COVID-19 vaccine discussion

Can naturally aspirated individuals even get turbo-cancer?

Does that cancer come with flame analyzation detectors?

Shoulda used a Flame Ionization Detector instead.

well, Thursday will be 13 weeks. I've come a long way, and I think I'm going to be in the clear (I feel great right now), but to give you a feel for how fucking awful this was, I ended up writing a short essay on what I've been through. It starts like this...

 

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At 3am she thought it might be a good idea to handwrite her will. Earlier that day she had insisted that her handgun be locked away so she could not retrieve it. Recently re-married, her prior will left nothing to her wife. Such a horrifying outcome that would be she thought to herself. Sitting alone in her home office waiting for the clock on her computer to tick to the next minute and then the next, she took refuge in obscure things. The dim light from a floor lamp in her office kept her awake as she intended, a soothing light that helped her forget the darkness.

Sleep had terrified her for weeks, now long enough to start counting in months. She knew the pursuit of living without sleep was an impossible journey, but she wished for a world where it could be. Now in new territory, her mind was misfiring often as she tried to be hyper-vigilant holding all of her responsibilities together and clacking away on her keyboard in the middle of the night looking for answers.

This was without a doubt the worst health experience of my life.

I think I got caught up in this due to catching the virus at 10,000 feet elevation in an arid, low humidity climate with stressed lungs used to 600 feet elevation and above 50% humidity.

I've taken prednisone for 30 days in a 60-day period. I've been on two inhalers, maintenance and emergency. I've used Xanax to sleep and I've tried sleeping meds, H1 antihistamines including prescription meds to help with insomnia and anxiety. I was told to take Zoloft, but rejected it as I believed this was temporary.

My symptoms were severe, uncontrolled asthma with a cough that would not go away and was not productive, for at least 10 of the 13 weeks. I was mis-diagnosed with adult-onset asthma caused by Covid (rather than post-covid asthma like symptoms – a distinction in the literature that I think *really* matters). I was headed toward a biologic for severe eosinophilic or inhaled-steroid non-responsive asthma.  My CBC was perfect (a marker that eosinophilic asthma was likely not in play), my CT scan was all clear, my X-ray was clear and my manual breathing test was 100%. Yet there I sat in the pulmonologist office wondering WTF. She said at week 8, "you don't have post-Covid, this is asthma." The insurance company said I needed 60 more days of misery before they would give me the biologic, which supposedly is a miracle drug but it's quite expensive.

The problem with moderate to severe Covid is that we have normalized a health care crisis. Erratic blood oxygen levels fluctuating between 91-95% are not okay, yet we send people home. We have just started to understand how to treat post-Covid issues yet no one on the front lines really knows. Primary care is clueless, pulmonologists are blinded by decades of the same lung problems and sometimes fail to see Covid as novel. Long covid is forgotten and ignored unless you get into a clinic and those have long waits and excruciating testing protocols to rule out everything, I mean everything before beginning any long-covid treatments (as you see below, I actually started doing the things long covid patients do to help anyway).

So what did I do? As alluded to in the prose above, I was constantly researching what to do.  I leaned heavily on my best friend's long covid experience, and I am going to share what I experienced so that if anyone on this board falls prey to a severe or even moderate case of Covid (and make no mistake about it, I had a severe case), they have some information to go on.

What was the single most effective and important treatment I received? A Stellate Ganglion Block. I ended up seeking treatment from a pain doctor. A Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB) is a procedure where a local anesthesia is injected into the Stellate Ganglion (SG) (a nerve cluster in your neck). The SG is one of the most accessible and closest nerve clusters to your brain that has been linked to the autonomic nervous system (ANS). As we know, the ANS has significant control over immune function.  One theory is that post-covid is a condition where your immune system has been derailed off its tracks and its response to being derailed is to spin its wheels faster and faster. Well, 9/13 I had my SGB procedure and every day since then has been better to the point where I am at about a 50% rate of sleeping full nights without a benzo or sleeping pill, even with wrecked circadian rhythms that try to push me to a 2am-4am bedtime. My lungs are clear, my cough is 99% gone unless I'm clearing my airways of gunk.

