Madison Brecka was a COVID-era caregiver who prescribed others supplements, sleep tracking, and optimal health while working 6 am to 2 am shifts and destroying her own body. She fainted in meetings, developed POTS, and couldn't sleep despite advising everyone else on sleep. The gap between her health advice and her collapse reveals how caregiver syndrome works.
I am probably the COVID girl of caregiver syndrome. Oh my gosh, yes, you are. I'm working on it now. I was telling everyone else what to do. I was obviously under the guidance of a physician, but what supplements to take, what peptides to take. You need to get 8 hours of sleep. You need to track it on your Oura. You need to track it on your Whoop. You need to prioritize yourself. Self-care isn't selfish. And then I was coming home crippled in pain, exhausted. I was getting up at 6:00 AM 'cause that's when a patient wanted to see me, staying up till 2:00 AM 'cause that's when another patient wanted to see me. I couldn't sleep. Say no. And I had a breaking point. It was almost like, weirdly, a perfect storm. I started having extreme fatigue, joint pain, POTS episodes, which is where my heart rate would get extremely high. There was times when we would be having meetings in my dad's living room and I'd have to go excuse myself and I would pass out on the bathroom floor so many times that we would have an oxygen cannulus there just so I could come back to. In my early 20s, in some of these celebrity homes that I watched growing up. It felt like so surreal. How could I let them down by not being able to show up? So I was just driving myself into a wall.
