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Evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another edition of, I love it when I come on and I see all these smiling faces. That’s awesome. It’s the one advantage of being funny looking. I love it. So welcome tonight. We’re going to shake things up a little bit tonight because I think that over the last several weeks we’ve gotten a lot of material out there. Certainly I have gotten a lot of scientific information from the physician guests that we’ve had, and that will continue. And now we’re going to start bringing in some of our kind of non-physician guests, people like Marian Machlis, who’s going to talk about breathing. People like Brian [inaudible], who’s going to talk about Tai Chi and Qigong. We’re going to expand our repertoire a little bit. Tonight we have multiple, some new people, some old people, some young people, so middle aged people.
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So I think everybody knows Karen Bishop. Karen is a firefighter and paramedic from Florida. So she knows what it’s like to be hot. I know what it’s like to be funny looking. And the thing is that Karen’s also a long hauler and the author of the first patient led survey. Also tonight we have a new guest. Who’s not going to be a guest, as long as she passes the audition. No pressure, Lori, I’m sure that you I’m just testing your psychological coping skills. Dr. Lori needle PhD, a journalist for the first 20 years of her career. Dr. Nate Dell is a specialist in acute stress, trauma and anxiety. So this is the right group for her. She is considered a thought leader in the emerging field of acute stress and post traumatic stress disorder from trauma to addictions, through workshops lectures, and one on one sessions, her focus is helping people find new ways to heal.
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She’s a new Yorker you’re originally from Brooklyn, right? So show, so she’s a Brooklyn Jew like me, which means that she doesn’t take any crap from anybody. So don’t test that later Marian will be on, Marion’s a lower East side Jew, and they really don’t take crap from anybody. So if, if you try to give her some crap, you might wind up missing. One thing that I’ll say Laurie has done a lot of work with trauma and New York. We’ve had our share of trauma nine 11. And I will say that if you are a health professional, first responder working on the front lines during this parent demic or a vet veteran, dr. Lori is offering her service to you at no cost as a way of thanking you for your service, which is amazing, kudos to you for that. Lori, everybody welcome to the darn show for God’s sake.
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All right. So tonight I want to talk about certain things. I want to talk a little bit, why is this show? Why is tonight talk called let the sunshine, okay. Tonight’s talk is called let the sunshine in, because I think that it is time for us. Oh, and Marian Machlis this year too. So Mary and you’re here, you just put something in your mouth. I was waiting for you to put that liver in your mouth. So the reason why I wanted to talk about letting the sunshine in and starting to turn the page is because not to say that anything is over, okay. We’re certainly in the thick of things. And please understand that nothing that I say or do tonight is in any way, a minimization of anything that anyone is going through, it’s real, it’s serious. It is having a huge impact on your life, but, but there’s always a, but, but we have to start healing.
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And I know that there is a lot of stress here. A lot of anxiety here related, not just to the illness itself, but to the nature of a global pandemic, the nature of being in lockdown for so long. I mean, it’s like one piled on another pile down, another pile down another, whereas at any other time in our lives, any one of these would be enough to make us want to throw in the towel. It’s like we have to get stronger than ever before. But, but that being said there is something called the repetition compulsion and I speak about it a lot. And the repetition compulsion has to do with the concept that we often dwell on things that are unpleasant for us. And again, I’m not saying anyone is dwelling excessively unnecessarily. I’m not saying anybody’s being a wimp. I’m not saying suck it up or anything like that.
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But I do want to say that that is contrary and, you know, complete opposite to what you need to heal and to start healing and to start moving in the right direction. I personally have experienced my share of trauma. We have our moments, we go through it. But at a certain point we must we must move forward. And how do we do that? And probably people are saying, well, you don’t know what it’s like, how can we move forward? If we can stand up without getting dizzy, blah, blah, blah. I say, blah, blah, blah. Doesn’t mean like, Maldwa, I’m not talking about Charlie Brown’s teacher, but, but the idea is that we have to start taking steps in the right direction. And those are physical steps, emotional steps, psychological steps. And we have to turn the corner, the fighting you know, and again, initially it was so important for us to be recognized and for us to be getting people to say, Hey, this is a real thing.
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I think the world is waking up. And that is really thanks to the grassroots efforts of people like Karen, of people, like the survivor Corps of other grassroots networks that are really saying, Hey, you know what over here, I know you said this was supposed to be gone two weeks ago, but I’m still here. And so are these symptoms, but again, this fight or flight, okay. That this disease is so based on, okay, this is a very sympathetic, nervous system, mediated disease, meaning it’s mediated by adrenaline. So if somebody bumps into me on the street, because they have their headphones on and they’re talking on their cell phone, or they’re texting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they don’t even say, I’m sorry, after they bumped me into the garbage. And then I go to work and tell the next 20 people I see about it, guess what?
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I am not allowing myself to move forward from that I am not allowing myself to get over that. And again, I’m not saying get over it as if to minimize what I’m saying, but I’m saying, if you do not, if you do not start to turn the corner, these are constant. It’s like picking a scab, picking a scab, picking a scab. And so the thing is that scab will never heal or it’s going to heal much more deeply, or it’s going to heal with an infection, et cetera, et cetera. So there are things that we have to do and boot camp is one of those things. Okay. One of the things that is really designed to help you quiet the sympathetic nervous system, as well as to enhance parasympathetic activity and it’s parasympathetic activity that is that rest digest, heal, bathe your body and oxygen, bathe your body in fresh, rich blood not on the outside, on the inside.
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Okay. so I say that because I want to help you. Okay. So the other thing is I want to talk about the autonomic nervous system a little bit. And I came up with a a concept today of how you can think about dysautonomia, which is that imagine you were blind, all of a sudden you were blind and you were taken to a place that you don’t know where you are. You’ve never been there before, right? And it’s pitch black because you’re blind. You are not going to run out and take 20 giant steps to figure out what’s going on. You are going to inch along with this, right? You’re going to feel the wall. You’re going to be looking for clues and any type of feedback that is going to help you navigate this room, this new place, this new environment, and dysautonomia is kind of like blindness of the autonomic nervous system.
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So what that means is that your body has just been kind of displaced, taken to a new place, blinded and trying to figure things out in a way that it’s never had to before it’s affecting your cardiovascular system, it’s affecting your neurologic system, it’s affecting your respiratory system. It’s affecting your emotions, it’s affecting your GI system. And the thing is that it’s not going to just like in the same way, let’s say today I go and I’m feeling my way around my room. And I’m picking up little things and I say, Oh yeah, there’s a, what feels like a dresser over there? Well, that still doesn’t mean tomorrow. I run out and take 20 steps forward. It means we have to take what we’ve learned, reinforce it with our bodies. And then only when we’ve got that reinforced, can we start to take other steps forward and experience that I’m having with many people is that they will start the exercises.
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They will start the breathing techniques. They will start some of the meditations. And if it doesn’t work very quickly, meaning in a day or two I feel discouragement or anxiety, or why isn’t this working yet? And the thing about this is especially for long haulers, okay. We didn’t get here in a day. We’re not getting out over in a day. And I think that it’s really important for people to adjust their mindset, to say this isn’t, you know, the common cold, obviously, you know that but this is something we’re going to be dealing with for several months. At least, and I wanted to share something with you that I read today, and it was an interview. And it was an interview and it, it, I’m just going to read. It says, I once interviewed surgeon, Sherwin, Nuland author of how we die reflections on life’s final chapter and asked him about the stresses and uncertainties of the year of cancer treatment.
