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 Radically Resilient Health Podcast

 Recovering From Illness With Dr. Jessica Drummond

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In this episode, Dr. Carolyn Dolan sits down with a colleague, Dr. Jessica Drummond, who shares her 2020 adventures getting the virus, despite her nutritional and physical therapy background. Even those who “do everything right” physically and nutritionally are not immune to life just happening.

 

Transcript:

Connie Wray: (00:00)
Welcome back to radically resilient health. We are with Dr. Carolyn Dolan, the creator of Vida kinetics. And today we’re talking with Dr. Drummond. She has a doctorate in nutrition. She’s a physical therapist, a health coach and author of the book, outsmart endometriosis. She also runs the integrative women’s health Institute in Reno, Nevada. One of the things we talk a lot about on radically resilient health is that by the kinetics is a tool to keep us healthy each day, but there are times in our lives. We’re unexpected things happen. Dr. Dolan, you have mentioned this quite often throughout the podcast, that really the concept of radically resilient health is about understanding how to maintain yourself on a daily basis. Eat well, move well, supplement well, sleep well, but there are times in our life where unexpected things happen, no matter how healthy we may be.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (00:54)
Absolutely early in my journey. I really thought adjusting all of those lifestyle habits would be very preventative of basically anything health related kind of coming your way. And I remember, um, I should, it’s now been four years where I really had a major life event for my family. That really shifted that perspective. When my son ended up with appendicitis and ruptured and ended up having to have emergency surgery. And there was so much like, what did I miss? What did I miss? Like he eats really well. He exercises see we’re, we’re super strict about sleep. And I went through all of these, these things, trying to find like the specific cause. And as anybody knows with appendicitis, that it can potentially have a vira l component. It could be a dehydration piece. There could be an anatomy portion. There’s still so much unknown that there was no pinpoint.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (01:46)
And I really had to look at that and go, it wasn’t that my lifestyle habits or how we were raising him, that we did anything wrong. Life happens. This is a problem that does happen, particularly in kids that are, were his age at the time. And it’s super scary. But then I look at well, you know, he really ended up doing extremely well. And a whole part of that probably had to do with the fact that we held on to our foundational principles of continuing to support his body through this healing process. And so as we started the radically resilient health radio podcast, we’ve interviewed a few other folks. We know where certain components of their life, maybe weren’t perfect. Um, but that they adapted to compensating with that. But that there are people who have also done things really well and had a life event occurred in infection. And that’s where I thought of J Jessica Drummond’s experience. And I was hoping that she could share as a health and wellness professional, who’s living, teaching all of these things, um, and ended up with a COVID infection and how she’s doing through that and how those fundamental principles have continued to support her. And with that, thank you so much, Jessica, for joining us. Um, I believe you’re in Virginia though. Is that correct? Connecticut. Connecticut now used to be Texas now connect. Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (03:06)
My company is based in Texas, but we’re global now and I’m, I’ve been since the pandemic in Connecticut. Okay. We kind of go back and forth, but we’re here now. So tell us a little bit more

