My Long COVID Story: What Finally Helped Me Recover (Not Medical Advice)

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0:30Back in early 2020, I got sick with what we would later know as COVID-19. And the really strange thing about how this story began is that I didn't have the typical symptoms that everyone was talking about. So I never developed a cough. I never had a high fever. Instead, it was this gradual onset of difficulty breathing. And not because it felt like I couldn't get the oxygen into my lungs. I could. It just felt like I couldn't get the oxygen to where it needed to go. And day by day, it was becoming harder to breathe. And where I was living at the time, there was sargasm. There were other things going on that I started to tell myself stories.

1:09Like, because this was so subtle, maybe it was because of the sargasm. That's a type of seaweed that puts off really awful smell, but awful gas as well. Then I thought, like, you know, maybe I just need to rest more. Maybe I'm burning the candle at both ends. Maybe this is some kind of anxiety. and then it became impossible to ignore and I remember waking up one morning and thinking like something is so wrong here that maybe I'm gonna have to go to the hospital I went outside I thought okay I'm gonna sit in the sun I'm gonna do deep breathing I'm going to meditate and so I was focusing on slow deep breathing because I truly was thinking like maybe if I can calm my nervous system, then these symptoms are not going to be so bad.

1:55Like, you know, because it couldn't be COVID. But the meditation didn't work. The sitting in the sunlight didn't work. The chilling out my nervous system didn't work. Because as the day went on, my breathing was getting harder and harder. And I remember just a couple days before that, I was on a webinar with a group of women, women I've known for like over a decade. And when I was talking and it was my time to present, we were on zoom and I was getting these dms like the direct chat messages from people being like are you okay what's going on with you I've never heard you talk so slow in your life and a friend of mine she was so concerned that she texted me and she's like you're not breathing right like it seems like you can't catch your breath here I am a few days later trying the deep breathing trying the meditation sitting out in the sun and I just had this thought of like I feel like I need to take a photo here and memorialize this moment because I am so scared.

2:56There's this fear deep inside me of I don't know what is going to come next. And what came next was me passing out on the way to the bathroom, just walking to the bathroom. I later call a friend of mine who's an ER doctor. He's like, I know you're stubborn. I know you don't want to hear this, but you need to go to the hospital. And I'm like, I don't want to go to the hospital because everybody at the hospital is COVID and I don't have COVID and I don't want to get COVID. Well, as it turned out, I did have COVID. And I'm going to talk to you about what came next to going to the hospital. But this episode was prompted by your request when I shared on social media my journey, my story.

3:33And I said I really focused on mitochondrial support to help me with my long COVID journey. Yes, plot spoiler. There was long COVID as part of this journey. many of you asked would you please share this story and share what you used. So I'm going to do that because as it is today I am no longer struggling with the long COVID symptoms. I don't have the debilitating fatigue, the brain fog, the nerve pain, the POTS. I mean it was a journey. So if you're new here I'm Dr. Jolene Brighton. I'm board certified in naturopathic endocrinology. I'm a nutrition scientist, certified menopause practitioner through the Menopause Society and I struggled with long COVID.

4:15I am a doctor. I'm licensed as a physician, but that doesn't make me your doctor. And so I say this because I'm gonna share my journey. I'm gonna share this as part of my perspective and anything you learn is not medical advice here. We're still learning so much about COVID. I finally agreed to go to the hospital and I am stubborn. Most doctors are pretty stubborn. And my husband drove me there, but because it was early in the pandemic, he was not allowed to come inside. I had to just be dropped off on a bench and wait for someone to come out. And I remember wondering if that was going to be the last time I saw him for a while, maybe forever.

4:55It was just a really awful feeling. And at this point, we knew so little about this virus. We watched hospitals on television, people reporting like, you know, people dying, intubation. We watched physicians trying desperately to save people without knowing what actually worked or what was going to be effective. So walking into the emergency room, I genuinely didn't know if I was coming home. And then it was a really odd experience. Nobody wanted to touch me, talk to me, have anything to do with me. They put oxygen on me. They sat in IV line. I didn't see people for hours. They came in with an x-ray machine and they were like, you can't go to another room.