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His answer, I always consider that year to be a sacrifice you make in the interest of the rest of your life, because those are some tough treatments, but the hope is that the rigors of treatment will not be in vain, that the physical toll, not to mention the personal strength you must summon to cope will be for a greater good. And it’s, it’s really important. I think to understand that it’s going to take more weeks. It’s going to take more months. How many exactly we don’t know because nobody’s ever experienced this before, but this anxiety and this kind of pressure to get better quickly and why isn’t it happening yet? Et cetera, et cetera is not healthy for you. Okay. And I’m not saying like, Hey, you know what I’m not minimizing it. I’m not saying it in a general way.
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It’s physiologically not healthy for you because that brings up emotions and releases chemicals in your body as if you are under severe stress. So as if you are in a fight or flight mode, and that again prevents you from healing. So as, as much as that’s your nature to push, we have to try to reset the clock, go to the healing, go to the breath et cetera, et cetera. And you know, there’s another thing. I read three things this, this, today that all kind of you know, kind of led me to, to this subject. But the other one is something that I posted on my, my, my Facebook page. And it says dear world, you’re not going to have the year you thought you’d have. And this article is not about COVID. This article is about being diagnosed with breast cancer and then going through a year’s worth of treatment for breast cancer.
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Okay. And certainly for the people in my group and our community who have been dealing with chronic respiratory disease and chronic cardiopulmonary disease for years. And in some cases decades, we know that this is not a fast process. So understand that we’re starting to get the hang of this. Okay. We’re starting to get the hang of this. We’re starting to understand it, starting to understand it, but you also I know there’s a lot of kind of anxiety, a lot of kind of turmoil, a lot of chaos, a lot of things that don’t seem to be orderly, like they’re just kind of flying at us and we’re trying to stay out of the way of it. But trust me, when I say that bootcamp was created in a, in a way that is specifically designed to lead you along the road easily. Okay. But I know I’ve seen probably 55, 56 patients at this point.
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And I could tell you that at least, and I’m talking about long haulers, and I can tell you I’ve recommended at least to 20 of them to get compression, stockings, compression, leggings, and abdominal binders. And to my knowledge at this moment, one of them has done it. Okay. So what I’m I see, Wendy’s raising her hand. Okay. So there’s two Dawn looks like she’s mad. Cause I said only one of them has done it. Okay. So a few more of them have done it. Okay. But let me tell you why this is so important. Whoa. Look at Erica Mostro bono with those glasses. All right. So let me tell you guys, I want to go through dysautonomia again and as it relates to heart rate and blood pressure. Okay, because let me tell you this autonomy is complex. It’s complex because the system is complex. The physiology is complex and therefore, you know, any, any disruption to the system is going to be complex. How many people here have had experiences with high heart rates?
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How many days
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We both had experiences with low heart rates,
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How many
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I’ve had experiences with medium heart rates. Alright. So let me tell you very, basically the purpose, how heart rate and blood pressure are related. Okay. Because this is something that I think a lot of people don’t understand, and this is directly related to compression, stockings and dysautonomia. So under normal circumstances, the body is designed and the autonomic nervous system is designed to work like a well oiled machine. The heart rate, the heart rhythm, the contractility of the heart, AKA also the cardiac output is designed to stay within a very, very limited range. And so for example, it’s based on supply and demand. And what that means is that as you start to exercise, okay, as you start to move up with respect to intensity, well, then your heart rate should start to go up linearly commensurate. Okay. And in proportion to the level of exercise, so supply and demand, supply and demand.
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Okay. So same with blood pressure. So the thing is that under normal circumstances, that’s going to regulate itself. And if I were to stand up, okay, just stand up under normal circumstances. By the time my blood starts to drop down to my lower extremities. Okay. Number one, my carotid arteries are going to pick up a change. My carotid sinus, cause that’s one pressure receptor. My aortic arch is going to pick up the change and it is going to constrict the hell out of my blood vessels to bring that blood back up to the upper body. So think of it like this. I’m just sitting here like this, I stand up and everything goes down. And if I squeeze this and you can’t see, this is the blood vessel, right. This brings everything back up and that is called venous return. Okay. So the thing is with dysautonomia, one thing is that, remember I told you about this dark room, number one, the carotid sinus and the aortic arch are not reading the information properly.
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So with dysautonomia, there could be a problem with reading the information. So in other words, the information that the brain gets about what’s going on here is faulty. It could be a fault with the way that the brain interprets the misinformation. And it could be a problem with the way that the brain sends out the information. So the thing the body is not doing that constriction. So you stand up, blood goes all the way down and now our blood is in our legs. And that’s why we have a lack of venous return. And that means the heart. The heart has two ways to increase cardiac output. It can increase the rate and it can increase the stroke volume, meaning it can pump harder. But the way that it pumps harder is when the blood comes back, it gets a stretch. And that creates like a rubber band effect. And it causes a big contraction. Now, if all that blood is down in your legs, then that’s like pressing a toilet bowl that has no water in the tank. Okay. And you can press and press and press and press and press and press and press. Guess what? I can say something. I just thought of a gross, funny joke, because that’s how my mind works, but I won’t right now. But
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Somebody didn’t want us to hear the gross, funny joke. Yeah, exactly. He’ll be back.
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Okay.
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If he was here, he’d go. Do, do, do, does he know that we can’t see him or hear him?
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Okay. So you get, you got the idea. My cane knocked out my internet. All right. So the idea is that, you know, until we can trust ourselves, it’s like those little things on the side of the bowling that you put for kids, no matter where you go, you’re knocking the ball’s not going to go in the, in the gutter. Right. And that’s what the compression stockings do. So they’re going to squeeze the calves. They’re going to squeeze. If you get compression leggings, they’re going to squeeze the thighs. And if that doesn’t work, you get an abdominal binder. And what that does, that’s like squeezing this so that the blood is everywhere. Now, if you don’t have that and the blood drops down, okay. And nothing is coming up from it, right. What’s going to happen here. You’re going to feel dizzy. You may feel nauseous.
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You may get sweaty. You may feel like the room is spinning. And when I get up and I feel like, Whoa, what do most people do? They sit right back down. So the message that your body gets from that is, guess what? Guess who’s in charge the autonomic nervous system, right? So if we want to train the autonomic nervous system, the key to that is consistency and slow steps and taking it one step at a time and moving along. And again, I’ve spoken about this, but the way that the nervous system works, it’s like two trains barreling together
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In a
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Cave and it’s, they could be dark, right. There could be one inch apart and it’s pitch black until that final connection is made. So my point in telling you all this is that a, there’s a reason why I’m asking you to get compression stockings. And there’s a reason why I’m asking you to get compression leggings. And there’s a reason why I’m asking you to get an abdominal binder. It’s because the number one symptom that I’m hearing from people over and over again can actually be helped significantly just by putting on those pieces of pressure, increasing devices. So if you say to me, Hey, you know what I’m having this and this and this and say, well, have you tried this? And you go, no, that’s not going to say, Hey, have you tried this? No. Have you tried this? No. Why not try it?
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There’s a reason for it. Okay. Nothing we say to you, if we don’t know something, we’re going to tell you, we’re going to tell you. We don’t know it. And I’ll be the first one to say 90% of this. We don’t know, but we know some of it. Okay. I am dealing with a similarly unfortunate situation at the moment. My dog was injured this week. Now is slipped a disc paralyzed from the waist down. Okay. So I have my dog inside. Okay. She’s home. We’re going to train her. Okay. I just put a pool in my backyard and we expect a good result. But again, it’s not going to happen until her spinal cord cools off until the imp his his until the inflammation goes down until we start getting strength again. And it’s a metaphor and I share this with you.
