I took a minute to cry before I wrote this. But we’ll get back to that.
I have always loved a good rabbit hole. Armed with my fav shovel (usually my phone) I jump in whenever I hear something interesting, or have a question, which is all the time. For the last few years, my favorite rabbit holes have been related to Long Covid. Since doctors and researchers took a couple years to decide it was real and not a conspiracy of the suffers, I, and many Long Covid sufferers took it upon ourselves to find solutions. We knew it was mitochondria related years before the scientific community did because of its relationship to Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia (ME/CFS). We self-diagnosed exercise intolerance and knew it was not simply “deconditioning” literally three years before the medical community decided we weren’t just lazy POSs. But knowing these things is not a treatment.
Over the last three years, I’ve taken all sorts of supplements to varying degrees of feeling better. Often I would take something for one thing, it wouldn’t work, so I’d stop, only to return to it months later after realizing it was helping with something else.
This last fall I fell down an iodine rabbit hole. One of the theories of Long Covid is lasting virus that for whatever reason the immune system can keep somewhat under control, but cannot kill off. Knowing that Iodine is a powerful antiviral and antimicrobial I read what I could find first. There is not much, though there was an op-ed about Iodine deficiency coming back due to flour mills using bromine rather than iodine to mill the flour. When I jump down a rabbit hole, I like to triangulate. So I looked up iodine’s effect on parasites because I have a kid and kids spread parasites. Turns out it can help. (However it should be noted that we are not as iodine deficient as the Malawi children in the study.) So then I looked it up in relation to GERD because I’ve had stomach aches and heartburn since getting Covid. Turns out iodine is necessary for making stomach acid. Check. I looked at it in relation to PMS (no correlation), ADHD (kind of but not really), and Covid (under researched), energy (probably helps), and myriad other things. Thinking back to my eating disorder because I’ve felt that whatever I’d done to myself back then made me susceptible to Long Covid, I found that over exercising can decrease iodine-you sweat it out. So I tried it out for about three weeks taking high doses. I did in fact feel better. My long covid symptoms went away. A cure!
But then of course taking too much iodine has it’s own problems. So I went to my GP for thyroid tests. He never got back to me. And then I got the latest greatest version of Covid and, like everyone we knew, just couldn’t kick it. So I went to my acupuncturist who uses a magic machine to see what’s going on inside - Bioresonance. I have no idea how it works outside of sound waves and magic, but it did find that I still had some Covid virus kicking around as well as Cytomegalovirus1 (heretofore known as dino virus because it sounds like a dinosaur name)2, as well as gallstones, which explains the stomach aches and suffocating feeling that is not asthma. My acupuncturist put me on antivirals and herbs to dissolve the gallstones (yes, that is real. No surgery is not the only option.).
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