WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, Psychologist, fellow long hauler, and your Long COVID coach, and welcome to another Wellness Wednesday.

This week, I wanted to talk about something that is a huge deal for all of us with Long COVID. And that I have spoken a little bit about before, which is making treatment decisions. And there are two reasons why it's incredibly difficult for us to make treatment decisions. And there are some things that we can do that I want to talk about that can help you with this that relate to polyvagal theory.

The first reason why it's really difficult to make treatment decisions is because we don't have any recommended, approved, randomized control trials, or suggested treatments. At this point, we're all scratching around in the dark trying to find potential treatments. When we go to make decisions, the data on which we would normally do so isn't there. And we second guess ourselves, not surprisingly.

But the second reason why making treatment decisions is difficult is even more important. That's because we have brain damage, i.e., cognitive dysfunction. Sometimes referred to as brain fog, but I tend to not use that word anymore because I don't think it captures the seriousness of what we're dealing with. We know that the spike protein from acute COVID enters primarily through the nose, and it goes up into the front part of the brain first, which is the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is responsible for a lot of things.

But one of those is decision-making. And when we have brain damage from COVID, like we do, that decision-making is massively impaired. When I'm working with people with Long COVID, individually, which I have been doing now for over 18 months. There are two very common presentations that I see. The first is the complete inability to make any decision at all. I totally paralyzed. "Oh, I don't know, let me think about it." "Oh, I don't know." And then the thinking just turns into no decision being made.

In many cases, and I see this in the Facebook groups and other places in our community, some people are literally just not getting any treatment at all, because they can't make a decision. Obviously, that isn't fair to them and is massively impacting the speed with which they can recover. Now, the second thing that I see is almost the opposite of that, although, in a way, it's also not decision-making either. Some people literally throw money at it. And obviously, those people are fortunate to be in a position financially, where they have the resources to do that.

But they will see every single doctor and take every single treatment, and somebody recommends, "I'll try that.", they research, "I'll try that.", they try this, they try that. And those people are doing so much treatment, that it's all canceling each other out and the body is getting overwhelmed and going into shock and not helping them from a nervous system perspective, either.

And so, what I want to give you today, are some things to keep in mind to help you avoid either of those two extremes. And building on my own experience, because this is something that I have grappled with massively in the three and a half years that I have had Long COVID.

I saw one of my doctors on Friday, and he had some recommendations for things in my treatment plan. One was a medication that he would like me to stop, and the other was a medication that he would like me to add. I'm not going to go into too much detail as to the specifics of the treatment and the medications that we're talking about at the minute because I actually want to do a whole another video going into that in much more detail in a few more weeks. But just so that you have the sense.

So, I was given this recommendation. Stop this one medication, take this other medication. And both of those recommendations didn't feel comfortable to me. And from a polyvagal perspective, when we can't make decisions cognitively. And in all honesty, even if we don't have brain damage, actually making decisions cognitively isn't necessarily the best thing. What we do want to do is go back to our gut intuition, or our gut instinct.

This idea that you've heard me talk about before that our bodies actually do know what they need. And if we can get quiet long enough, we can learn to pay attention to that information. And what is a really integral part of that is the polyvagal work that can help us get to that state. If we are in a permanent shutdown, we do not have access to our gut instinct. If we are in a permanent fight or flight, we do not have access to our gut instinct.

Gut instinct is literally that. It is the information that is coming from our gut, through the vagus nerve back up to the brain. And we know that there's an awful lot of information going from the brain through the vagus nerve down. But there is also information going in the other direction. And if your gut is messed up by COVID, if your vagus nerve is damaged, as we have spoken about. Then those signals are not going to run efficiently.

So first and foremost, if we want to make effective treatment decisions, we actually need to do the work, learning our nervous system, calming our nervous system, improving vagal tone and flexibility so that the information can run up and down that vagus nerve effectively. Once you have done that, then it is a question of tapping into that information.

When I was talking to my doctor on Friday, and he mentioned the one information, one medication that he wants me to stop, and my gut feeling was, "Oh, I'm not sure how I feel about that." And I sat with it for the rest of the day, and probably a little bit of the next day. But the more I sat with it, the more the feelings of: "No, this is not the right decision for me showed up."

And so, for now, I am going to keep taking that medication. And this is something that I have done many times throughout my treatment. And I think all of us are doing this to some extent, you see one particular doctor, they recommend something, or they tell you to stop something, and you're not quite sure that you agree with them. We find somebody else who can help us without medication instead. And in fact, currently, the person who's prescribing the medication who told me to stop is not this doctor.

Actually, I'm okay to continue taking it under somebody else's medical advice. And in terms of the medication that I was told to add, which apparently, I was supposed to take months ago. I've actually been doing a treatment, which I will tell you more about in a few weeks that has made me feel quite poorly for the last four months or so. And it was really a struggle to go back to a stage of feeling awful again when I was practically recovered. And I am not ready to go back there again. I just did it for four months.

And so, I am going to take my time in deciding whether I want to add this extra medication because I am not ready to go back there. And again, that's paying attention to what my body is telling me. My body is telling me no, we don't have the strength to do this right now. We're not in a place where that's going to fit in terms of things that I have scheduled, in terms of people that I want to spend time with, in terms of projects that I'm working on, but also physiologically, how my body and my nervous system are feeling.

We're not there yet. And if I've built up the resources in a few months and I'm okay to do that, then I will do that then. So again, pay attention to what the body is saying. Now, I am not telling you to stop your medications or not to start with the ones that people have recommended. I cannot give you advice about medical issues. I am not a Physician. But what I can give you is advice about how to make decisions yourself. And learning to tune into what our nervous system is telling us that gut intuition those signals coming from our gut, up the vagus nerve into our brain can be incredibly powerful and a huge part of my recovery journey that I will continue to bring forward even when I am 100% recovered.

Now, if you are struggling with this. This is definitely something that I help people within individual coaching. If you want a little bit more support, don't hesitate to reach out there's a link on my website that says apply to work with Sally. And that's exactly what that button is for. If you want to do some individual coaching with me to get some support about learning to make treatment decisions based on your nervous system. We can absolutely do that.

I hope you have a tolerable week. And I will see you again on another Wellness Wednesday.

Take care!