5:38You're not getting a lead apron to cover your organs. You're not getting any of that. We just need to do this x-ray. I was just left in this deserted part of the hospital. And on YouTube, I will put up an image so you can see what I'm talking about because there were beds there that had been occupied, but then abandoned and there was just paper everywhere. They weren't cleaning up after anyone. They weren't coming to check on me. I mean, I was there all day and no food, no water, nothing offered to me. And I had packed my own snacks and my own stuff. And thankfully I did because literally no one wanted to come near me.

6:22Eventually somebody comes to draw blood and And hours later, I get results. And what happened next still feels really surreal when I think about it today. So they told me, go outside and wait. He literally just walked in and said, go outside and wait. So I went out into this parking lot and just stood there. And a physician walked into the parking lot wearing full personal protective equipment and stayed as far away from me as he could possibly be. and he yelled my diagnosis across the parking lot. And he said, you know, your COVID is positive. I remember asking him, you know, the only question that seemed to matter in that moment to me is like, so what's the treatment?

7:06Like, what do I do? What do I do next? And here I am, like, can't breathe. My pulse ox had been really low, you know. And he said to me the answer that really just, I mean, was like a punch in the gut. There isn't one. He explained that my lungs were clear. I wasn't in respiratory failure from pneumonia or anything like that. So the only intervention they had, if I continued to deteriorate, was intubation. Otherwise, they had nothing. There was no medication. There was no treatment. There was nothing. And then he looked at me and he said something that I will never forget. And it honestly changed everything about how I went forward in living my life.

7:49and he said you'll either get better in a couple weeks or you won't and you should probably get your affairs in order okay so here i am i've spent my career studying nutrition hormones inflammation chronic disease i am young i am healthy i exercise i eat well not a smoker no cardiometabolic disease i didn't have diabetes you know all these things that we were told these are the risk factors. These are the people who get sick. These are the people who have to worry. Everything we believed at this point was that people at the greatest risk were older adults and people with significant underlying medical conditions.

8:30And I remember thinking, how is this happening to me? How could someone who has dedicated her life to health suddenly become one of the sickest people she knew? So I leave the hospital. My husband comes and picks me up. They're like, you should quarantine from your whole family. I'm like, it's too late for that. Honestly, my husband, thankfully the next day he advocates for supplemental oxygen and I am on oxygen daily for months. There wasn't a real treatment plan. There wasn't a protocol. There wasn't a roadmap. There was just oxygen and waiting. I can honestly say that as both a doctor and a patient, that was one of the most helpless experiences of my life because it wasn't just about being afraid of dying.

9:16It was also about being afraid that if I survived, like this might be my life now. Like I might be on oxygen. And I had no idea that the hardest part wasn't even this initial part, this acute infection. The hardest part was what came next. Because while my body was fighting this virus, my body took a hit and it never fully recovered, you know, those initial months. And that was the beginning of my journey with what we now know as long COVID. And, you know, I know as they say this, there's a very real possibility that this podcast, this video, social media could get shadow banned for all of this.

9:57And I say that as somebody who went through shadow banning. So because early in the pandemic, I had different symptoms. So one of the first things, other than the inability to breathe, is that my left armpit swelled up like mastitis swelled up. If you know, you know. Having mastitis, I had really, really painful lymph nodes just in my armpit. So bizarre. As things progressed, so there was the breathing issue, weeks later, what comes next is shooting pains. So just throughout my body, randomly, like I'm being electrocuted, pains going down my legs, my sacrum burning all the time, shooting pains in my face, trigeminal neuralgia, migraines, okay?

10:43Serious, serious migraines, feeling like my legs couldn't hold still because they were just so achy and painful and shooting pains. And so I'd have to constantly be moving my legs. Then things progressed further to where it was like, oh yeah, I can't breathe and get oxygen without being on oxygen. And in addition to that, I now get a racing heart. If I stand up too quickly, my heart rate would jump up. I couldn't go to the bathroom without feeling like my heart was pounding out of my chest and I was completely dizzy. I had no exercise tolerance left. I developed POTS. I wish I knew then what I know now, which is that I have endometriosis and adenomyosis because I had thought my autoimmune disease is what made me susceptible to this.

