5 practices that helped my Long Covid recovery
Covid infection: September 5th 2021
Symptoms: Fatigue, brain fog/pressure, heart palpitations, hot flushes, nausea, oversensitive skin, dizziness, tight chest, tinnitus.
Healing timeline: Crashes late Sept, mid Oct. February 2022 (80%), April 2022 (close to 100%).
An illness, a rollercoaster, a challenge, a breakdown, a break — all terms that could accurately describe my last seven months with Long Covid. Few things in life are black and white, and strangely, this is even true of a debilitating condition. Nobody goes around thinking ‘hey, I’d quite like the long version of Covid please if possible’, but the truth is I always learn something valuable when pushed to my limit. ‘You grow through what you go through,’ as one fellow Long Covid sufferer told me, who despite going through two years of struggle, said she had gained from the experience. I do not mean to belittle the suffering of Long Covid, because there is so much suffering, too much suffering, but I think it would also be a lie to say nothing good can come from it either. Long Covid taught me to slow down, it taught me to look after my body better, it taught me to improve my diet and perhaps most importantly of all it reminded me that I owned the tools for healing. Below I focus on the natural things that pushed my recovery in the right direction. We all need to find our own paths to healing, and I understand there are different levels of illness, but I hope there are some insights in here that might provide hope to someone feeling sick and alone.
1. FINDING MY LIMITS
My initial Covid infection was much like many other peoples — I felt rough for a couple of days, then a bit less rough and then there was a somewhat quick return to health. Feeling pretty good (80%), I resumed life without too much thought about whether I was ready. In the past I had bounced back from colds and flus, so I treated Covid much the same. Long Covid, however, had different plans. Two major crashes in late September and mid-October made it clear I couldn’t push through this one. I remember this dawning on me — talking on the phone to my dad in tears with the realisation that my life would not be the same for a long time. The tears healed me a little, but my dad also provided the most valuable advice of my recovery. He said:
- “Jo, you need to let your body catch up with your brain”
I particularly liked how wise and prophetic it sounded, but ultimately what he was saying was I needed to REST. That my body had gone through a massive assault and it wasn’t going to just blindly follow my needs and desires anymore. Whilst my brain wanted to keep sh*t happening, my body was crying out ‘No, I’m not ready!’ A self-imposed fourth lockdown felt quite cruel after the opening trilogy, but my dad was right. Every day I didn’t listen to my body, I pushed back the healing process. The problem I’ve found, is that in sickness and in health, I don’t always know where my boundaries lie. That’s when I find meditation and breathing practices helpful, as they help me slow down, go inside myself and work out what my body needs. After the phone call with my dad, I started meditating twice a day and although this did not instantly get rid of my symptoms (not even close), it did ensure I avoided another crash. Meditation helped me keep tabs on what I could and couldn’t do and even if it meant cancelling virtually all my Christmas plans, I was giving myself the best chance of making a recovery. I was backing the future me, the present me needed to rest.
These are a few of the meditations I have enjoyed:
Healing meditation: Heal Your Body Naturally: Powerful Guided Healing Meditation for Pain Relief & Sleep (4K) — YouTube
Short breathing meditation: 5 Minute Breathing Exercise — Guided Mindfulness Meditation 4K — Calming anxiety reduction — YouTube
Chakra healing meditation: Guided Meditation — Chakra Balancing — Chakra Alignment — YouTube
PMS healing meditation: Soothe Your Period Pain With This Guided Meditation By A Clinical Psychologist (PMS Meditation) — YouTube
2. KEEPING THE HEART ALIVE
As a journalist and comedy writer, there’s work I do for free because I enjoy it — and there’s work I don’t quite like so much, so they give me money to numb the pain. In the early days of recovery, I stopped most work because it was too exhausting. Both mental and physical activity hurt. However, I continued to work on a sitcom idea with my writing partner and we’d often get together on Zoom to brainstorm. I was too ill to think about it at the time, but I think this was my way of keeping connected with my heart and purpose. I am not alone in this thinking, that keeping the heart alive helps to heal. Soon afterwards, an acupuncturist looked me dead in the eye and said ‘you have to keep writing from the heart.’ I think he is right — it allowed me to keep connecting to my happy place, my creative place, my silly place, which was only good for my recovery. This BMJ blog is an interesting read which discusses the potential role of art in alleviating discomfort and aiding rehabilitation. (but please read my blog first, it’s more personable and less medical-sounding).