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You guys are the first people I’ve told this because I don’t want people feeling sorry for him and for us, we’re going to get through it. But we must adopt an attitude that we are going to get through this. Okay. For you guys, this is very different than my chronic long haul CLPD patients or chronic long haul pH patients. Okay. They’ve been dealing with this, but we must adapt a different attitude. And I’m going to stop talking in 30 seconds after I share one more quote from one of my favorites, John Lennon, who said everything will be okay.
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Okay. In the end, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
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Okay. So you must remain faithful. Okay. And you must have faith that everybody is trying to help you. Okay. The medical system is trying to help you. I promise. Okay. I know there have been frustrations here. Okay. I know it. Okay. But your frustrations are not worse than not surviving. Okay. So you guys are survivors. You’re long haulers. Okay. But you’re going to get through this, but it’s got to take a little bit of a shift in mindset because if every day, all we’re going to focus on is we’re going to go in the group. And we’re going to say, you know what? This is day 2,364 for me. And these are my 37 symptoms. And nobody even absorbs what you’ve said. They just list what day it is for them. And, you know, tell you about their symptoms. That’s not going to be helpful.
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I promise you. So I am coaching you as a therapist, but also as somebody who’s seen a lot of shit in my life and gotten people through a lot of shit and come through a lot myself. So understand that. So have you, okay. There’s things you guys could teach me too, but again, we must start doing things that are going to be productive for us that are going to be dealing for us. Okay. In the interest of that, what’s happening for the next several weeks. Okay. Next Wednesday, Marian Machlis. And I are going to talk about 10, 10 minutes and, and things you may or may not have known about COVID rehabilitation. When we talk about breathing, Marion is a super breather. She can teach different breathing techniques and relaxation techniques and things like that. And then the following week, we have Dana McCarthy from Mount Sinai who is a rehabilitation specialist. And what Sundays I would love to become is going to be more of sharing. Okay. I understand people need to get things off their chest and be heard, not just type it furiously and some of these groups and God bless them. Okay. I lead a group myself, it’s got 13,000 people in it, but some of them are just like ticker tapes. And it’s like, I’m there dizzying. Okay. Even just watch in the comments
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[Inaudible]
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But the idea is for be able to think free, able to feel. And so I want to turn it over to Laurie for just a few moments. And I would love for Laurie to talk about her book the five gifts and as one of those, the sixth gift Laurie has agreed to give each and every one of you a card you’ll get a car, you know? I mean, it’s not a car, I’m just kidding. But she will give you a copy of her book. Okay. A PDF, and we will email that to you through the foundation. Okay. So just keep in mind. This is frustrating. Okay. We get it. It’s more than frustrating. It’s excruciating. Okay. But don’t get the idea that nobody cares. Don’t get the idea that people aren’t trying to help you and as frustrating as it is for you, it’s just as frustrating for the medical community who is used to being able to help people a lot more quickly than it’s it’s happened this time, but will say this for something brand new in the world. I think the medical community has gotten up to speed pretty damn quick. And again, in the same way that you send signals to your brain and your brain sends signals to the body, we are asking you to send us signals and we will send signals back to you. And that is how we learn. So keep that in mind. And so, Laurie I would love for you to, I see you got your hair done for this evening. And you know, I just want to tell you I’m quarantining, so impress me.
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Okay.
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I’m very inappropriate, just so you know, and I love it and I embrace it. Go ahead.
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That’s right. I got tired. I was looking at pandemic air as it was, this was a good opportunity to kind of upgrade.
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Sorry. And thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for that, that you’re giving to somebody.
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Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be here. I I know what it’s like to live with chronic illness. I’ve been living with chronic bronchitis since 2004, 2005. My office was filled with dust from the world trade center. I’ve lost several years of work, two periods of disability. And I don’t know what it’s like to have. COVID I’m not trying to say that, you know, my my condition is worse or better than any what anybody is going through, but I do know what it’s like not to be able to get out of bed. And I do live with an unstable trajectory where right now I’m sitting up and talking to you and you know, tomorrow morning I might not be able to sit up and talk at all. So I, for me, after years of living with this, I, I, I’m hoping that I’m developing a little bit more patience with the the instability of the healing process, but I do know that it’s possible to feel to experience healing.
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Those to heal means to make whole, it doesn’t mean to make something go away. It doesn’t mean to, to take it away as though you’ve never had it before. It means that even though, you know, we were sick when we did were injured, were broken, we can go forward with a sense of wholeness and accepting who we are and where we are right now. And so I, I don’t know what’s best for any of you individually or collectively. And I would like to hear their, you know, through this form or by emailing me if there’s anything that I can do specifically that you’d like to know about any tools or techniques that could help you. But I did want to talk about a couple of things leading up to my book. And one is that,
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I’m sorry, before you go on several people, if you could just lower your camera a little bit several people have said they don’t believe it’s really you talking. So I think it’s important that they see your mouth much better. Yeah. Perfect. Thank you.
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So is that air conditioner in the background too loud? Or can you hear me? You can hear me. Okay, good. I wanted to say that that unlike other disasters, which had a particular timeline, you know, it had a beginning, a middle and an end, and then a very long period of recovery because it can take three to five years to metabolize what we say to just be helplessness and horror that we feel at the time of a catastrophic event. This kind of dynamic has no clear timeline. It doesn’t have a clear end point. We can’t predict how long it’s going to take until we feel that, you know, we, we can literally think of it as something in the past or something in our rear view mirror. But there’s one thing that I learned myself from having lost my home to hurricane Sandy.
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And that was this concept of the five gifts, which came to me when I was meditating a few months after I lost lost my home. If anybody’s been through a natural disaster it’s a, it’s, it’s not dissimilar to what you go through when doctors don’t believe that you’re still struggling with symptoms. You get a lot of different stories. You get light to you get you deal with a lot of unscrupulous situations there at the institutions that were supposed to protect you very often, don’t protect you at all, and it can be demoralizing. And it was in this moment of real despair that I was meditating and praying and asking for some kind of insight that could help me to get through that day and the next day. And I dunno how many years in it, I was going to be embroiled in trying to recover the pieces of my life, but these five gifts came to me when I was meditating the form of an inner voice, some kind of spiritual guidance that I believe comes from a source that knows a lot more than I do.
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And the five gifts that I was given to share with you are humility, patience, empathy, forgiveness, and growth. Now I remember I was speaking to somebody about these five gifts when I was first trying to think about what I was going to, how was I going to share them with people other than through the, my, my one-on-one work and the support, the support programs that I was running. And and he laughed when I told him the five gifts. And he said, those are not American values. If you think about it, you know, nobody wants humility. You know, everyone wants a million followers on Twitter or Instagram. Nobody wants humility. Patience is I call it the gift we wanted over yesterday. You know, we want it now. I am one of the most impatient people, inpatient people. I know. So it was very ironic that I was told, I was given this gift of patience.
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Empathy is the gift of staying connected. And as you know, as you’re seeing yourself, you know, the, the empathy period or what, what first responders call the mission phase or the hero phase of a disaster at that cycle lasts about two months and then the cameras go away. And you know, the, of course the cost care workers keep showing up for work, but a lot of people kind of drift off, are you you’re on to the next emergency or the next crisis, or you move on to another assignment. And those of us who are still in shock and trying to figure out, you know, what the hell just happened to my life, where we kind of feel abandoned because the media moves on and here you are struggling with a whole host of symptoms that you’ve never had to contend with before, and you’re not getting the attention or the support that seemed to be available for the first, you know, six, six weeks to two months of the pandemic.