11:35I have Hashimoto's. That's what made me susceptible to this. And as it turns out, the research is now showing endometriosis leaves you susceptible to this. And something that I would have done differently in my protocol knowing that. Now, I took like a lot of nettles, a lot of quercetin, but I would have been on antihistamines because I do think there was a histamine component to this that we only now are beginning to understand. I wasn't diagnosed yet with ADHD or autism. No, I did not acquire those from having COVID. I had those since childhood. Ask anyone who knew me as a child. I would say they'd vouch for me, but they did vouch for me.

12:13When you go through these evaluations, people have to write a narrative about their experience with you and looking back at what you were like as a child. So when I started sharing all this stuff online, just sharing my experience, Meta shut me down. So Instagram wouldn't share anything. I would literally have a story where I'm just talking about like food, for example. And the next story, I say COVID. I say that, you know, I'm sick or anything like that. And they just would not show it. And I think they did a lot of harm. I think most people involved in the entire pandemic did a lot of harm with good intentions.

12:53The impact is still the same, but I think the intention was like they were trying to guard against misinformation. I feel like I still, my social media accounts have never recovered since this because I just like got a mark on me because what I was talking about wasn't recognized yet. And I remember joining a long haulers group on Facebook because there were just thousands. I mean, I'm talking like 100 ,000 of us who were like, what is actually going on? And doctors took to the internet to say we were malingering, we were attention seeking, that there was no evidence of this. Then the same doctors flipped their story and said, well, we know Epstein-Barr virus can cause symptoms like this.

13:37So maybe that's normal. And I think it's things like that that made people start to lose trust in medicine early on. And we saw that JAMA came out with an article showing that public trust in medicine has dropped substantially. And I think we've got a lot of work to do to repair that public trust because there was never a, yeah, guys, sorry, we got it wrong. Actually, listen to your patients. Actually, this was right. Hey, sorry, guys, we know we said this, but now it's actually this. There was never an owning of it. There was actually more of like, yeah, we totally made people who felt like garbage feel more like garbage.

14:18And then we pretended that we didn't do that. And we were experts of things and just moving on. And I get that like, that was probably coming from a place of like, I need like, we need to have that confidence. Like we need to like fake it till we make it kind of confidence building. And I just, I don't think it worked out to be that way. So this episode though, I'm going to bring it back on track because I want to talk about what we actually know and what I did. So through this COVID dream, I was using antivirals. I was using, I mean, all kinds of medications and things that I can't even talk about because I definitely will get shadow banned if I say that.

14:55But it was early on. We didn't know it would work. I was literally trying everything. So when I was first infected in 2020, we were treating COVID as an acute respiratory illness. Months after my initial recovery, I found myself in a state of profound systemic exhaustion. I had crushing brain fog that persisted and I couldn't do anything really without a multi-day crash. And so whatever I did in that day, I knew I had to pay for it for like the next three days. One thing I hear from women all the time is that they're struggling with symptoms like hot flashes, sleep disruptions, and brain fog, but aren't sure where to turn to for help.

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16:27Plus, you'll get$20 off your first order today. That's M-Y-A-L-L-O-Y dot com, code Dr. Brighton. And so, you know, I had to step out of the role of being a patient and start to look at the clinical research. But at the time, there wasn't much. And now the World Health Organization, WHO, it formally recognizes is this constellation of lingering symptoms is post-COVID-19 condition. The WHO's working definition, it emphasizes that the condition impacts daily functioning and it cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis. And believe me, I tried to find every other diagnosis of like, could I actually just explain this because how could I be so sick?

17:14So what I asked myself at the time is like, what physiological mechanism explains a multi-system shutdown where my heart, my lungs, my brain are all structurally intact, yet they feel like they're completely energy starved? And that answer brought me straight to the cellular level, which is the mitochondria. We often dismiss the mitochondria in medical school. It gets just called the powerhouse of the cell. And we memorize the Krebs cycle for an exam. I don't actually know in medical school. I'm like, I definitely remember that in nutrition school. But when you look at the emerging data, it becomes clear that SARS-CoV-2 severely compromises the mitochondria.

