA in there, but I was focusing more on the anti-inflammatory aspect because long COVID's not just a fatigue problem. Many patients demonstrate persistent inflammatory and vascular abnormalities long after the acute infection, and EPA shifts production towards a less inflammatory profile [00:22:00] and helps stabilize cell membranes, including the membrane surrounding the mitochondria.

Now, the other cornerstone of this was ubiquinol, the reduced form of coenzyme Q10 or CoQ10. I specifically chose ubiquinol because it's generally more bioavailable than the oxidized form. CoQ10 is gonna serve as an electron carrier within the electron transport chain. It's gonna transfer electrons between these complexes that you have.

It's gonna support the mitochondria in its energy production. If that oxidative phosphorylation that I was talking about before was impaired, then supporting this, I wanted to support this. It was a very critical molecule to help with the electrons through that system. Now, when I look back at this section of the protocol that I was doing, my goal wasn't simply just to take antioxidants.

I need you to understand that. My goal was to interrupt the cycle of oxidative damage that was preventing my [00:23:00] mitochondria from recovering.-

So I'm bringing down oxidative stress, so then I also need to focus on how do I get my mitochondria to make ATP, to make that energy. This is not a passive process. So we've got the Krebs cycle, the electron transport chain. What you need to know about that is that it requires certain nutrients so that the enzymes can do their job.

That's the cofactors needed. If the cofactors are missing, the system becomes inefficient. Even if the mitochondria themselves are beginning to recover, we still have to have the nutrients to fuel this. And so that's why I prioritize a comprehensive B complex, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin. Those are three big ones that are essential for oxidative metabolism, and they are gonna participate directly in the biochemical reactions that ultimately create that ATP energy.

I also incorporated a NAD+ precursor nicotinamide riboside. That's [00:24:00] specifically what it was. And this decision to bring these in, it was rooted in the emerging research on NAD metabolism during viral infections

when the immune system gets activated, NAD is consumed at a significant amount. 

And when NAD becomes depleted, that can impair your ATP production further. So I needed to restore those pools

So restoring these nutrients, these pools, that just makes, like, biochemical sense to me, especially given the degree of cognitive dysfunction that I was experiencing, that a lot of us experience with long COVID. Now, something else I added was acetyl L-carnitine. Carnitine is responsible for transporting long-chain fatty acids across the inner mitochondrial membrane.

Why does that matter? 'Cause there's a process called beta oxidation that uses fat to produce energy. If the fatty acids can't reach the mitochondria, they're not in the matrix [00:25:00] there, they're not available for fuel. So supporting that transport system was another way of helping restore the metabolic flexibility that COVID was compromising in me 

Now, we mentioned supporting the neuroendocrine environment. One thing I've learned after treating patients for years is that physiology is not happening in isolation. You can provide every nutrient a mitochondria needs, but if the body is trapped in a chronic stress response, recovery is gonna become a lot more difficult.

And while deep breathing meditation sitting in sunlight did not help me initially, uh, you know, these things are important to consider in the protocol because long COVID itself is physically, emotionally, psychologically stressful. Sleep gets disrupted. The autonomic nervous system, its function gets disrupted.

That's why we see so much POTS. The nervous system will also generally remain hypervigilant long after the infection itself has been cleared, and for me, [00:26:00] supporting that system became just as important as supporting energy and metabolism. And so to help with my HPA axis, that's the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the stress system that's tied to my nervous system, I leveraged formulations with adaptogenic herbs, those that, like, help with energy during the morning. It had B vitamins, and then adaptogenic nervines in the evening, and so things like, uh, passionflower, L-theanine, ashwagandha to help with my stress physiology.

The morning formula is more with like rhodiola, eleutherococcus, but I did have holy basil in there as well. I wanted to support adaptive cortisol response for myself. The other thing I should mention is vitamin D. Maybe I should have started with vitamin D, uh, because vitamin D, it functions as a steroid hormone.

It influences immune regulation, gene expression, and mitochondrial [00:27:00] function, and I needed to make sure my levels were in optimal range rather than just avoiding deficiency. And so I, you know, got a blood test, saw what my vitamin D was at, and I supplemented accordingly. I was aiming to keep my vitamin D tightly in that seventy to eighty range

And going back to the antioxidant conversation, I used an antioxidant that I think most people will be surprised when I say, that I consistently took melatonin at night. So most people are thinking of melatonin as a sleep hormone. It is, but it's more than that.