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So empathy is the gift. That’s going to keep us connected as a community for the long haul and the long haul. It could be a few weeks, a few months, a few years, but as I said, this is not, this is not a disaster where we can say, okay, here’s an end point. We’re going to have a vaccine it’s three months. And then it’s all going to be over like a bad dream. We’re going to have to learn how to create a culture of empathy for the long haul. And I think that what we’re doing here now, it gives us an opportunity to really be pioneers in that regard. And that we have the ability to create an online community that is fully present and supportive of each other. The fourth gift is forgiveness and forgiveness is also not exactly an American virtue. Although it’s found in, I think all spiritual traditions, it’s very important that we learn how to begin to forgive ourselves because we’re not over it yet.
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And that ties of course, into patients. But I think learning how to begin to be forgiving, where we can say, you know I’m really angry at myself because I should be better by now, but I can be forgiving of myself 5% today, or maybe 15% tomorrow, or maybe 80% next week. And then back to 2%, it’s not a light switch. And then the final gift is growth and we’re growing all the time. But when we, when we received the gift of growth, we can say because of the loss of our health, because of what we’ve been through we, we’re stronger now. We’ve learned how to, we’ve learned how to be fully ourselves, whether or not we’re sick, whether or not we’re ill, we’ve learned how to find tiny of
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Hope, enjoy the sunshine. So thank you so much for your patience,
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Laurie, thank you so much. You know, one thing I, I have to say the humility aspect is, is you have no choice, but to be humble in the face of this, in this pandemic. And I think that, you know, in, in some ways our lack of humility is it, you know, is, has been detrimental to us as a society, as a society. And you know, for anyone who’s been brought to their knees before by trauma, you know, that it’s not the time for a, you know, for chest pounding and for you know, for things like that. I would like to I would like to invite you all, not at one time, but I would like you to, if anyone has anything they’d like to share, please feel free to unmute yourself. I’ll just give you the rules of our, of our meetings, which are that if in any way you try to take over the meeting or stage any type of coup, the first time we will boot you, we will mute you the second time we will boot you. So please keep it clean. And I’d love to hear from you guys.
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I can volunteer something if, if you’d like course, okay,
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Okay.
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I lead a support group in the Boston area for people with NTM, and I believe I had COVID. It was way before they were doing testing. I had, like, I think that I was interested in the five guests because with all this, I think what’s one of the most important things really is forgiving yourself. And it’s neat to be able to forgive yourself and almost anything. And that really allows you then to take the steps forward. It’s kind of, it, isn’t more of an Eastern thought. I studied Taoism and chigong and teachy and how for some time, and that also feeds into that. The first thing, my little Shaolin temple monk taught me was to forgive yourself because you can’t look up and you can’t breathe and you can’t move your foot forward. You can’t do anything unless you first do that. Okay. That’s my little beast. I don’t know if you’re supposed to just start talking. Thank
(00:38:36):
You so much, Laurie. That was so profound in the sharing of those gifts. I was moved that they came when you surrendered, it was a dark place, a difficult place, and you were meditating and it came to you. I, I I, that very much resonated with me. And what you said about dealing with your chronic illness and having to hold space for that and come to a state of acceptance, which is, is a very challenging thing to do. And with coronavirus, what I’ve found, like you said, there’s no timetable and the uncertainty is what I’ve found the most difficult, the confusion and the chaos collectively, it’s not, I’ve had chronic illness. I had a car accident. I’ve dealt with very big trauma health wise, but this has different because things are happening to your body. And the doctors are saying, we don’t know, the world is saying, we don’t know.
(00:39:55):
And it’s global. So you’re going through your individual. But there is this collective scream that in some ways the support you’re going through it and other people are going through it, but you’re so isolated. So, you know, millions are going through it thousands and thousands of long haulers, probably millions, but we’re trying to connect through these devices. There’s this isolation, but you’re feeling all that’s going on in the world and pathologically empathy. You can feel it. You can see, I can see it in my face. I can see it in other spaces. I’m blessed in a way that I’ve had chronic illness, that I’ve developed some resources. So I know where to pull from, but I will say that the confusion and the mystery has been quite scary to deal with that kind of not having any textbook to go, okay. Not having any real path. And that’s why you guys are amazing. And Noah is amazing because it gives you some clarity and some vision of, okay, I have some clarity, I have a vision of where to go to next, but I do. I’m so grateful that I’m going to get your book. I’m so excited. And for me, it’s acceptance,
(00:41:34):
It’s like kind of surrendering and accepting and being with what is reaching towards what can be, that’s what it feels like to me. So thank you so much guys. One other concept I want to talk about, I often talk about the idea of black and white thinking. The idea that nobody knows what to do is evolving. Okay. So if you ask us what we knew a week ago, it’s a lot different than what we know today and what we know two weeks ago and what we know three weeks ago. So, you know, again, it’s, don’t all or nothing it into thinking that it’s hopeless or that we’re just as far away now as we were on day one, because we’re not okay. Lou DePalo who gave our talk on pulmonology on Wednesday, who I love said the same. He said, have you asked me the same question?
(00:42:48):
I’ll give you a different answer every week, but we are learning and we’re getting better at it. So keep the faith. And another thing is that, you know, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge. And you’re right in the sense that for many people who have had something like COPD, emphysema, chronic bronchitis pulmonary fibrosis, diabetes, something that’s a kind of chronic slowly progressing disease. You have time to make those adjustments. This was like a bomb went off on us. And I’ll share something else with you. And, you know, after nine 11 which was traumatic for us and for me in particular, prior to that, I’d never lost anyone. I knew. My best friend was a fireman who died in the world trade center. And he was also a physical therapist at our practice. So that hit me like a ton of bricks.
(00:43:41):
And I’ll tell you something, my sister, who’s actually on this call. She goes by a different name, Erica Mastro bono, because she doesn’t want people to know she’s my sister. But she actually she said something to me at the time that was very profound. And it was, well, you maybe learn something about yourself. And I said, well, what did I learn? And she said, well, maybe you learn that you’re not as strong as you think you are. And I said to myself, well, how is that a good thing? And she said, it’s not a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a real thing. Okay. So we can, we are going to get through this, but we, we, we are going to learn. Maybe you thought you’d cruise through something like this. Maybe, you know, with respect to empathy and, and, you know, forgiveness and things like that.