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (03:19)
About your recent health story and your background and such.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (03:25)
I’ve been a practicing physical therapist since 1999. So more than 20 years now. And what first happened to me was after the birth of my first daughter, I had, what I now understand was probably a reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus. I had mano in high school. You know, it wasn’t a big deal. I was tired for a couple months. I mean, it was, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a big deal. I mean, part of it’s that I don’t really remember that much now. You know, it was like senior year of high school, but it didn’t take me off track. I was tired and sick, but I recovered fine. And then postpartum with my first daughter, I had all these vague symptoms, fatigue, anxiety, every cold and flu, you know, and, and really, it took me about four years to get anyone to take me seriously, nothing more than, oh, this is normal.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (04:16)
You had a baby or supposed to be exhausted forever, you know, or you just take naps or here’s some antidepressants. And at that time, eventually I found the sort of pathway of functional medicine. And I met a functional medicine, one of the earliest functional medicine physicians. This was like back in 2006 and she was an integrative functional physician. She worked, her son is in that as an acupuncturist. And the two of them really helped me re-establish my health. And at that point I was a healthy person, you know, by any sort of metric, I was never overweight. I never had any like, you know, high blood pressure, diabetes, or any major things, you know? Um, I exercised my whole life. I was an athlete. I was working as a physical therapist, but under it, there were some weak spots. I was a really type a person, you know, powered through school and graduate school and was always kind of overachieving.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (05:21)
And I probably overexercise. And I, because I was never overweight, I pretty much ate whatever I wanted. And then I kind of hit a wall where I started having some sensitivities to things like dairy and, you know, I had some digestive issues and things like that. And I really didn’t understand how much that sort of pushing through stress or not even really noticing I had stress. You know, I mean, like I said, is when you’re in all the AP classes and you’re competing nationally in gymnastics and you’re applying to college and like, it was just normal. Like, that’s just how I was, you know, and I wasn’t like a sickly kid. There were, I had allergies kind of under it. You know, there were some maybe mild red flags and I didn’t eat unhealthfully. We were never a family who lived on, you know, who even went to I’ve.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (06:13)
I’ve probably eaten at a fast, a fast food restaurant in my life, a total of like twice, but wasn’t like I was eating unhealthily, but I had that kind of, that was the one sort of weak area at the time is that I was overdoing it all the time and didn’t really know it. I had to, at that point, really adjust my relationship to stress and work and exercise and just kinda tone it all down. And I also was eating a lot more sugar than I thought again. I didn’t really think about what I ate. I just say whatever. And it wasn’t unhealthy, but it wasn’t a focus on health. It’s funny because now that I’m clinically a nutritionist, my graduate, my physical therapy graduate school roommates, like really can’t believe it because they’re one of them is a physician now and one’s a physical therapist. And one of the one who’s a physical therapist, she was actually a really good cook and used to cook out of things like vegetarian cookbooks. And she was just a good cook. My specialty was literally sliced and baked chocolate chip cookies. I would bring them to all the like potlucks.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (07:29)
And my husband says like on our first date, I made them burnt hot dogs, which I’m not sure if that’s true, but it certainly could be true. I wasn’t big into healthy cooking, but I wasn’t opposed to it either. I didn’t like hate vegetables or anything like that. I just, it wasn’t a big part of my life. I did really dig into learning how to cook and enjoy vegetables. I learned that genetically, I aligned a lot more with a sort of low carb paleo lifestyle, which was much healthier for me. Whereas as a kid, there was a time when my parents were kind of vegetarian vegan because I thought that was healthy at the time. But really for our family, it wasn’t because of just some genetic factors. So I learned a lot about that. I learned a lot about kind of nutritional biochemistry for the last 15 years or so.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (08:21)
I very little sugar, very little bite, almost no dairy, unless I’m in Europe. I don’t eat gluten. I exercise, but I don’t over exercise. I have a lot of sunlight time. I emphasized sleep. I would say I still have a bit of an Achilles heel about overworking, but I can’t say that my work is that stressful. You know, I love my work. I’ve created a company in the last 10 years. It’s not physically stressful at least because I, you know, the pandemic didn’t really change how I work. I have a lovely home office. In fact, it made it easier. Cause I used to be on a plane, you know, every other week during conferences and I was teaching and lecturing all over the world. Now we just do it from the house. So that was, that’s still kind of an underlying, like I’m still like a driven person, but I have a much better relationship with stress.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (09:12)
I do a lot of breath work and yoga and twice a day meditation and I was tracking my heart rate variability and I was going on outdoor hikes and I spent all summer paddleboarding at the beach and I really ate super healthy for years. What’s been really interesting is I was actually surprised as heck that I got so sick with COVID. I really didn’t think that it would affect me that badly. I took all the herbs, all of the antiviral herbs. We had them ready. We were taking a high dose, vitamin C, my vitamin D levels were amazing. I had vitamin a, I took all the things my daughter had at first. And we did all that with her. She got through it pretty well, you know, in four or five days. And it’s a very different thing than any other virus I’ve had. It doesn’t really feel it, I guess, acute phase.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (10:11)