17:56So there was a landmark study that was published in Frontiers in Immunology. I will put this in the show notes. It examined prolonged tissue changes in post-COVID conditions. And the researchers discovered that there was a persistent suppression of oxidative phosphorylation. What is that? That's the exact biochemical pathway our mitochondria used to make ATP, which is our energy. And this wasn't just a temporary lag. What the data showed was that there was ongoing mitochondrial fragmentation, impaired fatty acid oxidation, and massive oxidative stress for months after the virus was cleared. So you no longer have the immune testing that shows that you have a virus.

18:42It'll show like the history of the virus, the memory of the virus. And yet the mitochondria still are struggling. And what I explain this as is that essentially the cellular power plant, that's the mitochondria, they were in a brownout state. The fuel was in the room. But the generators were structurally damaged by the initial viral and immune storm. Because it's not just the virus. It's also how the immune system responds. And so I started looking at my post-COVID condition through the framework of this being more of like a bioenergetic failure. And then I switched my entire approach to recovery to focus on how do I support my mitochondria?

19:23How do they start to optimize them? So once I viewed my long COVID through the lens of mitochondrial dysfunction, that changed my strategy completely. and I wasn't looking for just one supplement that would magically make me feel better. I think that's important to understand. What I was looking at is what does a cell need to recover its ability to make energy? What does it actually need to make energy altogether? And that became the framework for everything I did. And yes, I did use supplements because, yeah, I mean, there's concentrated versions of these things you can only get in supplement form.

19:59So the way I approached this. The framework was really like four key areas of what I started looking at. So I needed to reduce oxidative stress. I needed to restore nutrients that my body needed, the mitochondria needed for energy production, the ATP production. I needed to support the neuroendocrine environment so that healing could actually happen. And then the fourth one I think is maybe one of the most important is I had to shift my energy, my expectations, my mindset, and I had to learn to pace my energy instead of judging myself, hating on myself, constantly exceeding what my capacity was.

20:36So these are the four areas I want to dive into here. Now, as somebody who now knows they have endometriosis, adenomyosis, ADHD, autism, and multiple autoimmune diseases, oxidative stress is always trying to get the best of me, and it did. It did in this story, but what I need you to understand is that one of the hallmarks of mitochondrial dysfunction is oxidative stress. So as the mitochondria become damaged, they're going to produce more reactive oxygen species. Those reactive oxygen species are what are damaging the mitochondria to begin with, and then the mitochondria makes more, and now you're going to damage mitochondrial proteins, lipids, DNA, makes your mitochondria less efficient at producing energy, and it's this self-perpetuating cycle.

21:22So if I wanted my mitochondria to recover, I had to first reduce the oxidative burden, reduce what was making them dysfunctional. So one of the first supplements that I was using was N-acetylcysteine or NAC. I chose NAC because it is a rate-limiting precursor for glutathione synthesis. What does that mean? It's necessary to make glutathione, which is the body's primary intracellular antioxidant. It's one of the most important defenses against oxidative stress. And rather than simply adding more antioxidants from the outside, I wanted to support my body's ability to produce its own. Plus, N-acetylcysteine has so many benefits for neurological health, for gut health.

22:06So it's like one supplement to help all these systems. I also paired it with high-dose vitamin C. Vitamin C works differently than glutathione. It functions as a potent water-soluble antioxidant. It's going to donate electrons to neutralize free radicals before they can damage surrounding tissue. And it does that to the vitamin E that's in the lipid bilayer. So at the cellular level, so vitamin C is in the aqueous solution. It's going to donate electrons to help keep the cell membrane stable. I didn't use vitamin C because it helps you get over a cold faster. That's not actually how vitamin C works.

22:45vitamin C works because it helps with oxidative stress. It helps with free radicals. And together, NAC and vitamin C, they supported a complementary aspect of antioxidant defense system overall. A lot of people are not aware that when your immune system gets activated, it is going to make free radicals as part of battling the viruses, bacteria, any kind of infection that shouldn't be there. I also increased EPA-rich omega-3 fatty acids. They still had DHA in there, but I was focusing more on the anti-inflammatory aspect because long COVID is not just a fatigue problem. Many patients demonstrate persistent inflammatory and vascular abnormalities long after the acute infection.