(00:44:29):
Maybe we can see sides of things that we haven’t before. Okay. But we will heal is going to take time, but, but just know that you’re not alone and it’s a very different situation, but don’t get the idea that, you know, nobody’s looking for you, you’re stranded on the Island. And you know, you’re writing SOS in the sand and you have the coconut on the basketball, on a broomstick. And no one knows you’re lost. Everybody knows. Okay. but you can’t take care of those people before you take care of the people that are actively drowning. Right. You guys have been, you guys have survived. You were on the shore, you got your ass as well. Yes, it’s true. But you’re not actively drowning. And now there’s time to get this going. Okay. So please don’t have the idea that no one knows what’s going on or nobody cares what’s going on, or that you’re being gas lit by the medical system. Trust me. No, doctor’s gaslighting you. Okay? No doctor is gaslighting. You that’s a, and the reason I say that is cause that’s kind of dangerous kind of paradigm to come, come at the system with one of distrust and mistrust, but I will be quiet for at least the next 12 minutes. Please share
(00:45:51):
One thing that Laurie mentioned is the gift of patience. And I remember when COVID first came about, there was everything on television about two weeks and you get it in two weeks. You’re done. So I got something I thought was COVID they wouldn’t test me. I looked at the calendar for two weeks. And what do you know? It didn’t well, at this point, fast forward, I will spare the long story of what’s in between, but pre COVID me, isn’t back physically in pre COVID me. Isn’t that mentally either. And I had to deal with some things that I shouldn’t be able to do in my minds. And I can’t do them. They just don’t, there’s just things that don’t work. And I’ve had to accept the idea that this is normal for now. And I have to be patient about what normal later is going to look like. I’m not making a judgment on whether, you know, what I get back to, but this is normal for now. And I guess since it’s turned up in a couple people’s comments today, I’ve come to really appreciate. I don’t know, because I don’t know as honest, almost everything I heard about COVID and the month of March turned out to be past true assumed, hoped, wished so on. And I really respect it when my doctor,
(00:47:30):
I don’t know, is that means they’re not going to tell me something that they think I want to hear. They’re just going to say, this is what we know. This is what we don’t know. I’ll turn it back to the rest of the group, but I just wanted to throw those two things out there. Can I just say something, Emily? Thank you. I mean, that was wonderful. I had a professor who once said, I don’t know is the beginning of learning. And when you said that, I think, you know, all of us, we don’t know, we don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring. You know, normal also, what is normal normal changes from second to second with, I don’t know, you know, when you start asking questions, so, you know, I think you brought up two really wonderful points. And if you think of them as one, I think we can, we can all get through this.
(00:48:22):
It’s really sometimes frustrating as somebody who’s trying to help people, you know, to, to, to help them. We, we also have to surrender and be very humble and forgive ourselves because we don’t necessarily, we know we, we have tools, but we don’t know if we have the right tools. So we’re all textbooks, we’re textbooks for treatment and you are textbooks for, for learning, for, and to teach us and to teach yourself. And I think, you know, we’re just all going to have to just be a community and, and be our textbook. And you are a chapter in that check, textbook, textbook as is everyone here. And I think it was really those two points I think are really, really important to sort of digest and think about. So, and I want to thank you for bringing them up.
(00:49:21):
Thank you for for saying it that way. I hope it’s helpful to others. Hi, my name is Karen. I’d like to share. Are you guys able to hear me? Hi. so first I, I just really I’m grateful for this you know, zoom meeting, that’s addressing the emotional, psychological and spiritual aspect of what we’re all going through. Cause I’ve been so focused on the physical part and I’m getting my supplements and I’m doing the breathing exercises and pacing myself and measuring this and that. And it’s easy to get wrapped up in that. But yeah, there’s just, you know, that’s all there aspect
(00:50:28):
That I’m realizing is what’s going to get me through this. And I’m on going on week 27 now. So it’s been a long road you know, and there had been improvements and I just signed up for boot camp. So I’m looking forward to that. We’ll be doing that when we get off this call. But I just, you know I just, I appreciate the everything that you guys are doing to share the information, to bring us together and, and provide all of this help that we need. That’s very, very much appreciate it. Thank you everybody. I kind of want to touch on what Pam just asked us in regards to, how do we deal with family members or friends who don’t listen. And I kind of want to touch on something that Noah said in the past too, and that we know as first responders, which is one we have to worry about ourself.
(00:51:45):
Then we worry about a partner. Then we worry about the victim. And I think this is a situation where, where in such a whirlwind of unknowns, that the only way that we’re going to help ourselves and move forward right now is to focus on us. And again, to use an analogy like Noah said, when you’re on the airplane and the oxygen masks fall down, you put your mask on first and then you help the person next to you. So you can do your best. You can share articles with your friends and family. You can share the survey stuff with them, but you’re never going to completely change somebody’s mind. And kind of like what Laurie was talking about with the five gifts. I don’t know if you guys have ever read the book the five stages of grief, but I think the first thing that people are dealing with in this is denial.
(00:52:40):
This is not real. It seems so surreal and fake. It’s too much to comprehend. I think a lot of people are just overwhelmed and I think a lot of people are in denial and you can explain yourself, you can share the stories of others. You can send them articles, but you’re gonna run yourself into the ground and put yourself in a really bad place. If you continue to just hound the same person over and over again. And granted, it is really, really tough when it’s the people that you normally lean on for support. That’s really hard. And I think that’s why a lot of these support groups came about because unfortunately in life, as humans, we normally learn from things that we go through and we experience. And when people are not experiencing the things that we’re going through right now, for any event at this capacity, it makes it really hard to relate. So I think that you do your best share the resources that are available with them, but you cannot make yourself sick over it. You have to focus on your, your own physical, mental, social wellbeing in order to help yourself before you can start to help others. So that’s what I want to say.
(00:54:04):
Karen, I’m going to play that back to you tomorrow morning when you’re feeling fresh,
(00:54:13):
Guys, you only have so much energy. Can you only have so much time and you only have so much will and I’m Judy Rosberg. I don’t know what you did to get that massage during this meeting, but I’m going to give you my address, sir. It’s two 18, he’s 36th street, maybe after the meeting now. But you only have so much time and energy and you know, this is exhausting for everybody. It’s exhausting for you. It’s exhausting for us. You know, and I’ve had to make a super effort to really conserve, to conserve resources cause we’re going to be in it for the long haul. Okay. So just breathe it out. And I won’t surprise her with one second, but before we end the meeting, I am going to ask Erica to do a breathing with us and a centering technique because it’s going to help everybody. But or if you’re ready now, Erica, just let us know. But guys rely on the breath, go back to the breath when you’re feeling like this is going to just that one breath, keep it coming. People I’m Frasier crane, right?
(00:55:34):
Hi everybody. Can you hear me? Thank you Noah, as usual for them and the advance as you put my glasses on, but I won’t. So actually before, right before I do the breathing, I just wanted to, I was reminded of something that you said no at the last meeting, which was how important it is to rest and how we often think we’re resting. And we’re not because we could be reading or we could be thinking about the news or listening to the news and to really get to really practice that feeling of not doing anything mentally as well, so that whatever those levels are that you were talking about, aren’t spiking. And I think that’s really helpful. I’ve been trying to practice that and be proud of resting and taking, you know, taking time to really shut down as much as you can to you know, in the interest of regenerating. So just like a one minute thing we’re going to do Noah. Yes. Okay. All right. So let’s just take a moment, bring your attention into your shelf. You can close your eyes if you want to. You don’t have to.
(00:56:51):
Okay.
(00:56:52):
Just bringing your focus in, Make sure that you’re breathing comfortably. It feels good to take a deep breath And just do a scan of your physical body. Starting at the top. Just really allow yourself to bring your attention to any places that feel tight. Any places that may be painful or stiff. Well, just allow yourself to send healing energy. Now, as you’re continuing to breathe comfortably, let’s do a similar scan of where we are emotionally.
(00:58:20):
Okay.
(00:58:21):
Whatever it is, you’re feeling Telling that feeling or thought that you see it and that it’s okay. There’s no wrong way to feel. Just say, because that girl, you don’t have to push it back down. Just tell it that. You’ll talk to it later. Maybe then let’s just take a moment. I’m so grateful to have been here to listen to you and spend this time together. And let’s take a moment to just really think ourselves for being here, showing up to get information or to make a connection,
(00:59:22):
Whatever you came here for. It’s an act of self care, which self care is it’s talked about a lot. It kind of becomes cliche, but it really is always, as we just talked about the most important thing to focus on. So coming here together, knowing that the load that you’re carrying is now shared by this group. Okay. And then in your own time, bring your energy back out from the inside rejoined. And hopefully, hopefully nobody feels Quinn’s words, but even if you do, thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. It was lovely.