It sort of felt a little viral, like where you’re kind of like hot and, you know, puffy, swollen glands, things like that. But it feels a lot more like, um, like an injury. There’s a lot of pain with it and not like muscling, it’s like sharp body pain. It’s like vascular pain really in my experience, it’s very, it’s just so different. Um, but you know, my daughter, it’s interesting because she was isolated from us. Um, and I, but you know, you can’t leave your 17 year old, like in their room and not ever like check them, you know, we were FaceTiming and I’d put a mask on and everything. And, but you know, you have to check your kid and, um, I’m sure that’s how I got it. But she, you know, she did pretty well. She was doing school through it. She was tired and a little brain foggy.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (11:04)
And I made her take these like Epsom salt baths every night. And I was giving her all kinds of herbs, but like I said, she got through it easily. And so did all of her friends healthier, unhealthy? I knew it could be quite bad because in Connecticut, we had a lot of people who had it in March with the New York search because in our town, a lot of people, quite high number of people live and work in New York. So there were like PTA parents back in March, April who were like, oh no, this is really bad. Like we had young kids in the hospital, 17 year olds ventilators. And it was bad in that very first wave dads in the community, like in bed for three months, not unhealthy people, but I knew they weren’t, you know, doing all this stuff. I was right. And this is what I think has been interesting to me about being in the world of functional medicine, functional nutrition, integrative medicine.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (12:03)
There’s a lot of talk about the medical community. Doesn’t listen to people with Lyme and chronic fatigue and dah, dah, dah, dah, and they don’t handle them well, but they have not handled this. Well, I can’t, I have been so shamed by posting anything about this. This isn’t real, it’s a government thing. You’re just being, you want to be a long holler. I don’t want to be a long hauler. I didn’t expect real long on all this stuff. There must have been something you probably had a weird, there was your microbiome. Wasn’t being well taken care of all these little, oh, well you didn’t do acupuncture. You didn’t take the right herbs. He didn’t do. Yes. I did all that stuff. I did all of it. And for months, like really since March, April. And so it’s been a really interesting experience to see that, no matter what your health care perspective, people get afraid when they don’t understand.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (13:06)
Oh yeah, absolutely. For me, I think there’s a couple of things that happened. So one, I got way sicker than I ever expected I would have, but it was weird. First of all, it took about 13 days from when my daughter was exposed to when I tested positive. So I was like, wow, missed it. We were ready. We were like, we got cocky. Um, but we were still taking care of ourselves. Right. You know, we were doing all the things we were isolating. We were, but we all did have to be in the house together because we had it. Now, first of all, it was winter with this was right around Christmas. So we couldn’t really do anything, but try to stay away from each other, you know, but we were taking care of our health, eating, super clean, super healthy. That whole time took about a week.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (13:50)
I started to have a very mild cough and then it was like, oh, you know, that’s probably just like a sematic, you know, I’m sure it’s fine. But then I tested positive and then I felt sick, like viral, sick for probably two or three days. And I was thinking, oh, you know, this was maybe the week before Christmas. And I was like, by Christmas morning, we’re all, this is going to be a memory. We’re all going to get up and enjoy the day and be back to life. Well, Christmas morning I was texting MD friends of mine to see if I needed to go to the hospital right then, or if we should call in for steroids. So I don’t remember. It was funny the other day my, we were making, um, we were baking something and I was like, oh, but we don’t have a mixer.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (14:36)
And my husband was like, oh, well, don’t you remember? We got you that bright red mixer for Christmas. I was like, no, I have zero memory of Christmas. I was in my room, isolated by myself. Literally not able to breathe. My heart rate was resting at one 70, you know, one 50, it was a mess. And finally I did go to the hospital. I was never admitted. So take that for what it’s worth. Yeah, that’s good. But I, you know, it was, I’m really very textbook when it comes to what the long haul post acute COVID, whatever you want to call. It looks like I had a relatively mild case. I had three really bad days of heart, lung, bad pulse-ox racing, heart, that kind of stuff, headache a weird pain. I had all this like tingling, like ma nail, like pain in my hands and vascular pain.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (15:35)
And then it was kind of like people just expected I would get better. So a week later I’m not really better in some ways I’m feeling worse. So when there was no like other medication to take, I didn’t really know what else to do. So I, I did there, there is a post COVID clinic here at Yale, but it’s very challenging to get into. I didn’t really have the bandwidth of the moment to do that. I didn’t even have a primary care doctor. Cause I had, you know, my primary care doctor was my gynecologist who retired last year and like, you know, and I didn’t really see him. So I, I went to my husband’s primary care nurse practitioner who was in the Yale system and she was great. Actually the care I got, the, the ER was amazing. They were ready. You know, the things I had very commonly with COVID are blood clots or stroke or, you know, other things like chest.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (16:27)
They did a chest x-ray really quickly and then pneumonia. Um, and so many of my friends who are, ER, physicians have said, they’ve never in their lives, admitted more people in their forties and fifties and thirties to the hospital for hypoxia. So I got there, they were ready and I had great care. And then, um, in the post COVID period, my nurse practitioner really quickly recognized that I might have post COVID post viral pericarditis. So she started treating it right away, which I think is really helpful. We had to adjust, you know, and she got me in to see a cardiologist within a week. And he was kind of like, yeah, it’s some kind of inflammation. We don’t understand it yet. Um, maybe it’s, you know, I never had a cardiac MRI. I did have a echo, which was normal. My chest x-ray was normal.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (17:20)
