The Whinypaluza Podcast with Rebecca Greene Episode 018 Lessons from Having COVID
In this solo episode of the Whiny Palooza podcast, licensed clinical social worker and mother of three, Rebecca Greene, shares her personal experience contracting COVID-19 in Buffalo, New York. She walks listeners through her symptom timeline (a mild sniffle, loss of taste and smell, headache, fatigue), the rapid testing process, and the county’s contact‑tracing and quarantine guidelines. Greene reflects on the mental‑health toll of the illness, describing a cycle of harsh self‑talk, guilt, and anxiety, and then explains how she applied cognitive‑behavioral techniques—pausing, rewinding, and replacing negative thoughts—with humor (the “hammer” metaphor) to improve her self‑compassion. She discusses practical lessons learned: the importance of early testing, diligent hygiene, supplement use (zinc, vitamin C, quercetin, Passion 4 Life), and clear communication with health officials. Greene also details the impact on her family—extended quarantine for her children, emotional upset of her 8‑ and 11‑year‑old daughters, and the decision not to isolate in a separate room to protect family mental well‑being. Throughout, she encourages listeners to treat themselves kindly, monitor self‑talk, and take proactive health measures. The episode ends with promotional plugs for her podcast, social media channels, and her books (Whiny Palooza and Whiny Palooza Gets Less Whiny).
Chapters
No need to whine, it's whiny palooza. Have some wine and join us on the whiny palooza podcast with Rebecca Green.
Welcome to the whiny palooza podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Green. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system.
I want you to know that you are not alone.
We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.
Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Green for the Whiny Palooza podcast. I want to thank all of you who have been listening to my podcast. I hope that you are having a great time with me. I am having so much fun doing this for you, and I'm learning so much, and I'm enjoying talking to all of my guests. If you are someone who wants to be on my podcast or you know someone who is, please don't hesitate to contact me. I would love to talk to you. My email address is whinypaloozamom@gmail.com. If you are new here today listening, welcome. I hope you enjoy. This is going to be my first solo episode, so I will continue to interview fabulous people and continue to have a wonderful time. And I will also sometimes do a solo episode and will use my background in social work and my experiences, and we'll hopefully get to share some things that you can relate to and learn from. I will use my marriage and my parenting and everyday life in my family and all of the lessons that I'm learning. And I'm just hoping that we can do this together because we are in this together. This parenting thing, this marital thing, it's not easy. It's wonderful. It's the best gifts ever given to us, but I would never call it easy. We have to put work into anything that's meaningful to us. So I hope that you will give your marriage and children a little extra attention and love today. And I want to thank all of you for your wonderful reviews. If you have left a rating and a review, I really appreciate you and I just appreciate you for being here. I'm going to share a couple. There's so many fabulous ones. I don't even know which ones to pick. I will pick a couple of different ones another time. This says, realness. I I love how real you are when talking about being a mom parent, and same for the guests. Each episode provides a couple tips and tricks I have been able to apply to make my parenting job just a tad easier. Love it. Thank you so much for your 5-star review and for sharing. Um, there's so many good ones, I don't even know what to pick. Um, this says, this podcast has really come in handy with giving tips encouragement and advice for us parents who can use all the help we can get. I listen every week. Thank you so much for that 5-star review and for listening every week. I am loving the podcast. Rebecca Green packs every episode with tons of amazing content, guests, and interviews that will motivate, uplift, and inspire you. I highly recommend. Another 5-star review. Thank you so much. I'm so touched when I read this stuff. I want you to know how much it means to me, and it keeps me motivated to keep sharing with you and to know that even if I'm touching one of you, that this means so much to me to be doing this and to be able to help even one person today. So I'm going to jump into my topic today. I am going to tell you about my lessons from having COVID. I'm going to tell you some information I learned along the way. I am in New York State, in Buffalo, New York. I know that The guidelines are different depending on where you live. So if you live near me, this might be even more meaningful. And if you don't live near me, just check out— the rules have probably even changed since I had COVID. But I did have it and I wanted to talk to you about what I did right, what I did wrong, and how I treated myself and how us women really need to learn to treat ourselves better. That has been one of my biggest lessons in life. So I I hope you will learn something with me along this way. I have some questions that people keep asking me. Lots of the same questions. And I am so thankful to