From Suffering to Solace: My Healing Journey Through Long COVID
In July 2021, my entire life unraveled. Here is my most vulnerable side, sharing a story of life, death, and rebirth.
I’ve enjoyed my privacy lately, but like the branches on this tree and the jungle that surrounds it, I yearn for connection to the world outside of myself, for a community of people who challenge the way I grow, who move me to spread outward.
It’s this privacy which can also become easily addicting to live in, a cave of protection that keeps my thoughts my own, and holds hidden the darkness that lies beyond.
The story I’m about to tell is my own. It’s taking me over a year to get to a point where I feel comfortable sharing this with a larger audience. After all of the pain, anguish, and heartache, I now feel the waves settling and I’m seeing the lessons from this journey. The other side is in view and the clouds have begun to separate. The light, although shaded, has never left.
It began on July 9th 2021. The day was a wonderful day. My physical, mental, professional, and relationship states were all at highs. I didn’t know how fragile all of this was about to become.
That day, I went in to receive my first vaccine dose and I left feeling good. I had been exposed to COVID 10 days prior, had tested negative 5 days after exposure, and this was the proper waiting period by the CDC to have before receiving a vaccine after exposure.
Before I go on, I want each of you to know that the mystery of what happened isn’t important to me anymore. It’s the story of what happened afterward that is…
3 days later, I started to feel immense pain in my neck and shoulders. Beyond agonizing, the pain moved upward to my head, and headaches started to develop. The headaches I was having from the tension in the neck and shoulders were much more like migraines, and the pain in my head, neck, and shoulders was so excruciating that I wasn’t able to sleep for the next 5 days.
On the 6th day, I started to journal and take notes of what was happening, but by day 7 I started to lose mental functionality. I have absolutely no recollection of days 7–14.
Those 7 days felt like what I believe dementia would feel like. I sent texts, emails, and had calls with people but have no memory of any of it happening until I looked at my texts, emails, and records later on. It was terrifying. I was functioning with no memory of it. Not only was my body in extreme pain, but I began to feel like I was losing my mind.
Maybe my mind was protecting me during this time, I’m not sure.
But by day 14, I began to regain some of my mental state and I have memories and notes of what happened afterward.
On week 3, I wrote:
“They say youth is wasted on the young, but not if you know what it’s like to feel old.”
And indeed… I felt like I was 90 years old: physically and mentally debilitated.
Then day 29 happened.
I woke up that morning feeling good. By far, the most difficult part of this whole experience were the feelings of hope that were torn apart by surprising physical pain and exhaustion. For those of us who’ve experienced Long COVID (much more on this later), where you don’t know what to do and no one knows what you should do, you know what I mean.
And it was on this day when EVERYTHING came crashing down.
I was stretching on the floor of my home when I started to feel faint. My eyesight became blurry and my peripheral vision began caving in. My breathing also became shallow and before I knew what was happening, I felt like I was going to pass out. I breathed through it for 5 minutes or so, but it didn’t subside and I started losing consciousness.
My heart, which wasn’t an issue before this day, pounded irregular heartbeats throughout my chest, which then sparked pain all throughout my upper body. Out of nowhere, I thought I was having a heart attack. I’ve never felt so close to death than at this moment.
After 4 weeks, things were getting worse, and I was losing consciousness and having heart palpitations just by sitting on the ground. I felt the raw, black energy of death near by, almost calling to me, asking if it could come inside.
But somewhere, someone or something was there, and I took a deep breath and felt a powerful, supportive light wrap around me.
I immediately called my parents, explaining what was happening and warning them that I might need someone to come take me to the hospital. 29 days after first getting sick, I legitimately thought that this was it and I was going to die.
I’ll never forget what my dad said to me on the phone when I called him that day:
“Alex, listen to me. Don’t you fucking die on me son. Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Don’t you die on me son.”
I still cry every time I think about that.
I didn’t die. Instead, I came out of it, started regaining consciousness, and for a couple of moments afterward, I even regained some of my physical strength.
That didn’t last long.