My D dimers, like all my blood clotting things were normal to opponent was normal. My heart muscle seemed fine and I could go get a cardiac MRI, but it’s, he was kind of like PR you probably don’t have actual muscular damage. And if you do it’s healing, so just be patient. But they did tell me at the very being like, do not exercise. And actually there was an article that came out in the New York times from, uh, a guy named Jordan. Metsul, who’s a sports medicine physician at, I think Mount Sinai he’s somewhere in the city. And he w you know, the, we always think, especially as PTs and I did this the first time that I had the Epstein-Barr stuff and I couldn’t sleep and all that, we try to exercise our way out of it.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (18:09)
And that is the exact wrong thing to do with post COVID. And I’ll explain in a minute what I think post COVID is based on my experience and everything I’ve read, although I there’s a lot of unknown in that still, but from New York, from what we learned from New York, the good and horrible thing about what happened in New York is so many of the people got sick were the actual doctors and PTs, and they’re like, oh, no, this is real. Like, this is, we all have this, you know? And so, because they’re all like me and type a and want to work out. And they learned that that was the wrong strategy, unfortunately, by testing it on themselves. And so I knew immediately, and there was this article in the New York times by Dr. Mansell that a colleague of mine locally had shared that was like, look, you might have cardiac.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (19:06)
Um, so not, it could be pericarditis, but it could be mild carditis. So like, don’t exercise until, you know, and that was super helpful because I had been trying to like, exercise, like, just walk a little further. Like when I, the first week I literally couldn’t walk like three houses down. I couldn’t, I couldn’t carry a basket of laundry down the stairs. I couldn’t lift my cast iron pan, so I couldn’t shower. I would just, it would floor me. So I was like, well, so I rested. And that was one thing that I took from my first experience. That was a really, I was glad I had had that, because that is a huge mindset shift for people that are used to being healthy.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (19:57)
Sometimes the most important movement is actually rest.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (20:00)
Yeah. And the other thing that I did do both during the acute, well really, for years now, but I really kind of dialed in on this during the acute phase. And since then, every, you know, every day is a lot of mindfulness and breath work. I thought of that as my exercise, which is, again, another thing I had learned from my other experience that has, I think served me because now we, we have a little bit of an understanding of what this acute post COVID. And I just read a great article in the Atlantic just this week that is starting to pull together what this probably is and has at least been my experience. So it really is that the virus injures you. So there’s a couple of things it can do. One is blood clotting, which, you know, again, having shared my story, I’ve gotten a lot of shame from integrated people, but I’ve also gotten a lot of quiet stories.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (21:02)
Oh, my partner was a firefighter and had a mild case. And then 10 months later, I had a mild injury and had a two foot DVT. Goodness. You know, a lot of, a lot of PEs that I’m hearing in my messages, oh, wait, this, you know, we were, it was easy. It was fine. We got through it six months later, I had a PE you know, so the blood clot thing is something to look out for you then months, months later, if you think you never had an issue. Fortunately for me, that seems to be something I’m genetically at lower risk for. And I took aspirin actually during the acute phase. And then for a little while, and now I will, if like, I’m, I haven’t tried to fly it. I’m a little nervous about that because I, we went to Vermont and just driving up the hill.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (21:51)
I was like, it was like being put in a vice, you know, um, the vascular shifts. So there’s definitely some kind of blood pressure thing. There’s definitely an inflammation, whether that’s in the brain, I’m fortunate. I don’t really have a lot of brain fog or memory issues, but a lot of people have, I sort of feel like there’s like heart post COVID and brain post COVID. So if you have the like Morton, and sometimes both, if you have the brain version, I think it’s inflammation in the brain, heart inflammation around the heart lungs, vascular system, both vascular system could be at play. I mean, I feel like, and there’s this like autonomic thing. So, you know, if my bladder gets too full or if I just eat too much, I have like an intense headache. Um, I can’t sleep. I wake up with like a racing heart.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (22:42)
My hydration has to be carefully monitored. Um, but so I think there’s this inflammation piece clotting piece irritation to the lining of the vessels, whatever that means exactly fatigue. I think the fatigue it’s different from like an Epstein-Barr fatigue. It’s like, you, you can’t do anything without your heart rate, just going up like crazy. And you literally kind of get tired out. Um, but it’s not like that kind of like, it does recover with sleep, but you just need a ton of sleep. Like I fall last night, I fell asleep with my daughter at 8 45 in my bed with all the lights on an audio book going, you know, like my husband gave me these, like I didn’t wake up for like hours later. And, um, so it’s a different kind of a fatigue, but I think the reason that so many people with post COVID report year long fatigue, everyday fatigue, is that there’s no, if you have to go back to work at any point during this, there’s no opportunity to rest. I mean, I have total control over my work, my schedule. There’s no way I could work a regular job now, you know, and a lot of people that have this were healthcare professionals, teachers. I just think it’s almost impossible for a person in those jobs to go back to work without a lot of support. And I’m sure they’re not getting it right.