be healthy. I'm gonna knock on wood. I'm sitting at a wood desk, so you're gonna see me knock on wood. And I also wanted to share with you, some of you don't know this, that you can watch my, you are probably like me, you are probably listening to me on a walk, or in the car or while you're doing dishes or while you're folding laundry. Those are all of my favorite places. I love to listen to podcasts on the treadmill or outside with my dog, but you can also sit and watch me on YouTube. These are— the video access is available for you to actually watch. Today would be just me, but normally you can watch me interacting with who my guest is for the day. So the first question that I get is, what were my symptoms? And this is one of the most important things that I want to share with you so that you realize how small your symptoms can be. I had a sniffle, and when I tell you that I had a sniffle, it was so small that I didn't even have to blow my nose. It was up high in my nose. I felt it there, and I felt a little bit off. Now, as a mother, as a wife and mother, my tendency, whether I'm sick or not, is to just keep going. So I'm not going to tell you, maybe I didn't feel as good as I think from my memory, but I tend to, sick or not, just keep going. It's just a little more stressful with COVID because of maybe how contagious it is and how, um, you don't know what your symptoms are going to look like. So I was just going about my business all week at home with my kids, had no idea that I had COVID, literally thought it was a small sniffle, um, had heard that a friend of mine had a fever who I had seen, and then the red flag started to go off in my head. Now mind you, the sniffle did not scare me. It should have. I don't know that scare is the right word, but I had had friends tell me that their children had to be tested and test negative for COVID to be able to get back into school because they had told the school that their child had a sniffle. So I did know that a sniffle was a symptom of COVID based on what my friends had told me, based on the daily questionnaire that I'm filling out for my kids to go to school. Do your kids have the sniffles? Do they have a headache? Did they throw up? Ba ba ba ba ba. So I heard my friend had a fever, knew I had seen her, and went, uh-oh, I have the sniffles and she has a fever. This is not good. Then we move on to the weekend and I'm noticing that my taste and smell are dulling. Now, mind you, I have had so many colds and through the colds have certainly lost sense of taste and smell where things just— everything tastes dull. Then I realized it was gone, gone completely. And I went, okay, My friend has a fever. I have a sniffle. I lost my taste and smell. I called my brother. He's been around so many people. He's a chiropractor and he has had so many patients get COVID that, um, when it comes to my health or my questions, I tend to call him or my parents. My parents own Marlene and Phil's Vitamin and Herb Center in Depew, New York. So they know a ton about health and wellness. And so does my brother. So I called my brother. I told him my symptoms. He said, you have COVID, go get a test. Went and got a test, tested positive for COVID, totally shocked, shocked. My family was all shocked. My husband was shocked. He thought I was going to get a COVID test, test negative, and stop freaking out. That's what he wanted to happen. He's like, go get a test so that you stop freaking out. Got the test, tested positive, got my results within 15 minutes. So it was a fast turnaround. I didn't have to wait for days. What sucks is when you, when I hear about my friends who take a test and then have to wait a few days to get the results. That is stressful. So those were my symptoms. The county called me 3 times. They asked me about my symptoms. They said, did you have a headache? Well, as a mother, I'm going to be very honest with you. And sometimes I get headaches. Sometimes my kids are so loud that I'm like holding my head and Lily's like, oh God, you have a headache again. So yeah, sometimes I have headaches and yes, I did have a slight headache when I had COVID, but it wasn't a bad headache, and I think it was for 1 day, may have been for 2 days, but it wasn't bad. And like I said, sometimes I get headaches, so I didn't think anything of it. Then they asked me, were you fatigued? Well, I want you to find me a parent who does not feel fatigued, because if you find me that parent, I want them on my podcast right now. Could I eat better? Absolutely. Am I working on exercising more? Absolutely. I tend to have the best energy right now. Like, it's 12:30 in the afternoon. I would say 9 to 5 is my optimum time. Not a huge morning person, not a huge night person. I feel— I would say I feel fatigued a lot. So yes, I felt fatigued, but I think that a lot of the time I do. Okay, so where did I get it? Well, I told you my friend had a fever. God knows who gave it to who. God knows if we gave it to each other. Who knows? We don't know. I had been on errands. I had been to my daughter's elementary school volunteering to help with picture retake day. I told the county the list of places I had been and she said, "Yes, any of those places." So unfortunately we can't say this is exactly where you got it and this who gave it to you? I wish that we could. That is always the big question in everybody's head. The other question that I get a lot is, am I protected from