What most people don't know is that melatonin acts as a powerful antioxidant within the mitochondria itself, and it's been shown to be concentrated there. When you're producing energy, well, your mitochondria are producing energy, ATP, there's gonna be some oxidative stress that's generated in that. And so mitochondria are relying on that melatonin to help reduce that.

And then of course, sleep is part of the protocol as well, because we, [00:28:00] to repair we require energy, and energy requires healthy mitochondria, and healthy mitochondria requires sleep. So yes, melatonin was also helping with sleep On top of like sleep hygiene as well, the L-theanine that I mentioned

The other thing that I was doing to support mitochondrial health and was part of my bedtime routine was red light therapy. And so I had red light therapy mats that I would lay on at night and just, you know, chill and do deep breathing and do my meditation while I'm doing my red light therapy. Red light therapy has been shown to help with inflammation, to help with the mitochondrial function.

And so, you know, I'm not saying that any one thing in this episode is the answer to long COVID or the answer to COVID altogether. I'm simply sharing, sharing my story of things that helped me

Now, I will say that if I had to point to the single hardest part of my recovery, it wasn't remembering to take the supplements or gagging them [00:29:00] all down, and literally I hate taking supplements, so I was gagging them down. But it was focusing on, like, not pushing. Like, it ... When I get a little bit better, "Ooh, I have energy.

Let's do all the things." No, I had to really pull back on the reins. And as a doctor, like, I'm trained to work through fatigue. Uh, you know, we're high achievers, and many of us wear this badge of honor of, like, I mean, I think when we're younger, we're just, we really embrace the, the sleep when we're dead mindset.

That that is a mindset that's an o- an obstacle to healing, and I'll say that. Because every time I would feel slightly better, I'd be like, "I need to do more. So I need to exercise. I need to catch up on errands. I should be playing with my son. I should, uh, be more productive. Like, I need to be productive.

I've just been laying in bed. Like, how worthless do I feel?" But every time I would do that, I would pay for it.

And we now recognize post-exertional 

And we now recognize post-exertional [00:30:00] malaise, or

Post-exertional symptom exacerbation. It's a defining feature for many people living with long COVID. Research, including findings in the NIH RECOVER Initiative, they've reinforced that exceeding an individual's physiological - capacity, that can actually worsen symptoms, and it can delay recovery.

So once I understood that just by paying attention to my own data, not waiting around for this study, that changed my approach. But I'm really glad we have this study now, 'cause it's giving a lot more permission to people. So I was monitoring my heart rate, heart rate variability. I was respecting my limits.

I stopped treating my fatigue as, like, something to battle, something to push through. I started seeing it more as like, okay, this is biological feedback. Like, this is your body saying, "I need you to pause." And, you know, the way that I look back and I describe it is that I was living with an energy budget.

So every conversation, walk, workout, a stressful [00:31:00] day, it required, like, a withdrawal from that account.

And if I was out there overspending m- more energy than I actually had available, I was borrowing from tomorrow's energy, and I paid for it. I was borrowing from the next several days. So it'd be at least three days of feeling just wiped out, fatigued, couldn't get out of bed So I had to learn to stay within the energy envelope.

That was one of the hardest lessons of my recovery, but I think it was also one of the most important parts of my recovery, because when I look back, I don't think there was just one intervention that changed everything. It was a combination of things. So I had to reduce the oxidative stress. I had to support the ATP production.

I had to create an internal environment that favored repair, and I had to give my body permission to heal instead of demanding it to perform. And in doing all of these things, like I [00:32:00] really... You know, it had to be about how am I nurturing, supporting, caring for myself. And this is the framework that helped me begin to climb out of long COVID.

Now, if you've been on my YouTube channel for years, then, you know, this was before I had a podcast, I explained that what came next really changed everything for me. So I was on this protocol for about six months, and I s- and I had my husband on it, too, 'cause I was like, "Just in case. Just in case, like anything happens to you, like the healthier your mitochondria will be, the, the better."