Connie Wray: (24:21)
So you look at the individuals that like the factory workers, individuals that were working at a Walmart, number one, they’re also at an economic disadvantage. So they don’t have that ability to take the time that many of us that may have that economic advantage can do, we can work from our homes or we can find alternative ways. And I think that’s why we’re also seeing that medical professionals are looking at this saying, this is an incredible divide.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (24:48)
You have built up a lot of connections and support with your family and through your community. And not everyone has that support network through that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (25:00)
Okay. And you a hundred percent would need it because there are days. I just, I can’t make dinner. I mean, I can’t even now take a shower and dry my hair, blow dry my hair. Like it has to be two whole separate events where I rest between. And I really, I wash my hair like once a week now because I can’t, I don’t have the physical endurance to like, hold the brush and the dryer. And, you know, I was dead lifting 115 pounds, like nine weeks ago, I was taking a hit class. What

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (25:37)
Have your, um, background in this health and wellness world? Like which of those fundamental principles do you feel like you’ve maybe relied on? I mean, we’ve heard you talk a lot about the importance of rest. So as far as movement that, um, really hasn’t been that rest piece and not forcing, forcing through, um, just because your mind is telling you, I’m a physical therapist, exercise is so important. This is what I have to do. It’s it’s really dialing that in.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (26:08)
Yeah. So I think if we look at those pillars that you were talking about in terms of movement, thinking of mindfulness breath work and outside time, you know, I unfortunately got this literally in the winter and again, but even still every day I put on my coat and my hat and today it’s like 50 and sunny, so it’s wonderful. Um, and I walk five to 25 minutes. I have, I have about a 60 minute mile pace right now, just yesterday or two days ago, I went around, I walked off, my street is 0.2, five miles. Roughly. I went up my street and around in the next street back, it was like 0.6 miles, which is like a huge barrier. Yeah. But I did go out and walk a little bit every, basically every day, unless I was too tired. I’d never push it too. If I was tired.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (27:06)
And you just, I just don’t like, I haven’t watched TV in 10 years. I watched so much TV in the last two months because you just need to distract yourself, podcasts, whatever you have to just sit down. But unfortunately I can’t lay down cause that messes. It’s like, you’re in this weird thing. Like I can’t just lay, but I can sit. So that’s why meditation and breath work is so helpful because it’s something productive and healing to do. That’s not exercise. No. And then outside time walking and then I would say with nutrition. So the good thing about all of my foundations there, one of the theories is that the reason why healthier people get so sick with this is we have many more ACE, two receptors is in our heart and lungs. Yeah. That’s what I was gonna ask about. And so what I keep thinking about with that as a healing mindset shift is like, okay, great. My heart and lungs are healthy. They’re just injured right now. And they need to recover. So this virus attacked them and they will heal. The vessels will heal. I have the foundation. So don’t push it, take the time it needs. And I do wish I had a better understanding of the timeline. I would feel better, but we just don’t know yet. So patients okay.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (28:32)
And ups continue to have a positive mindset about it, you know, and faith, right. Faith that your body is doing, what it needs to do when you can continue to fuel it the way you, you need to and support