COVID now that I've had it? According to the county worker that I spoke to, the average amount of time that we are protected from COVID once we have had it is 3 months. Some people are protected longer, some people are protected for a shorter amount of time. So hopefully I'm protected for a little bit, but I'm not like banking on it. I'm still washing my hands. I'm still using hand sanitizer. I don't just, you know, go about my business and think that I'm just safe. Did I give it to my family? That is the most common question. No. Oh no. Where can I knock? I'm knocking everywhere. I should be doing this is what I should be doing as a prayer and a thank you. We're going to talk about this. I did not give it to my family. I was around my family. I was around my husband. I did sleep in the same bed with him. I did. I was around my children the whole time. I cooked their meals. I was cleaning. I was washing my hands a ton. I was trying to keep my distance from them once I knew that I had it. Before I knew that I had it, I was not keeping my distance and was contagious. Like I said, I had that little sniffle, so I did not give it to my family. I am unbelievably grateful. Unbelievably. I was trying to rack my brain when they were contact tracing with me from the county. I was like, did I see anyone? Did I give it to anyone? Of course you feel terrible when you get it because your mind starts to go to— I shouldn't say of course. If you get COVID, I don't want you to feel how I felt. I spiraled into a complete mental— I don't like what I did to my brain. I don't like the stress that I caused myself. And the reason that I'm sharing this with you is that I want to tell you how I handled it, how terrible my self-talk was. All of my stress was not— my stress was not my physical symptoms. My stress was my mental I don't know the word. I was like, my negative self-talk, that was my stress. The physical symptoms were little. The mental stress was humongous. And I want to talk to you about how we talk to ourselves. And I want to help you do a better job with your daily self-talk, with how you deal with it if you get it, with how you go about your days. I want to help and I want to do better myself and I want to learn from this and share. So I blamed myself over and over and over. And my mom used to say to me when I was little, she would say, I almost need to just give your father a hammer so that he can hammer himself over the head and beat himself up the way that he's beating himself up mentally right now. Because my dad, I remember him being so hard on himself, and I'm not going to say that my mother isn't. I just remember her saying that about my dad. So when I beat myself up mentally, I think about my mother holding, you know, pretend holding a hammer that she wants to give my dad to hammer himself over the head, and it makes me laugh and it gets me out of the moment. It interrupts my thought. And I want to share with you that when we talk to ourselves negatively, when you hear yourself beating yourself up, I want you to find a pause button. I'm going to start to pause myself. It's like I think of my brain as a tape recorder. This is how I learned it when we talked about cognitive behavioral therapy in all of our trainings. My— I remember so many trainings talking about this tape going off in our heads, and I want you to think about the fact that you can stop, you can pause, and you can rewind. You can also pretend you're fast-forwarding. So I'm going to give you an example. I was beating myself up and saying things like, I can't believe that you caught this. You weren't careful enough, how could you do this, you don't know who you're going to give it to in your family, you don't know what their symptoms are going to look like, and I just stressed myself out all day long. I would just go on and on in my brain, and I wish that I would have pressed the pause button when I realized I was doing that and then rewind and replace. And challenge yourself and say, okay, I'm talking to me right now, Rebecca. Let's replace your thoughts. What you're doing to yourself is only causing you stress. Blaming yourself is not doing anyone any good. I know you're like punishing yourself, but we know that you feel bad. You feel bad. You got it. It's easy to catch. You didn't do it on purpose. Let's replace your thoughts. Let's replace your thoughts with You didn't mean to do this. You didn't do this on purpose. It's gonna be okay. You're okay. You feel better. Your family is gonna be okay. I want to challenge you today as you're going about your day, pay attention to your thoughts. I'm paying attention to my thoughts, and as I'm catching myself having the negative self-talk, I'm going to listen. I'm going to listen because what am I actually telling myself? And I am going to stop, stop or pause. And I'm going to say, okay, so you're upset with yourself for getting COVID. I hear you. Now let's move on. Let's replace with something else. Let's replace with you didn't do this on purpose. You are a good person. You are doing your best not to give this to anyone else. You are staying home. You are keeping your distance from your family. You are doing a good job. How many times do we say, "You are doing a good job," to ourselves during the day? I catch myself saying it to my kids. I catch myself giving my husband or my kids praise. My next step is I'm so happy that I'm doing that. How about that? How about stop