On the other side of my health, mentally, I was beginning to crumble. I had lost faith in getting help. Having a near death experience with no explanation from doctors to why I experienced it was one thing, but being unable to walk more than the distance to my kitchen was another. It was awful, and without basic movement, it became a particularly dark hell for me to live in. And worse still, no one had any idea what to do.
That’s when the depression came.
Like a dark stream of rainwater gushing down a pothole marked street, my thoughts circled into gutters of hopelessness. My girlfriend Natalie saw the worst of it, and without her, I’m not sure I would still be here. Janet, my business coach, was there for me too, and she became more of a spiritual therapist for me when I needed it the most.
For the next 8 weeks, another 56 days, the depression moved through my mind while I went in between being bedridden and bursts of small contained energy that would soon fade and leave me painfully physically debilitated. Moving more than 20 feet in a day was an accomplishment and I was constantly exhausted.
The “mind fog” was like a black blanket dressed over my brain, drenching drips of poison into my nervous system, which consistently gave me memory loss and the inability to think critically. Trying to function and do my work as a financial advisor was virtually impossible.
The depression, always in the background, played with my mind like a cat toying with a mouse.
But every day I woke up and told myself:
“Just one more day. Just one more step. Just one more day, Alex.”
I kept saying that mantra often, as if it were a prayer, but in the forefront of my struggle was the knowingness that no one knew what was happening to me, or how to help. The mere mention of my story to doctors was looked at with confusion and with no idea what to do. When I mentioned the words “vaccine reaction” to a doctor it was met with a look of “oh fuck”. It was, and still is, a very confusing and difficult topic to talk about.
During this time period, the physical pain and depression moved deep into me and I lost my spirituality. At this point, even sitting on the ground to meditate was painful for my whole body. I had to be horizontal and sleeping more often than not. The one thing I had known to always bring me peace in dark times I wasn’t able to access.
It was my mother who helped me come back into touch with it once again. Through healings, integrated family systems (IFS) therapy, and listening to the part of me that does not speak, I found the deeper part of myself once again and I realized an incredible truth:
I had never actually lost my spirit in the first place.
When I am lost, it will always be there, waiting for me to come back home.
It was in October, near day 82, when I started to feel my mind and body come back online. There was little rhyme or reason to it, but there were a couple of changes to my diet and daily habits that definitely helped. The trauma from the previous 12 weeks had left me deeply scarred, but slowly and surely, I began to go back to work and try to live what was once my life.
For the next 10 months and continuing to this day, I’ve endured through Long Haul COVID, which are intense COVID symptoms that randomly occur months after first getting infected. Some days I’ll wake up feeling great, other days I’ll wake up not being able to walk.
I have learned to live with the aches in my neck, shoulders, legs, and hips, but the reminder is always there, kissing my neck, whispering for me to move slowly and to appreciate and savor each delicate moment.
In May of this year, 9 months after that fateful July ’21 weekend, I started researching about Long COVID and the effects it has on an estimated 1 in 5 Americans. Outside of America, there are very few data points to rely on, but a study by the CDC in June, which was said to be “on the low side”, put the Long COVID number at 1 in 3 for the global population.
Thanks specifically to my sister and my dad, I started researching about the illness and finding people in support groups that were, or had been, in my shoes. I was experiencing what others were experiencing and at last, I felt like I wasn’t alone.
My father was instrumental in getting my physical body better. After working with his patients and learning more and more about how COVID attacks the body, he theorized that COVID had left severe damage to my diaphragm and was consistently constricting my breathing, limiting blood flow to my brain, lungs, and muscles. The psoas, which is connected to the diaphragm in the hips, was an area that he also thought to be of interest in the healing process.
Because of my dad’s body work techniques on the diaphragm and psoas, I have regained most of my functionality and am able to work out and exercise once again.
While my body healed, I walked through the final painful stages of my journey, and they were focused on my financial stability and my relationship with Natalie. After not being able to properly care for them, both started showing serious cracks, and eventually they both came apart.
In one year, my physical, mental, spiritual, financial, and relational worlds all completely dissolved.
For weeks I questioned why this had to happen to me, but eventually I realized that this needed to happen for one reason: in order for me to put them back together once more, but this time, stronger.