Developing a sitcom is not the only way I connected to my heart. I never used to understand it when people banged on about how ‘great!’ music was, I was like ‘get a room, it’s just sound.’ I get it now. When there’s a potent mix of panic and sickness flooding the body, music provides some healing. It soothes, it distracts — I like to think it’s a love note from one person’s heart to another. Robert Gupta talks about the healing power of music here. On a similar note, I also found Long Covid gave me a real need to vocalise myself. I would randomly burst into song as I walked around the house, singing my little heart out. Singing almost instantly made my symptoms feel better — and on more energetic days I would sometimes add in some booty shaking. And as a comedy writer, I should probably not forget to mention the powerful heart that beats in comedy and the healing of laughter. Singing, dancing and laughing — were all ways I could disrupt a negative energy cycle and bring myself into a place of faith and calm.
3. THE RIGHT DIET
Diet played an absolutely vital part in my healing. Straight after infection, I just wanted to eat everything (and I indulged that). A few months later, I really entered the world of healthy eating. This came easier for me as I had a mother on standby to feed me homemade soup for a few months, but I made sure to continue healthy habits when I moved out. A lot of this came quite naturally to me, but it was also a case of reading information in support groups and following more acupuncture advice (acupuncturists are going to take over the world, mark my words). Dieticians would be helpful too though, but often people in alternative medicine have crossover skills/qualifications. What seemed to especially help me were turmeric and black pepper teas (you need the black pepper for the turmeric to work its magic), oily fish, sweet potatoes, stews, soups, porridge, basically if it was boring and wet — I ate it. Oh and I craved salt. There’s lots of talk about anti-inflammatory, anti-histamine and fasting diets amongst Long Covid sufferers, but I always felt that a general healthy diet — and not being stupid — was probably the best path for me. This meant no alcohol, caffeine, chilli, a limited intake of sugar. And lots and lots of water. Fun times!
I don’t really want to get into the weeds of vitamins because I have read that almost every vitamin on earth can be good for Long Covid, and most of the time this information just stressed me out and made me poor in Holland & Barrett. However, supplements that seemed to work for me are CoEnzyme Q1O, probiotics and cod liver oil. But I ended up buying really good quality ones, because it turns out vitamins can actually have crap in them (bulking agents etc). It’s a scary world out there. Bad vitamins… geez.
4. MOVING TO THE SEA
At the start of 2022, despite still feeling on the rocks, I moved to the seaside. The Victorians used to prescribe periods of rest by the sea and although this might be laughed at now, it has worked for me. It wasn’t long after my move that my recovery shifted up a gear. Having a lungful of fresh sea air and watching the waves soothed my mind, body and soul. On days when my heart was leaping about my body, I would look at the sea and instantly feel calmer. Whilst I am lucky not to have any serious breathing problems, unless I try to run (which I don’t), keeping my lungs full of fresh sea air worked wonders for other symptoms. The headaches went, the fatigue lessened, my sleep deepened. It is just as much about the quality of air than it is the sea, so I think anytime spent somewhere with better air quality is likely to be healing. Doctors no longer prescribe the seaside, but perhaps they should.
5. FINDING ACCEPTANCE
Changing virtually all the main things in my life, including where I live, is hardly a sign of acceptance. For me, acceptance isn’t about doing nothing and waiting to get better, acceptance is the attitude I try to cultivate whilst feeling unwell. Acceptance is knowing I couldn’t control the speed of my recovery and I couldn’t control if I would get better at all. I believe there is deep healing power in truly accepting my present situation.
Part One: Flipping the narrative
There are many different levels of pain and discomfort attached to being human. When you have something like Long Covid, suddenly you are living a life with a much higher level of discomfort. Whilst I never felt like I was in a must-go-to-A&E place of pain, I did feel like some of the sensations I had in my body could make me go mad if they didn’t go away. After mental health struggles in my late 20s, I know the mind can go through horrifying levels of discomfort without anyone requiring a doctor or ambulance. If there is one thing I learnt from this hellish time, it is the power of acceptance. Six months is a long time to be unwell, but I know it would have been longer if I was less familiar with uncomfortable sensations.
I am never going to like pain and discomfort, but I try to frame it in a way that is less conducive to panic. What often happens to me is pain starts out mild, I think negative scary thoughts, enter a fight or flight response and this makes the pain worse. The body clenches in on itself, blood pressure rises, adrenaline spikes, muscles tighten. The mind amps up the pain because it is easy to attach discomfort to danger and damage, and thoughts like ‘am I going to die now?’ One way I try to stop this chain reaction is to associate pain and discomfort with positivity and healing. Pain is my body trying to fix something, create healthier pathways and protect me from getting worse. This isn’t something I just tell myself, I believe it. By creating love and empathy for discomfort, I can sit in unsettling sensations and let the body heal. I believe there are few things more powerful than making peace with your own suffering.