(01:01:14):
And we still have a lot of time, so please feel free to share. And I’ll just say one thing, which is that we’re all beginners here. Right? And one of the greatest things about support groups, it’s a lot like in medicine when they say watch one, do one, teach one. Okay. So you guys are the Guinea pigs. And don’t take that personally because if you know me, you know, I love animals more than I like people and I like Guinea pigs. But the idea is that you will become empowered by helping others. And as you learn, we learn. So
(01:02:00):
That’s the question. That was a question that Cathy asked on the chat that I would also like to know what our thoughts regarding anxiety meds for some of the autumn Tommy issues
(01:02:20):
Like heart rate
(01:02:23):
For the dysautonomia. So, you know, of course I would preface anything like that with speak to your doctor about it. But my gut feeling is that’s not the direction you want to go. And the reason being you know, that’s like giving a false guide to your autonomic nervous system, right? We don’t want to just control heart rate. We don’t want to just, you know, I mean, certainly there are situations where you need to but you know, as much as we can do naturally. And I don’t say that because I’m anti-medicine, but by controlling your heart rate with an anxiety medication your autonomic nervous system will never learn. And this is really retraining the system in the same way that if you broke a leg or had a stroke, your neurologic system has to learn this. Okay. Unfortunately, the neurologic system is a slow system to heal.
(01:03:19):
It heals very, very slowly in terms of distance of healing. So but I don’t think that we want to, unless it’s dangerous. Or unless there’s a reason why a physiologic you know, function needs to be controlled. Then I think that it’s, it’s, it’s best not to send even more confusing information there. I’d rather you take smaller steps, walk more slowly, take more breaths, pace yourself, then rush it with a false sense of security. Think of it. Like, would you say like, Hey, you know what? I should probably have a few drinks. That’ll help me.
(01:04:05):
That never ends well. Right? So it’s like the same way. Like by, by masking your physiology, the brain will, you’ll be sending the brain misinformation and it’s you, you want good information out. You gotta put good information in, even if it means going slower. If I had to guess, and if like I had a gun to my head and I was asked to give one piece of advice that I think would serve everybody, well, it would be slow down. Take your time. Don’t push it. Let the process happen, throw the stone, let the pool ripple. Because as many of you know you know you can do a minute fine. You could do two minutes. Fine. You can do three minutes. Fine. If you do three minutes and 15 seconds, something happens. It’s like a shutoff switch. It’s like, you flooded your engine. Right?
(01:05:00):
And so I would rather, you throw that little pebble, take a step forward. If you’re good tomorrow, do it again. If you’re good the next day, do it a third time just to make sure. And then we’re ready to throw another pebble. Right. But I hear stories I could, I could do whole night of standup comedy about some of the, some of the COVID stories I’ve heard. I’m like, well, you know, I was in, I was in bed for two months and then I started feeling a little bit better. I woke up and I went for a 45 minute walk and it’s like, wait, what? You were in bed for two months. And then he went the body. Doesn’t like surprises. We must regain the trust of our autonomic nervous system. And our automatic autonomic nervous system must regain our trust. Who writes this stuff? I’ll wait, I’m sorry. I meant to mute myself. So
(01:05:55):
I know I have a question. So when I’m doing bootcamps, it’s on some of the days when you’re modeling some of the breathing and the arm movements, you do it standing. And so that might be a good 10 minutes of that. And then I’ll knock it out. You know what I mean? And then I’m not able, it’s like, how do I know? And I know what you’re, I mean, I intuitively know what you’re going to advise, like do what you, you don’t push me on your body’s limits, but sometimes you’re sitting,
(01:06:25):
Right. You don’t know where it is. I guess that’s my, this is going to be what Marian and I talked about the whole time on Wednesday, but let me give you a, let me, let me give you an idea. So a lot of what we do well, first of all, a lot of the experiences that you have are very random and chaotic, right? Like unlike many conditions like with lung disease, there are certain things we can predict with it. With heart disease. There are certain things we can predict with it. Okay. COVID is like, you reach into a bag and you open your fortune cookie, and these are going to be your symptoms for the day is going to be like, you know, we don’t know what it’s going to be. Okay. So the idea is that the more kind of organized and orderly your routine is the better.
(01:07:17):
And there’s a certain continuum, right? So a lot of people think that we just make this stuff up on the, on the fly, right? It’s like standup comedy. No, it’s that there’s a continuum. So lying down is less strenuous than sitting up. Sitting up is less strenuous than standing. Standing still is more, is less strenuous than walking. Walking is more strength, less strenuous than running, right? That’s the continuum, but there’s also a continuum with blood pressure and dysautonomia and things like that. So dysautonomia has its whole thing, but again, unlike a cardiovascular condition or unlike a pulmonary conditioner, unlike the neurologic condition, this is a cardiovascular condition superimposed on a respiratory condition, superimposed on a neurologic condition. And each one of us has like a little something I’ve stripped thrown in for good measure. But Marion, as I think about this, we should come up with kind of a progression sheet that, and we can have that ready by Wednesday. So
(01:08:21):
I just, if I could add something, it’s, I just want to give an example. Cause I actually have a 20 year old Guinea pig who I started with from the day she was diagnosed with.
(01:08:32):
And I think that’s the oldest Guinea pig. [inaudible]
(01:08:39):
I know it’s a miracle, like a tortoise, like one of those old tortoise, but it’s been, you know, she’s my Guinea pig. She was not did not get tested. And it’s the one that the people that know. And I speak about, you know, praying for several nights that hopefully she would live. And she was lucky enough to have us be able to drag some oxygen over to her house. So but so, but literally it was, it’s not just doing the exercise cause we’re so used to doing exercise and it’s exercise. You know, the exercise also has to be your learning tool. So you have to be very present when you exercise. So it’s not just, so let’s say there’s something that we do called Arma size. Okay. Which is, is 16 different arm movements. Okay. Usually 30 seconds and you build it up each.
(01:09:32):
Okay. It was literally start with just one a day sitting. Now let’s do that one a day. Standing sit down. What are you feeling? Let’s breathe. What are you feeling? Teach your body what you’re feeling when that happens, are you okay? Let’s get up and do another one. Just that one, sit down, talk to your body. What is your body telling you? Because you have to. And that’s the only thing like I do have trouble with, with taking medications. Cause some of those medications can raise your blood pressure, decrease your blood pressure. They also play with your serotonin levels. And so they can mess. They can cause something that for anxiety can also have an adverse effect and raise your heart rate and, or make you nauseous or making kissy. We need your pure soda, your, your, your birthday suit so that we can re we have to reteach that body. And you know, it’s like Noah says, I love when Noah says something about, you know, it’s, you’re the slowest, most scorched system is going to be the slowest to come back. And it’s just going to take a while to teach that nervous system. But once it learns, it’s going to be like Helen Keller at the water. You know, when finally she gets that moment, Oh my God, this thing on my hands. And this thing that this woman is spelling is water. And that’s, you’re going to experience that. But look how long it took her.