For a long time I thought about this as a period where I was being tested — tested to see what I was made of. But now, it feels more like an initiation: an initiation into a new self. An initiation into a new world.
Through all of this initiating, change, and uprooting, the powerful words by Viktor Frankl have kept ringing in my ears:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Like a river rolling through a canyon, these words have carved into my psyche, and I’ve chosen my way forward from here. I’m embracing what this last year has given me, and I know that this didn’t happen to me, but for me.
The answer for how to transmute this experience into something bigger than me became clear a couple of weeks ago.
I’m to turn my mess into a message.
I didn’t know how I would do this at first, but the pathway opened up, and a magical combination of divine timing and powerful teachers came into my life and the message became clear:
Create a roadmap of healing for those with Long COVID.
There are too many people suffering without answers. Although I am no doctor, I understand what it’s like to be sick with this illness, and I know what has helped me and the others I know who have it.
I also know that the frustration and disillusionment I felt within the current landscape is shared, and a program, community, and guidelines are desperately needed for those who still endure through the physiological and psychological tortures of the illness.
I’ll be sharing this program with the public in the next number of days (edit: it is now live! Click here). Keep an eye out for it. I’ve put much of my love, energy, and time into it and I feel driven to share this information in a way like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
The program has 3 main modules —
- Managing your physical body
- Aiding your mental health
- Rebuilding your faith
For the reader, remember that waking up each day healthy is a privilege. Too many of us are caught up in life and don’t realize this. It’s hard to really be grateful for what you’ve never lost, but please… do one thing religiously:
Passionately love your body, your mind, and your connections with others. Someday, they will leave, and in their absence, you will crave what you once had.
Give thanks for the gift of being alive, and always remember that it’s a gift - and it isn’t yours to keep.
I’d like to extend enormous gratitude to the people who were there for me this last year. In the back of my mind, I feel that if I didn’t have my family, friends, and lover during this time period I could’ve easily become homeless. I will never forget the support all of you have given me.
I’m alive, writing this, and feeling strength because of each of you. Thank you so much.
To my dad, thank you for your wisdom, dedication, and willingness to work on my body, week after week. Your insight saved my life, and I am physically and mentally healed because of you.
To my mom, thank you for your patience, care, and unconditional love for me when the waves of darkness crashed into my soul each day. I will never forget your unflinching tenacity to help me with every area that I was healing from. I am spiritually healed because of you.
To Natalie, thank you for always bringing me up when I felt so far down. Thank you for the laughs that kept me wanting to live, the delicious foods that kept my body alive, and the care and love you showed me everyday. You were one of the few people (the only?) who saw the entire painful progression, and your dedication, love, and willingness to stand by me while you too were suffering is something I will never forget. Thank you so much.
To Janet, thank you for your insight, guidance, and healing this last year that kept my mind moving towards the light. Without you, the darkness would have swallowed me. You have become a pivotal person in my healing process, and the conversations we have each week give me strength to continue moving forward.
To my sister Genna, thank you for reaching out and sharing Long COVID articles and research, and opening up my view to the millions who suffer, and the hundreds of thousands in Long COVID support groups. I realized I wasn’t alone because of you.
To my uncle John and my immediate family — aunt Jo, mom, dad, grandma, Genna, Paul — thank you for coming together to bring me financial support in one of my most testing moments. Each of you gave me room to breath when I felt suffocated, and you gave me the space and time I desperately needed to step into my next chapter.
To my friends, thank you for reaching out, joking with me, checking in, and talking to me about everything. The love and compassion each of you gave allowed me to process my pain and turn it into something beautiful.
To the caregivers of my caregivers, thank you for the support you gave to those above and everything you did behind the scenes to allow my healing to take place. You might not have known it, but you saved my life.
To Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, thank you for your insight, care, devotion, and wisdom with your Time to Thrive Challenge. You lit a fire of passion within me to create a better world for those in pain.
And to my body, mind, and spirit: thank you for fighting alongside with me, and thank you for your undeniable strength. I love you and I honor you — always, and forever more.
To help share this message with others, please consider “clapping” below to bring more public awareness to the Long Haulers. You may not know it, but you probably know one or two people who are secretly suffering with Long Covid. I hope this story can give them hope.