So it was about six months later that I said to my husband, you know, the thing that came to me when I was lying in bed and thinking like, "Okay, this is my two-week countdown. Am I gonna be here? Am I not gonna be here?" Is I was just thinking like I really regret not having another child. And so that's when we decided to have another child.

And I was scared going into that. I got pregnant right away, which [00:33:00] is, um, why secondary infertility that came later in my story was like so shocking to me. So I got pregnant right away, and I had a really healthy pregnancy, but I was really afraid that I might not have a healthy pregnancy. I was afraid .

what if like, you know, my cardiovascular system isn't up for it? What if I, you know, f- something bad happens to the baby that we don't know about with COVID? So what if I get a clot? Lots of people were getting clots. There was like a lot of what-ifs. What ultimately happened is that a lot of things improved for me, and then I got pregnant, and by the second trimester, I was no longer dealing with any of the COVID symptoms, the long COVID symptoms anymore.

And what was interesting about that is that there's a big shift in my immune system at that point. It shifts into TH2 dominance away from that TH1, which is that fighting viruses, bacteria. [00:34:00] TH2 is about fighting parasites, but it's more allergies, eczema. I also spent, I remember, a lot of that first trimester, like I would just get so exhausted.

But I was already in this mindset of, like, if your body says rest, rest. And I did a lot of resting. And so, you know, there's the shift in the immune system that happened. Certainly I've had people say to me, "Maybe your baby d- donated stem cells to you to repair tissues." Maybe. Uh, you know? T- TBD, to be determined. I was so afraid, though, that when I delivered, I was gonna be right back in that long COVID state again. I was really afraid of that. That ended up not being my story.

My story ended up being having this flare that was so bad. Um, my sacrum was so painful. My hips, my pelvis was so painful. I couldn't walk. I couldn't, I couldn't sit. It was so bad. And I r- remember there was a conference I was supposed to speak at [00:35:00] when I was about, I think I was eight weeks postpartum. I was supposed to speak at this conference, and I couldn't do it 'cause I was like, "I can't...

I can't walk through an airport. I can't sit on a plane." That conference was like, "If you don't come, you're never being invited back again. Like, this is it. This is your opportunity." And I was like, "I don't really have a choice. I just had a baby. I'm having an extreme health condition flare. Like, I don't know what's happening to me right now."

I, you know, my doctors were like, "It's probably psoriatic arthritis." As it turns out, it was adenomyosis, endometriosis. Like, that should've been my first sign of that. Um, the conference did never invite me back. I think this is w- you know, one of those things that, um, as just a little side tangent here 'cause endometriosis is related to all of this, but, um, it's just the cost, the price that women pay when you have a chronic health condition.

Like, there's, like, missed opportunities, missed jobs. Like, I'll, I'll never get that job again. [00:36:00] Um, but you know, I look back and I'm like, "I did the right thing. I did the right thing for my family, for my baby, for my body." It was gonna be too much to get on that plane and go there, and, um, as it was because, you know, this is the, still, like, 2021.

I didn't wanna have my infant, my newborn on a plane contracting God knows what, you know? You, you, I didn't want that, so I was gonna have to, like, fly there, be pumping, fly back. Like, it was gonna be this rapid trip. But you know, eventually those symptoms, I was able to get out of that pain. I was able to, uh, I started my period again.

Um, and I never had the long COVID symptoms come back, and I'm really, really grateful for that because I know that's not everyone's story. And I certainly am not advocating that people have a baby to try to fix their long COVID. Um, certainly please do not misunderstand me as that. But I'm simply just sharing my [00:37:00] story and my journey with you.

If you are someone with long COVID, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Certainly, you know, what I have found so rewarding with this podcast is how many of you go into the comments, especially on YouTube, and you offer suggestions. You talk about, you know, doctors you've worked with. Like, just to see the community supporting each other is such a beautiful thing.

So as always, I appreciate you being here. This was a requested episode, um, so I hope I delivered what, what you were asking for and what you were hoping to hear from me. And as always, I appreciate your support. If this helps you at all, share it with someone, leave a comment, a review, like, subscribe, all, all the things that help podcasts like this, um, get out there, because certainly this is a topic that social media does not want me talking about.

So I will see you next time.