Long COVID Success Stories: Part II

All right, great to be with everybody once again. So this is the second case in a series of three. We're talking about patients who got Covid. And this is as a second patient that got Covid. Actually, she's a healthcare provider that I had not met before she got Covid. So the way she presented to me was acutely after going to the hospital with shortness of breath. And so she came to see me really short of breath, really winded. Her oxygen levels had dropped a little bit to the 94, 95% level. Not so bad that she got hospitalized in the er, they did the typical workup doing CAT scans, et cetera, to rule out any clots in her lungs. And so she ended up seeing me in the clinic about a week after being in the hospital. Now, this was a period my clinic, my primary care clinic currently is closed to new patients. I'm just open on the functional side. And what had happened was I'd opened my clinic up a little bit just because with COVID everything was kind of sparse. And so we need to be available to patients. So we kind of opened up our availability and that's when she kind of was introduced to our clinic. So a couple things I noticed on her initial evaluation was it sound like she might have actually had some exposure to mold at her workplace. And she's a healthcare worker, works in a clinic. And it's amazing how many healthcare facilities, how many ERs, how many restaurants, places of business have had water leaks when it rains really hard here where I live, which is in Richmond, Virginia. So realizing that, we start realizing we had to improve the air quality of her home as well as her work environment. But acutely, she was having really bad shortness of breath, really, with slight elevate D dimer, which is a marker for clots. Now, again, we said she didn't have any clots on the CT scan, but that just means large ones. These really small ones are the ones that make people really short, feel winded, feel like they have air hunger. And so knowing from what the literature said, that N acetyl cysteine or nac works really well to kind of break these little clots up, we actually added on large amounts of nac. Of course, you know anybody, you know, from the data, we know most people with severe Covid and long Covid, she was not long at this point in time, had low vitamin D. So we went right straight to high dose D, high dose C, zinc, pepsid, all those typical kind of things. But with her also realizing that she had some Hypermobility, realizing she's going to have issues with making, you know, glutathione, which is your body's primary antioxidant. We added in your glutathione precursors, which NAC is one, you know, adding collagen. A lot of patients with hypermobility will have mineral deficiencies, Magnesium, potassium, and trace minerals. So we added those in and just, just kind of really, really increase those levels. So what was happening is as she was starting to get a little better, a little better, and about the two month mark, most of her shortness of breath went away. So as I started seeing her on the functional medicine side, because this kind of transitioned for her, she was really, at this point in time, she'd been healthy her whole entire life, had never had health issues before, which was important, you know, why did she get, get this sick? So she really wanted to delve into this. So we did a full evaluation on her. Come to find out her house, where she lived, actually had some serious, serious mold issues. Now that might sound kind of weird to people, but once you realize that half of all the buildings in our country have water damage and you realize that 23% of the population has the gene that sets them up for sensitivity to water damage buildings, it wasn't a long shot. Realizing that was part of her inflammation. And once we realized her lungs was, was one of the places that she was getting chronically exposed and had a low grade inflammation that then the viral lung infection stood up for, we realized we need to focus on her lung health. So the minerals, etc. We've already talked about HEPA filters clean air, but we just started addressing her mold issues by using binders, doing some lipid therapy. One of the things we do in clinic with patients who have chronic illnesses is evaluate their lipid status. And like a lot of patients, all of her omega 3s 6s 9 saturated fats, they were all below normal levels. Which seems kind of impossible to think about how anybody can have low fatty acids in their red blood cells. But I see that frequently with patients who've had healthy diets of low fat diets, healthy diets of, you know, eating low fat stuff, which is actually inflammatory fats. And it actually sets them up for instability with their cell membranes. And so when they get infection or some trauma to them, they get very inflamed. So we started doing basically lipid therapy where they're addressing those using different things like ox bile, tudka, which actually works nicely to help burn off some of the inflammatory fats she responded nicely. And the interesting thing is that, you know, now that she's gotten her, she's back to her pre illness state. For her it's just realizing, wow, she thought that she was healthy and had no idea that the place she worked at her house, her hypermobility. We're also discovering that she also has a little bit SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in her GI tract which is another setup for chronic inflammation. And one of the things I actually learned today, strangely enough as a semi ring, one of the things that makes kids unusually less susceptible to Covid is their microbiome or the bacteria that live in their gut. Well, people with SIBO or dysbiosis don't have that stable bacteria milieu that helps decrease, helps train or educate their immune system to be less reactive to viruses. And so people with these gut issues like IBS or SIBO are going to respond more robustly to a COVID infection or other infections as well like Lyme, tick related illnesses, chronic mono cmv, et cetera. So we're able to actually start addressing that. And she's doing quite well. But it's really kind of interesting how her whole, whole body, whole system, whole person, personalized approach is now changing the environment she lives in, the food she eats, as well as affecting her GI tract. And she's doing quite quite well right now. So my encouragement to those of you who have any of these issues or long Covid currently, just find a practitioner, someone who can help you have a whole body holistic approach to your care. You know, again, if this, if you feel like this is helpful at all, please you know, make comments below those help this be more readily available to other people. If you have insights, something you did with your long Covid that was helpful, your chronic illnesses that was helpful, or something you feel like has helped you be unusually resilient, please share the information as well that creating, sharing our knowledge gives us all a little more empowerment and ability to take charge of our own health. You all take care, be well and we will talk to you soon.