I have been writing a series of posts about my grown daughter, Michaela, and her path back to health from COVID and then from Long COVID, which started with the first blog post here. It has now been 20 months since the initial acute COVID infection, and the last 6 months have been better than any Michaela has had since being diagnosed with COVID.
Since my last blog post on the topic in the beginning of January 2023, Michaela has tried only one new modality, Neurofeedback. Sadly, it turned out to be too much for her body and nervous system. While my experience with Neurotherapy was wonderful (which I wrote about here), we learned from the results of Michaela’s QEEG (Quantitative Electroencephalography) that she had experienced some type of brain injury in her early childhood. This injury could have occurred at birth, when the doctor used a “suction method” to guide her through the birth canal, or one of the several times that she fell down the stairs of a 100 year old home in which we lived when she was a toddler.
The QEEG isn’t capable of providing the date of the injury, but the results of the test were consistent with someone who had experienced a traumatic brain injury many decades previously. The reason why that was important to know is that Michaela’s brain isn’t communicating optimally from one side to the other, which creates energy discrepancies, and makes Neurotherapy more challenging, requiring the sessions to go much more slowly.
The previous brain injury was also likely to blame for her grand mal seizures after she experienced severe dehydration back in 2017, which I wrote about here. So the culmination of a childhood brain injury, plus two grand mal seizures created a weak link for COVID to attack. (I wrote about COVID and a body’s weak spot here.)
For Michaela, that weak spot was her brain, and her brain fog and vision issues were the symptoms from COVID inflammation in her brain. We were hopeful that Neurofeedback would be able to quell that inflammation and to help her heal. Instead, it activated her nervous system to the point that she couldn’t tolerate doing the therapy. She wasn’t able to sleep for a week, and even deep breathing put her body into a fight/flight feeling that was untenable. She stopped the Neurofeedback, for now, and decided to continue to practice Zhineng Qigong as her sole means of getting better from Long COVID.
She has been able to practice various routines up to 5 hours a day, and has continued to see improvement. She’s able to ride in a car now without vision issues and nausea. She’s also able to work about 5 hours a day on the computer, which is a very big deal from where she began. She no longer has the feeling of burning organs, and her hives have lessened dramatically. She has more energy than she has had for the last year, and is able to follow conversations and engage in them! In other words, big improvements.
Michaela was interviewed by the Denver Post about her Long COVID experience. The article can be accessed here. (If you hit a pay wall, you can load the Denver Post app and access the free article through that.)
We continue to hope for an article that can provide more treatments for patients than just a litany of research, but Michaela wanted to share what works for her to help others.