there, pat myself on the back. Good job giving your husband and kids praise. Now I want to see you do it more with yourself. I am going to give myself praise. Good job getting your podcast done today. Good job getting outside and taking your dog for a long walk. That was good for you. It was good for your dog. Let's give ourselves more praise. Let's pay attention to our self-talk. Let's pay attention to what the tape in our head is all day. Pay attention to how you talk to yourself, because what always fascinates me is that I talk to my friends so much better than I talk to myself. And why is that okay? That's not okay. I deserve it too. I want to talk to you a little bit more about a couple lessons that I learned that I did not know. I want to back up to me finding out that I got COVID. I found out and I came home and I was distraught, understandably. When you hear that you have COVID, it's like that big looming thing out there that everybody is talking about. It's why my kids aren't going to school full-time. It's why I— my husband and I couldn't go watch my son play soccer. He had 2 soccer games and he won and we couldn't watch. This is why there are all these rules in place because of this big looming COVID. Oh my God, I have COVID. I couldn't, I couldn't even wrap my mind around it. I come home, I run upstairs, I'm hiding in my bedroom. I'm on my bed. My 8-year-old daughter is distraught. Are you going to just stay in here now? Are you not coming out now? What's going to happen now? She was so upset. I would say I sat there for, I don't know if it was an hour, it might not even have been an hour. And my husband comes in and he's like, listen, I need you. You have to come downstairs. I can't do this by myself. I can't do this for X number of days left by myself. "Can you please come down and help?" I was already trying to think about— we hadn't discussed what the next steps were going to be. I was already looking around my bedroom going, "Oh my goodness, can I stay in here? Am I going to be able to just stay in here?" It seemed so confining, and it's all our minds playing tricks on us. If Seth and I had decided that I was going to stay in our bedroom, Of course I would have done that to protect my family. When I took the test, the nurse, healthcare worker, whoever came and gave me my results, she said, "Can you isolate from your family? Can you go to a different house? Can you stay away from them? If you can, that would be great." And she left. And no one really explained it to me further than that. And I didn't do my research. So I put on gloves and a mask. That was day 1. That didn't last. And I went downstairs and I started cooking dinner, crying to myself, hiding my tears because my 8-year-old was already so upset. And I knew that she knew I was upset. I wasn't about to hide that I was upset. Of course I'm upset. I just got diagnosed with COVID But I went about my business and I cooked and cleaned for my family and I took care of them. And the first county worker calls and she tells me, "Your quarantine is for 10 days from the first day that you had symptoms." So we calculated that together. She said, "Your family's quarantine is 14 days. So you're 10 and they're 14." And that was the end of our conversation. And I was like, "Okay, I'm fine. What are your symptoms?" I told her my symptoms. She said, "I'm so thankful for— to you that you have such mild symptoms. I hope it continues." And of course my brain was like, oh my God, me too. I hope it continues. I hope it continues. I hope it doesn't get worse. And thankfully it didn't, but I was stressed. And then I find out the second county worker calls to do the contact tracing and we figured out where I had been, if anyone had been exposed. We did all that after my quarantine. This was past my 10-day quarantine when they called me to do contact tracing, which is scary in itself. Because if I had exposed people, they had no idea. However, I would have contacted people if I thought that I had exposed them. So then we move on to my third contact with the county. I decided to call the county because I was confused and I wanted to send my kids back to school and I wanted them to help me figure out when I could do that. Well, she was the most helpful, and the first county worker was having so much trouble answering my questions that What I should have done was I should have gotten off the phone, done some research, called them back, and asked more questions. That's what I wish I would have done. If you have questions, don't hesitate to make the phone calls. So I call the county and I say, I need you to help me calculate when my kids can go back to school, because not only did I need to calculate it, I needed to help the pediatrician calculate it because they needed to fill out paperwork to release my kids back to school. So the school wouldn't let them back without the paperwork from the pediatrician, but the pediatrician first needed information from me. So what I find out is that because I did not isolate from my family— now mind you, I am hearing about people isolating, I'm hearing about people isolating in their basements because their basement has a bathroom. They want you in a room where you can be by yourself and have access to your own bathroom. They don't want other people using the same bathroom as you. So isolating to their bedrooms, isolating to their basements. We have been hearing about people doing this. I