(01:10:53):
Yeah. I mean, think the key that remember is that you’re only gonna get better as quick as fast as your slowest system, right? So that means this exercise may be helping your heart. It may be helping your lungs, but again, if the neurologic system is, is the limiting factor, then that’s like, like again, even with my dog, like I, that once that heals, he will get up and start walking again. And that is what I expect for you. So maybe this is my lesson. I wish it were mine, not his, but you know, it’s one of those things where it’s like we, and that’s where taking notes comes in and keeping a journal, things like heart rate line down. And I think what we should do on Wednesday also is we should really teach people how to monitor the autonomic nervous system. And we’ll make, we should make a journal entry page that we will send out to everybody before the meeting. So we’ll teach you from scratch, how to do that. Because going from sit, stay, you know, lying down to sitting up big change, sit to stand, big change. So we have to teach and again, let your body learn. The medications, you know, I, I don’t love them for you, for me. I love him. But but the idea is that also like if, if standing is too much for you, sit and do it, okay. If I’m going like this and you want to go like this
(01:12:21):
And one of the enhancements, like if you look this week is for some of you, is, is coming up to week two of bootcamp, okay. Each day there’s extras at the bottom. And those extras weren’t in the first bootcamp, those extras were developed just for Kobe bootcamp. And it’s because those extras are breaking the minutes down minute by minute. So that means if you’re going, if you’re really having trouble with us, do one.
(01:12:50):
Sometimes I start my workouts with people by saying, this may feel like you’re not doing anything. And that’s okay. And there was another great comment before, which is that, you know, you have to make sure that when you are resting, you’re resting and that you can turn off that noise. You know, we are living in a society where God, I’ve never seen such an assault on the senses that guy’s tired from the massage. I could tell. I just saw you’re young. This guy knocked themselves out with themselves. As Dave gave Judy a massage, he’s ready for bed. But, but you know, the thing is that I’ve never seen such an incredible assault on our senses. Like there is today from television, Facebook, Twitter li how many of these damn, I mean, I would be off Facebook in one second, except that it’s allowed me to communicate with more people than I ever could without Facebook, but it is an assault on our senses.
(01:13:51):
The politics is toxic. And I saw somebody posted before. Maybe I should go off the groups. The groups are only supportive. If they make you feel better, like if they get you riled up and pissed off. And like my heart’s beating now because I went to a support group, I need to find a different group. And especially because this condition is so entwined with you know, it’s so really intertwined with the autonomics, the emotional, the physical, and the physical affects the emotional. And so we need to quiet this down and find that place where we can just be for a little bit.
(01:14:41):
I have a class my 15 year old started boot camp with permission from her doctor. But every time she’s breathing, she has sharp stomach pains and side pains. Is there like little bleeding up side of the can do for the day to help her?
(01:15:02):
Yeah, absolutely. You know, so if we’re asking you to breathe in for, for four, and that’s giving you a side pain and breathe in for two, if that’s giving you a side pain, breathing for one, go as little as you need to always do less than you think. But the idea is that you know, as we S you know, I’ll tell you this, if you haven’t seen the webinars that we’ve done with the physicians you should watch them. Because for me personally, they’ve allowed me to take what I’m seeing with patients and get affirmation from doctors that I really trust and respect, and we’ll continue with that. But, you know, the questions always are, isn’t going to be dangerous for you. Okay. So in other words, what is that discomfort? Right? If somebody says chest pain, well, we can’t assume that, you know, just cause you had COVID that you’re not necessarily having a heart attack, you could be having a heart attack also.
(01:15:55):
Right. But the idea is always think of it. As did you have an injury? Like, did you have a heart injury? Did you have a brain injury? Did you have a lung injury in the acute phases? Do you have an ongoing process or are you at risk for a future process? And with respect to that, I always, you know, want to look at the heart first. I want to look at the brain second. Okay. That’s how I live my life. And then I want to look at the respiratory system third, and then the GI system, because we want to always go from most dangerous to least dangerous. And we want to make sure that there’s not something that’s getting missed. And so if the answer is, we know that that’s not something dangerous, then there’s a way to work through it. So anything that we tell you, and that’s the whole reason we’re doing these consults with people is so that we can kind of say to you, Hey, what’s going on?
(01:16:51):
Let’s figure out is this potentially dangerous? And if it is, then let’s make sure we get it worked up and we will guide you through that workup process. And we will help you get the attention that you need and you want and then once we know that it’s not something that’s really dangerous, but uncomfortable, cause uncomfortable, we could work with, we don’t want to do something that’s going to really hurt you or make things worse. So if you do ever want to talk about it personally, you know, we are happy to do that with you, just shoot us an email. But the other thing is that, you know, there’s always like Marianne and I have been working together for 26 years. We discovered you know I’m drawing about, I don’t want to, I don’t want to give you a little blue lagoon moment, moment here, but no, it’s not like that.
(01:17:41):
But we discovered, you know, really the beginning of treating pulmonary fibrosis, which when we first started with pulmonary fibrosis in 1995, it was nobody was doing anything because everybody was terrified of these patients. Their saturations were horrific. They were, you know, they were scary to people. And we worked through it and we learned, then we learned with, you know, we learned with pulmonary hypertension, then we learned with pots, you know, and these were times when nobody, there was no textbook, you know, we did it by inching along, you know, you don’t go into the ocean, polar black, polar bear club style, you inch in and you feel it out. And now we’re doing the same thing with, with COVID and we’ll get there too, but always if in doubt, err, on the side of caution and I just want to say there’s about 15 minutes off. I don’t want to please turn this into a Q and a session only because I am happy to answer questions, but not during this. This is please share your experience and get to know each other.
(01:19:09):
Yeah. I think it’s hard because it affects so many different systems and then eight system it’s not only that you follow a system on the bag, you pull symptom of the symptom that could be very mild. Most of my stuff is kind of mild or it could be very severe and you could get very severe attitude. And then the doctors mainly see people that are doing really well and they, they think it’s just a cold. And so I meet someone that events, Oh, it somebody else a little more serious. And so I feel a little, sorry for the doctors and won’t frustrated general practitioner because they said we can do nothing at the end of the session that no, I told them I thought it might be a good thing to talk to him. Cardiologists. Nice. Yeah, you can go talk to cardiologists.
(01:20:09):
And so now I got a stress test and echocardiogram scheduled for next week. So I just consider it progress and hopefully they’ll find some stuff that will be useful for my general practitioner ACS since Oh yeah. Kind of it can cause heart problems. So the next person that comes in, they’ll say, Oh yeah, I just had a patient that had heart problems. And I’m really looked at as a really tough one because a large percentage are all well symptom list and then a large percentage and mild symptoms us out on the 20% or so. We have more serious issues in accents. They’re not consistent, more serious issues. It’s hard to get people to, to, well, Joel that’s progress number one. And if, even if you find out that there’s nothing wrong, like see, everybody wants to get a test done and they want to find something that could be easily treated, right?
(01:21:10):
Like either give me a pill for it or cut it out. But if we find out that there’s nothing wrong with you, cardio logically, well, that’s great information because now when you do experience that discomfort, we know it’s not your heart, you know? And you mentioned, you said a tough learn. It is a tough learn. Okay. But when, as soon as you said that, I thought of like game of Thrones. I was like, you want to hear a tough learn? What about the people in the front as they charge? Like that’s a tough learn. But you’re right. You’re a hundred percent. Right. And I’ll, I’ll give you another kind of perspective here, which is that at any other time in history, the majority of you guys that are in this meeting tonight, the long haulers would have been admitted to the ER and you might’ve even been admitted to the ICU where people would have been monitoring you every 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes.