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (28:44)
It. And then from the nutrition piece, fortunately, I have tons of knowledge there. So once I started to understand that this was a inflammatory thing, initially I supported the medication with lots of anti-inflammatory supplements that were supportive for me. Um, you know, curcumin, fish oil originally. Yeah. Just want to throw in there. I was just

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (29:07)
Doing, um, research for a talk on giving on lifestyle components, affecting the macrophage of the inflammatory process. And some data popped up about the effects of COVID. Um, this was really fascinating, you know, the macrophage cell having this, it’s both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory depending on what phenotype the cell is. And in that COVID like thing the MLN macrophage really seems to is the inflammatory one. That’s the really seems to be on fire, right? Like one’s what really gets triggered during the viral infections. And then that transition. And so things like curcumin and nutrition can help the transition into that. Anti-inflammatory Makerspace is really, I it’s, I get sort of like geeked out and nerd out on it. I was like, ah, that is so interesting. Cause it is it’s inflammatory, but it, the whole, what we talk about a lot with why developed by the kinetics to begin with is to really optimize the inflammatory process. You got to keep it out of the super hot zone, but you need that a little bit. Cause that’s what attacks and kills the viruses, but you can’t turn it all the way off. You need to kind of try to help promote and, and the nutritional components that you’re doing, being metabolically healthy, all of those help the function of that macrophage.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (30:29)
Yeah. And you know, what was fascinating to me. So I basically, I started on just massive doses of ibuprofen and it immediately helped, which was great information, right. Because then you’re like, okay, this is clearly inflammatory. And then they added another one culture scene, which is for pericarditis also helps like right around this time of day, like I take it around three 30 or four, I can start the, the symptoms come back every day, a little bit less, you know, less than it was. And I’m off all the ibuprofen now. But, um, I S I was intuitively like what, which anti-inflammatories right, because there’s millions of them. There’s yeah. I did Rivera trial for specifically heart healing. And then I’ve done a course, a tin for vest, vascular, you know, vascular epithelial healing. And that actually was really helpful, but what I I’ve been doing some more G Nutrogenomix studying in the last few months, and it was fascinating that all the things I intuitively kind of put together for myself align very specifically with my genetics.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (31:34)
So it’s really not as simple as like there’s a post COVID recovery protocol, there’s a who, what your body needs protocol. So it’s the same that we kind of would look at anything else. But I think the disadvantage we’re at with this is we still don’t understand the, what the virus is doing or did. So we, I don’t even still know there’s kind of three theories on this. Like, do I still have a little active virus somewhere? Maybe did it trigger an auto-immune response? Cause I never had any auto immune issues. Did it trigger that maybe, um, cause that definitely could be what’s going on. And then the other theory is that like there’s kind of a viral residue, some sort, um, one of the interesting and shocking things to me is that people and that I’ve met in sort of clinical long ho call groups.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (32:26)
They, they are many of them like about half, are getting better with getting the, and a vaccines. So like, what is that all about? Do we still, as the Visy immune system needed to be like pumped up and then again, is it like stuck somehow? Like what’s going on there? So I don’t know, but that’s an interesting thing. But one thing I noticed, so the anti-inflammatory piece was key with nutrition and again, my body type does better with sort of paleo food plan. And I usually lean that direction anyway, but you know, I was okay eating some gluten-free grains, occasionally whatever. And, but right now, if I have, like I was doing really well, and then I got worse after super bowl weekend and I was like, huh, I ate corn tacos and corn bread. And it flared up all the lung stuff again. So I stopped all grains.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (33:22)
Then I tested a few weeks later, I had a little rice. It was as if I was on fire, my vessels were burning my skin. So I took Advil. It calmed it down. And then I, so I have to be kind of really therapeutically eating right now, but it would be hard. I can imagine for someone who doesn’t understand what their best therapeutic diet is too defined it now, you know? So again, that’s an advantage that I come with, but I think that between the supplements and the food it’s healing, that immune piece of it. And then the third piece is really dysautonomia. So a lot of people have, um, pots, you know, uh, orthostatic, hypertension. I think one manifestation of that for me is the heart racing that I get at night. I’m not sure yet if it’s sleep apnea because my pulse ox goes down and it like wakes me up.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (34:16)
It depends on how deep sleep I’m in. So I’m not sure yet if it’s like, there’s still some residual stuff in my lungs. I tried to do a glutathione nebulizer. Oh my God. It made me so much worse, you know, painful. But on the other hand, no, it’s almost like it helped a little, like I was talking to someone else who’s in this boat who was also in functional medicine. And she was like, I started with like one puff, not like 20 minutes of doing that. So a little too much and things like that. We’re all learning. Who knows, you know? Um, but the, I don’t have a lot of dysautonomia symptoms, but I did an organic acids test and my dopamine markers are all kind of messed up when I’ve never really had any neurotransmitter issues on any tests like that before. So the virus does something to the immune system, which in, at Mount Sinai, in their post COVID clinic, they’re starting to see is that the breasts they’re using some military style breathwork, um, you know, calming the nervous system that people use in, in military situations that is helping with the autonomic nervous system issues.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (35:31)
So the fact that I’ve done that all along and like Vegas nerve toning and sunlight, all those kinds of things possibly is helping us heal a little bit faster. So I think that all of those pillars are still really helpful. And if you get this, this is a hard hardcore virus it’s it could injure you. We don’t know who it might injure healthy, unhealthy old gung it’s a Le you know, there are like the more likely people to have long haul are women in thirties to fifties, the more likely to die or men over 75 over 70, you know, so there are some generalizations, people with obesity are more likely to die. Um, kids are less likely to have any issues if they’re generally healthy or even if they’re kind of mostly healthy. So there’s a lot we know, and a lot we don’t know, but I think that we have to be careful of doing the same thing. A lot of people moved into integrative medicine for shaming people, you know, and that, that is one