23:33And EPA shifts production towards a less inflammatory profile and helps stabilize cell membranes, including the membranes surrounding the mitochondria. Now the other cornerstone of this was ubiquinol. It's the reduced form of coenzyme Q10 or CoQ10. I specifically chose ubiquinol because it's generally more bioavailable than the oxidized form. CoQ10 is going to serve as an electron carrier within the electron transport chain. It's going to transfer electrons between these complexes that you have, it's gonna support the mitochondria in its energy production. If that oxidative phosphorylation that I was talking about before was impaired, then supporting this, I wanted to support this.

24:21It was a very critical molecule to help with the electrons through that system. Now, when I look back at this section of the protocol that I was doing, my goal wasn't simply just to take antioxidants. I need you to understand that. my goal was to interrupt the cycle of oxidative damage that was preventing my mitochondria from recovering. So I'm bringing down oxidative stress, but then I also need to focus on how do I get my mitochondria to make ATP, to make that energy. This is not a passive process. So we've got the Krebs cycle, the electron transport chain. What you need to know about that is that it requires certain nutrients so that the enzymes can do their job.

25:01That's the cofactors needed. If the cofactors are missing, the system becomes inefficient. Even if the mitochondria themselves are beginning to recover, we still have to have the nutrients to fuel this. And so that's why I prioritize a comprehensive B-complex, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin. Those are three big ones that are essential for oxidative metabolism. And they are going to participate directly in the biochemical reactions that ultimately create that ATP energy. I also incorporated a NAD plus precursor, nicotinamide riboside. That's specifically what it was. And this decision to bring these in, it was rooted in the emerging research on NAD metabolism during viral infections.

25:51When the immune system gets activated, NAD is consumed at a significant amount. And when NAD becomes depleted, that can impair your ATP production further. So I needed to restore those pools. So restoring these nutrients, these pools, that just makes like biochemical sense to me, especially given the degree of cognitive dysfunction that I was experiencing, that a lot of us experience with long COVID. Now, something else I added was acetyl-L-carnitine. Carnitine is responsible for transporting long-chain fatty acids across the inner mitochondrial membrane. Why does that matter? Because there's a process called beta-oxidation that uses fat to produce energy.

26:36If the fatty acids can't reach the mitochondria, they're not in the matrix there, they're not available for fuel. So supporting that transport system was another way of helping restore the metabolic flexibility that COVID was compromising in me. Now, we mentioned supporting the neuroendocrine environment. One thing I've learned after treating patients for years is that physiology is not happening in isolation. You can provide every nutrient a mitochondria needs, but if the body is trapped in a chronic stress response, recovery is going to become a lot more difficult. And while deep breathing meditation sitting in sunlight did not help me initially, you know, these things are important to consider in the protocol because long COVID itself is physically, emotionally, psychologically stressful.

27:24Sleep gets disrupted. The autonomic nervous system, its function gets disrupted. That's why we see so much POTS. The nervous system will also generally remain hypervigilant long after the infection itself has been cleared. And for me, supporting that system became just as important as supporting energy metabolism. And so to help with my HPA axis, that's the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the stress system that's tied to my nervous system, I leverage formulations with adaptogenic herbs, those that like help with energy during the morning and had B vitamins, and then adaptogenic nerve vines in the evening.

28:07And so things like passionflower, L-theanine, ashwagandha, to help with my stress physiology. The morning formulas more were like rhodiola, eleutherococcus, but I did have holy basil in there as well. I wanted to support adaptive cortisol response for myself. The other thing I should mention is vitamin D. Maybe I should have started with vitamin D because vitamin D, it functions as a steroid hormone. It influences immune regulation, gene expression, and mitochondrial function. And I needed to make sure my levels were an optimal range rather than just avoiding deficiency. And so I got a blood test, saw what my vitamin D was at, and I supplemented accordingly.