did not do this. I decided for my children and husband's mental health, mental well-being, that I would continue to take care of them. I did continue to keep my distance from them. However, I didn't isolate. So what that means is that because they saw me on my 10th 10th day of quarantine that they then needed to quarantine for 14 days after my 10th day, which gives them a 24-day quarantine if you did the math. Now they have changed the rules since I had COVID and now the rules are, I believe, now look this up and make sure I'm correct, in my area the rule is now 10 days. Okay. So they would have had to quarantine for 10 days after my 10 days. So it would have been a 20-day quarantine instead of a 24-day quarantine. But at the time it was 24 days. And I can't even tell you how upset my 11-year-old daughter was. I talked about this on my vlog every Wednesday. I come out with a new Winey Palooza blog and vlog. Wednesday morning, I put out a new topic every week. You are more than welcome to email me and tell me a topic that you would love me to cover. I love getting topic requests. So every Wednesday morning, I put out a new topic, and I did write about COVID And then every Wednesday night at 9 PM, I go live on Facebook and I do a vlog about what I wrote about. So when I was talking about how upset my 11-year-old was, I did break down. I didn't mean to, but it, you know, it's further out. We're further out from it now. So I'm less emotionally emotional when I talk about it. But she was so angry with me every day. That was one of the biggest stressors to me. She was so mad at me for getting COVID and for keeping her home. Ella loves going to school and theater, theater especially. And I was taking away her greatest coping strategy. And trust me, that was part of why I was beating myself up. I felt so terrible. So again, the stress, thankfully, thankfully the stress was not the physical symptoms. The stress was the mental stress that I was causing myself and that I could have handled so much better. And my main reason for sharing this with you is that I'm hoping that you learned something from me. I'm hoping that you learned how small your symptoms can be. When people sneeze in my house and I look, my husband always says, it's just a sneeze. It's just a sneeze. Relax. However, I know how small a symptom can be. So not only did I want you to learn what mine looked like, I also wanted you to take care of yourself better than I did when I had it. I was beating myself up, and I just want to encourage you to love yourself and to talk nice to yourself and to just become aware of your thoughts. Become aware of what am I telling myself and how can I do better? What can I replace my thoughts with? What do I want to tell myself? What would I tell someone else How would I talk to my best friend? How would I talk to my 8-year-old when she's upset? Would I beat her up? No, I would hug her and love her. Hug yourself with your words. Love yourself with your words. Understand that, of course, you're not gonna be peaches and rosy keen all day, every day. You're not gonna be all love and happy and smiley all day, every day. I just want you to become a little bit more aware of how you talk to yourself, and I will do the same, and I will learn from this. I learned so much from this. I learned to be even more careful because I don't want to catch it again, and I don't want to give it to anybody. I want to protect my family, and I want to protect my loved ones and my friends, and I will wash my hands and use that sanitizer and take my supplements. I can't emphasize that enough. Take your supplements. I'm a strong believer in supplements. Zinc, vitamin C, quercetin. What else am I taking? There's so many good supplements out there. Do your own research. Ask questions. Feel free to talk to my parents. They can ship things out of town. They are Marlene and Phil's Vitamin and Herb Center. We also— I know that my husband loves Passion 4 Life. That is another excellent vitamin to take. There are so many good vitamins to help protect us. Do what you can, do what you have control over. We don't have control over everything. I'm still going to run my errands. I'm not going to isolate and see no one, but I'm going to be careful about it. I'm going to do my best. I'm going to treat myself kinder and hopefully love myself a little bit better today. So I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. You can find me on YouTube at Whiny Palooza. You can find me on Facebook at Whiny Palooza. You can find me on Instagram at whinypaloozamom. You can find my first book, Whiny Palooza, on Amazon. And I'm so excited that I'm working on my second book. My second book is called Whiny Palooza Gets Less Whiny, and I will let you know when it comes out. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and I hope that you have a wonderful day. This is Rebecca Greene encouraging everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving. Have a wonderful day.
Thank you for tuning in to the Whiny Palooza podcast.
If you like what you heard, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review. I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time.
This show has been produced by Market Domination LLC. To discover how you can have your own show completely done for you and turn it into a real published book and become the authority in your marketplace, go to www.marketdominationllc.com/podcastoffer.
