Carly's Recovery From Long Covid, POTS and MCAS

My name is Carly, and before I became unwell, I was a very busy, enthusiastic, energetic mom. I had multiple businesses, and I was very health-focused, very— was exercising regularly, was eating all the right things. And I still managed to adopt a chronic illness. In January of 2022, I got COVID, and the acute illness was not severe in nature. It just felt like a regular flu. But about a month later, I found myself experiencing, um, ongoing fatigue and accumulating a lot of shortness of breath. And so I was moving through my days feeling quite tired, unable to accomplish my regular tasks, experiencing a lot of shortness of breath, which caused me a lot of anxiety and then a lot of dysregulation to my nervous system. I was waking up with heart palpitations and sort sort of tremors throughout my body. I would often become nauseous, even to the point of vomiting after eating certain things, and I had never had any kind of allergies or anything like that in my life before. And it got to the point where I could barely get out of bed. I went and I had an MRI on my brain, a CT scan on my chest. I saw a hematologist, a blood specialist, I saw a cardiologist and wore a 24-hour heart monitor. I went to every specialist possible. And for about 5 months, I barely got out of bed and I thought that my life was over. I didn't have the energy to play with my children. I all but shut down my business. And it was, it was very dark, very dark time. In the end, I was diagnosed with POTS. My doctor had me fill out a checklist around mast cell activation syndrome and said that was what I likely had as well. I was officially diagnosed as Long COVID, but I came to the end of a program offered through my province, and the doctor then just pivoted my diagnosis to chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, and sent me on my way. In the beginning, I focused heavily on holistic therapies, and I saw two different naturopaths baths, and I spent $5,000 on different treatments that did not help me. I ended up having to step back from all of that and really lean into more practices of going inward and just trying to regulate my nervous system on my own through breath, through slow yoga movements and things like that, doing small practices in my bed. And that's when I learned about the Gupta program. Right away in the Gupta program, I was able to shift my perspective to, I am healing. To— I remember early on in the program, he said something along the lines of, if you knew for certain that 100 days from now you would be in complete health, then none of these patterns of reactivity would be occurring in your body. And he helped me understand that patterns of reactivity does not mean that it's all in your head. Like, the diagnosis that I got from the doctors, having all of my blood work and all of my things looking fine, was basically, "It's all in your head, so here's some antidepressants and some anti-anxiety medications." Well, Ashok helped me understand that It's not all in my head, but it is a function of my brain. It is a function of my inflammatory system and my immune system overreacting, and that I can help that system to stop defaulting to overreaction. And so by embracing that ideal of I can— of if I know I'm going to be in complete health, then the patterns of reactivity can stop in my body. It was just an opportunity for me to exhale, for me to not be so worried that I was going to be reacting to everything under the sun. So I joined the program in September of 2022, and by January of 2023, I was back to work full-time. I had the energy to play with my children again. And I would say that I'm 95% better. I have some lingering allergies or reactivity, a little bit of extra fatigue, but it's all just little reminders for my— for me to take rest. My life feels more vibrant and I feel more myself than I did before I got sick. I approach my work in a different way. I approach parenting in a different way. I have so much more compassion for myself.