Interestingly enough, the SGB procedure is first and foremost a pain procedure (the ANS is involved in chronic pain feedback loops) but doctors stumbled upon its efficacy for treating PTSD with veterans suffering chronic pain. Vets were showing up and saying, hey pain is subsiding, but my PTSD is too! This brings me to an important point. The SGB procedure first took away my anxiety. Within 24 hours I was night and day different on my anxiety and PTSD from post-covid which let me get routine sleep which was a huge factor in my recovery. In the end though, my ANS reset and my immune function calmed down, and my symptoms subsided.

A miracle and one of the few pure successes of traditional medicine in my journey.

Incidentally, my PC doctor had no idea what an SGB procedure was and my pulmonologist said "it won't work, you don't have post-covid, you have asthma." Several really important points here, as alluded to above, first the literature says adult onset asthma from Covid can happen but it is exceedingly rare. What is common though is asthma-like symptoms during the post-Covid period. My pulmonologist certainly was reading my blood work, but it appears that she mis-diagnosed me and missed the opportunity for treatment. Instead, I insisted that I get the SGB and she said, "it won't hurt to try it."  What is the takeaway from my PC and lung doctor not knowing? In this day and age, we have to be our own advocates. And I will tell you, the diagnosis haunts me still. I am working through the fact that an expert can be wrong, but I have not fully accepted that and I still work through the "what ifs" to the point where I have to acknowledge the power of a diagnosis, whether correct or incorrect. My pain doctor simple said, you are in a cytokine storm and we have to reset your immune system. He appeared to be correct, and that diagnosis also has power. Bottomline be your own advocate, you are part of your own diagnosis and your own treatment.

Another point - the drugs I took - prednisone and my inhalers also have side effects that were terribly similar to the underlying post-covid symptoms. chest tightness, cough, phlegm, anxiety, jitters, insomnia are all problems suffered from severe asthma, they are also side effects of these meds. It was incredibly difficult to distinguish between the three, in the end I think the meds did help but it wasn't until the SGB took hold that I started to understand the side effects from the meds. Those side effects combined with the underlying symptoms made things much worse before I got better. Probably a necessary evil, but fuck that was a miserable existence.

Mental health - do not ignore the mental health side if you catch it bad. First covid can infect the brain, it can cause mental health issues as a primary symptom. Secondary symptoms are common too. I think most health care professionals are not equipped to help on this. Truthfully, only xanax has worked and the literature also supports short term use of benzos to help with covid induced (primary and secondary) anxiety. Yet only my pain doctor understood this. I probably had to advocate for my anxiety treatment more than any other aspect of my experience. Very unsettling how unprepared my PC and pulmonologist were for this aspect of the condition.

Finally, we cannot underestimate the importance of what we eat and drink. I went on a very strict anti-inflammatory, low histamine diet. Heck, I didn't even know foods had histamines and when I found out oranges, lemons, strawberries, avocados and more could trigger a histamine reaction in my body I was blown away. Now in the end I think my histamine system is well under control, but it was not worth the risk. I eat (for at least another 2 weeks) whole grains, lean protein, some fruits, most vegetables, most nuts and most seeds, with olive oil, salt and pepper as my seasoning, that's it. I've lost 30 pounds and my gut microbiome, and my body are thriving because of it. There will be no way to pinpoint the success of my recovery with my diet but what I do know is that my diet did not work against me and I was able to recover because my body had all of the essentials and none of the harmful substances it needs to thrive. our bodies function at a cellular level and without the necessary ingredients (i.e. zinc, C, etc. etc.) our system will function at a deficit.

The last week I've slept well and I've been on the tennis court going 100% and thanking my body and the universe for getting me through this.  I hope this post isn’t premature, as I probably have another month to fully heal - especially fully clearing my lungs and restoring a solid sleep routine - but I do sense my body returning to a sense of normalcy, even if still slowly and day by day.

Tl;dr – the current variant is a bitch, don't underestimate it.

Edited October 8 by troph