Part two: Why me?
There is another area of acceptance I had to work on and that was accepting I was ill. Really ill. For a bit I naturally rallied against it. I had short covid, not long covid. Then I had medium covid. My ego found it hard to see everyone else bounce back, when my conditions were getting worse. I was generally a physically healthy person and this wasn’t meant to happen to me. But it had. Strangely, or perhaps not so considering what I’ve just written, it wasn’t until I truly accepted I had a long-term condition that my recovery started to speed up. When I accepted this might go on for years, and even return in later life, I made massive strides. Healing works in mysterious ways, eh! When I accepted I was going to have to be careful about how much I work, what I eat, how much I travel, exercise — for a long time — things shifted. It was like I was finally getting the message my body had been trying to send me for months. Slow down. Find gratitude. Make peace with your situation. Maybe I needed to be humbled before I could be healed. I couldn’t manufacture this deep level of acceptance, I needed to really feel it. I needed to embrace the speed of my own healing path and that became easier when I kept connecting with mind, heart, body and soul.
Part three: I’m no fighter
I have refrained from mentioning terms like battle or fight in this piece (except just then). I believe fighting Covid or battling Long Covid, is just the same as saying I am fighting or battling my own body. There are a few theories about Long Covid but one thing that is undeniable is that with Long Covid, the virus and its ramifications are now part of me. If I pour hate and anger on the virus, I am pouring hate and anger against myself. You cannot just pluck the virus out of your cells, out of your body, out of your soul, it doesn’t work like that — you have to work with the virus. One night, during my worst crash, I was lying in bed with this awful brain pressure and it was one of the most horrible brain sensations I’ve ever experienced. Every time I turned my head on the pillow I felt nauseous, I was beginning to lose myself in the panic. I was spiralling. In this place I was angry, raging and every nerve of my body wanted to fight this bastard virus — but then I remembered what happened when I had tried to fight depression… it just got worse and worse and worse. I stopped in the middle of this brain agony, I stopped, I accepted and I sent love to Covid. I just sent love to this thing that was trying to destroy my body, because I realised we were one now. I realised that love was the only thing that would get me through this.
I have told my brain and body I loved it a thousand times since, so many more times than I ever told myself when I was healthy. Because I need to feel this love, I need my body to know it is loved even when it is suffering, broken. I need my body to understand that it doesn’t have to be well to be worthy of my love. It is always worthy of my love. So maybe it’s not just about acceptance, maybe it’s about love too.
THE CONCLUSION BIT:
I am writing this piece because I hope it can be healing for myself and for others. Perhaps even those who don’t suffer from Long Covid can take something from it. Who knows what happens next — I still feel like I am a few mistakes away from relapse — but I have made great strides over the last couple of months and wanted to share the things that have helped me get to this point. Long Covid recovery is not a given.
I also want to include how I have felt since my health has improved. When I was really ill, all I wanted was to be well again. And yet, now I feel better, I have not rejoiced in my health the way I thought I would. I do not leap out of bed with a spring in my step and appreciate all the things I can do. I wish I did, but that’s not the truth. Life was terrible with Long Covid, so hard that I would waste words trying to explain it. I really think you need to go through it to understand. But in a weird way, life was more simple. All I wanted to do was get healthy, and this meant so many of my past desires, concerns, stresses, didn’t matter anymore. I had a single mission — not to feel like crap. There was a lot of comfort in this. As soon as I felt healthy again, I started to take that health for granted. I am now having to face all those issues I put on the backburner. They are heating up full throttle on the front burner and providing their own unique discomfort. Life is still tough, but not as tough.
Because it is true, when you don’t have it, health IS everything. Chronic illness takes away so much, too much. Career and dreams are put on hold, relationships breakdown, peace of mind flies out the window and you no longer feel safe in the world. It is lonely too — because so few people understand. Even loved ones. They aren’t mean, it’s just human nature. With doctors playing catchup, I sought comfort in online communities. There is a lot of helpful information in these, but a word of warning, it can be easy to get terrified by the experiences of others. Limiting my time on support groups helped, and it is important to remember we don’t know anyone’s back story before we start to overly panic. I hope there are breakthroughs with Long Covid — that we understand more about what is going on and there is a cure that works. But in the meantime, one thing I passionately hope, is that people never forget about the healing power already within them.
Love and peace,
Joanna