(01:22:01):
And instead you were sent home and here we are a month or two months or three months or four months or five months. And for some of you six months later, and you know, it’s, it’s like if you were in a car wreck and your car went off the side of the road and you weren’t found for a month, somehow you miraculously survived, but you’re going to heal a lot differently than the person who received immediate attention. So it’s not fair. It’s, you know, it’s definitely a raw deal, but we will gain strength through this and you will gain strength through this. I know it’s hard to see at this moment, but you will, and we will help you. I just wanted to say that I get a lot of benefit from the breathing. The bootcamps are helps you.
(01:23:01):
So I just want to say, thank you.
(01:23:08):
Awesome.
(01:23:19):
Six minute warning. Rosemary Morris is checking her watch. She’s saying six minutes. Do I have enough time? Okay.
(01:23:49):
How do we get
(01:23:52):
We will we will email it to you, Lori. It’s a PDF, right? Yeah. Your book is a PDF. So we will send it out. We will send it out with our, in the next email that we send. We’ll send it out to you.
(01:24:13):
Hmm.
(01:24:15):
And Lori, again, I just want to say thank you so much. That is incredibly generous of you.
(01:24:21):
Oh, it’s my pleasure. I can contribute in any way. And you’d like me to show butterfly hugs.
(01:24:30):
Yeah, let’s do it. That’s the perfect ending butterfly hugs.
(01:24:34):
This is when we’re feeling stressed or anxious or overwhelmed or a feeling that we just can’t just kinda overwhelmed for any reason. You cross your hands over your chest, this, and you’re just you Pat very gently over your lungs. And this is called butterfly hugs. It’s an acupressure technique and it’s just designed to lower stress levels and relieve anxiety. And she just did, when I do it, I was kind of feeling I want to go, ah, just kind of let, go with my breasts and just feel all the tension kind of floating down through my feet are floating out as I exhale. So I hope that you’ll try these and there’s a good emotional first aid tool to have in your toolkit. Butterfly hugs, everybody try that. Any questions, please feel free to email me. Okay. Thank you for posing.
(01:25:52):
If someone’s rushing you and you want me to take care of them, I’ll come over right now. We’re not that far from each other
(01:26:08):
Guys. One just one other thing I want to say is that, you know, with respect to some of the medical questions you know, the, the group is, it’s not that I don’t want to answer questions in a group. It’s that there’s so much benefit in these sharings. There’s not a clinical education, you know, but, but that’s, you know where Marion and I will sit for a couple of hours with you and, and, and go through your medical history and then we can give you really specific stuff because no matter how similar you guys feel to each other, everybody’s different. And it’s, it’s really fascinating. I mean, it’s a fascinating, you know, it’s a really fast paced learning curve for us. And they, we thought we knew everything before this. Now we realize we don’t know anything, but any final thoughts, two minute warning, final thoughts. Go ahead, Dawn. You can unmute. We can’t hear you. You’re muted
(01:27:15):
Minute. I’m in a meeting. You spoke in the early part about posttraumatic stress. I don’t, I don’t like labels, but it’s there’s a lot that, especially what happened with sleep. I know for me, and I know they have said that on the Facebook pages of when people were waking up, when it was really, really acute and you couldn’t breathe and your heart was like, I’m going to die, I’m probably going to die. Do I go to the ER, I don’t want to go to the ER, but, and all the thoughts that we were going through, especially in those early those first weeks and how do we, because I’m getting better, I’m in pre approving, but I still Harbor some of that fear, especially at nighttime where, and I’ve worked through it, I’ve used some different tools, but I definitely, and I know others have shared about that, that fear that comes up that it may not even be present anymore. You’re sleeping better, it’s getting better, but you’re still holding that energy of the trauma that you were going through and working through that. I mean, I know that it’s definitely improved, but there that still, that fear of that experience re like Noah said that repeat of that experience, even though it’s not happening. And maybe at some point we could look at that, like posttraumatic kind of how to release that and be with what’s what really is going on and not what happened.
(01:28:58):
Absolutely. so there’s two aspects of there’s the physical and the physiologic, and then there’s the emotional, right? So the physio, the physical and the physiologic Marion, and I can talk about this Wednesday and the way that we get through that is by learning techniques. You know, it’s like, we, we talk about our patients are short of breath, right? So if you don’t know how to swim, you’re not going in the pool. And in the same way, like if you don’t know, if you’re gonna have a heart attack and keel over, you’re not gonna walk to the grocery store. Right. So we teach you techniques. And we do, we have developed some techniques that have been helpful with what you’re speaking about. And then the other aspect is the emotional, which I will leave to Laurie.
(01:29:45):
Yes. I, I have a few specific techniques. One or two are acupressure, some visualization and some, some rapid techniques that can help to diffuse the start of a panic attack or a flashback. But I’d also, you know, at perhaps next week, I can talk about what happens that the, kind of the mechanism of how trauma molecules are stored and what happens when you wake up and your body is re-experiencing something, how do you flush it out of your system and how can you get centered in the moment? So we can certainly, you know, cover that next time. Happy to
(01:30:24):
Give us one technique right now, Lori, some we could use tonight if we wake up.
(01:30:29):
Yeah. I would suggest that you check in with your body and if you’re feeling any tension or stress or spasm, just ask internally, what color do you want? Whatever color comes into your mind, just breathe it in and you don’t have to visualize it. You can even just say the name of a color and let it hit your ride on the oxygen molecules and find its way into wherever and wherever you’re feeling that stress or panic or just comfort. And then you can release anything you want to get rid of from your body by breathing out a different color. So you breathe in and you ask your body quickly because it’s not something where you’re going to say. I think my body wants green to let them let the color come from wherever you’re feeling, the tightness or the difficulty breathing and just let it, let it find its way and release that feeling and exhale a different color so that it will clear out of your body and mind work quickly.
(01:31:31):
A in a couple of weeks, we’re also going to have Brian Transcos who is tight. She’s a physical therapist, but he’s also a Tai Chi gong guy. And this guy is powerful. He’s, he’s in really my most powerful influence in the last couple of years that has come into my life. And he will also help with this stuff too, but we’ve got a lineup coming up over the next several weeks that are all stars.
(01:32:00):
We know them all for a long time and we know they work, but be patient focus on the breath and hang in there is going to get better and just remember, everything will be okay in the end, if it’s not okay, it is not the end. Have a great evening, my friends. And thank you, Karen, Laurie, Beth, Erica, Marianne, everyone else who shared, and even those who didn’t share. And even those that are just like a black square on my screen. Thank you for blacks. Let’s see who else is here. And I will stay until the last person leaves.
(01:33:02):
Thank you. Thank you. Good night. Good night. Thank you. Good night. Next time. It’s right here. When you get in, if you’re the last one to leave now. Okay. No, I just, I just want to, I like to hear the comments people make when they don’t know, I’m still listening. When people shut off their microphone on mute themselves, but Marion, what did I do? Who’s screaming, Marianne and I’m eating and I’m eating and I’m screaming. My breathing. I knew I was gonna, yes, this is Fred. Can you hear me? Hey, Fred, how you doing? Fine. This is my first time to be live welcome program. And now I have the equipment to participate fully. Awesome. I thought you were in a cockpit. Yeah, I’m hearing like you’re ready. How are you doing? Doing great. Recovering from knee surgery, but doing great. Okay. All right. Good to see you. Thank you. Keep it that way. Okie dokie. Bye. Bye. Look, Marian’s there too.
(01:34:59):
Hi. Hey, take care. You know, when I first met you, Fred, I heard you speak. I thought you were from Brooklyn also, but alright. Have a great night, everybody. [inaudible].