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (36:45)
Of the reasons why I was so drawn to your story, um, was exactly that because I saw all of our peers socially talking about, oh, you just need to get metabolically healthy. You need to improve your vitamin D three status. And I said, those are all very important things and certainly help reduce your risk of having, uh, a worser outcome. Um, but it’s, it’s a virus. And, and also, and also ultimately to the point that brings us back to this radically resilient health component is life happens. And sometimes it’s a virus in your case, and it requires us to continue to promote those foundational principles to move forward and continue that resiliency in your health status health. I mean, I still look at you and I go, she is still the picture of health in my mind, despite you having to go through this particular challenge, because it’s not the absence of having an injury, like Connie had to have her hip replaced because of a long time injury or, you know, my son rupturing his appendix or getting the virus.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (37:57)
The whole point is that you do all of the things that are, are, um, honoring your body in so many ways and, and respecting the natural process to get through and continue those to carry you on back to your, uh, healthy life or your active life. I mean, so help is not the absence of having a challenge, right. Is ultimately where we’re getting at that radical resilience. You, you fall back onto those fundamental principles to carry you through. Um, and I think that’s amazing. I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. I think it’s so interesting. And I will just say, hopefully don’t get flagged because we said the word COVID on the podcast. So hopefully we can bypass bypass all of that with the podcast, because I know it’s really tricky out there, but I think your story is so important. And I really appreciate you sharing that with us. Thank you so much, Jessica. You’re welcome.

Connie Wray: (38:51)
Yeah, Jessica, I just want to say again, thank you for, for sharing this. And I think it’s also important for both of you as physicians to, to explain to us who do not have the medical background to know where you both come from Carolyn with your nutrition background and your physical therapy background, and you as well, Dr. Drummond, that we need to learn from you. And this is a learning process for you as well. This is a new virus that we don’t know anything about, but it’s your knowledge and your experience and your education that I’m so grateful that you’re able to show the world. And those who are listening to radically resilient health, that this is something that everyone is learning about. We still have a long way to go, but these are some of the basic ways that we know how to recover from this. So again, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re welcome.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (39:39)
And, you know, I just want to end by saying that all of these tools are valuable and when we take what we hear from other people experiencing this, like really, I think one of the things that helped me the most was the fact that all those people in March and April who got sick, shared their stories, and it it’s really helped all of us to piece this together and, and make some pretty quick progress. I mean, you rarely see so much knowledge about one thing a year.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (40:14)
Absolutely. And, and being brave enough to share it, because like you mentioned, with the whole idea of shaming people that they must have gotten it because they did something wrong or they were just unhealthy, that’s, it’s unfair. Um, but I really am excited that people are sharing. Cause I think it’s so important to get that information out there. And um, why don’t you share with us where people can get in touch with you if they happen to have any endometriosis problems or health when it’s health issues, please go ahead and share.

Dr. Jessica Drummond: (40:45)
The fastest thing to do is just send us a message at integrative women’s health on Instagram, or you can find out more about our work at integrative women’s health institute.com.

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