177 - The Stool with Four Legs: Rachel's Long Covid Recovery

Rachel Rock shares her powerful Long Covid recovery story, detailing her journey from initial illness to healing through understanding and supporting her autonomic nervous system.

• Contracted COVID in May 2022 & developed long COVID whilst attempting to train for a cycling event
• Discovered she was experiencing Dysautonomia & significant blood pressure regulation issues
• Used tracking tools including Welltory app to gather data about HRV & autonomic nervous system function
• Built recovery on four pillars: autonomic nervous system regulation, functional medicine, dietary changes & trauma processing
• Worked with practitioners including Dr. Lydia Knutson who combines chiropractic medicine with energy healing techniques
• Addressed previously unresolved childhood trauma through EMDR therapy & made profound connections to physical symptoms
• Successfully completed bike ride by consciously downregulating instead of pushing through physical challenges
• Learned to recognize bodily signals that indicate nervous system dysregulation
• Found community connections with fellow long COVID sufferers around the world through online classes & support groups
• Continues daily practices to maintain ANS health even after recovery

Links:

Rachel's website

Rachel's LinkedIn

Lydia Knutson episode

Long Covid Breathing course

Work with Jackie

Ed Yong

Recovery themes episode

James Nestor "Breath"

For more information about Long Covid Breathing courses & workshops, please check out LongCovidBreathing.com

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Rachel's Recovery Story
• 2:40 Getting COVID and First Symptoms
• 5:53 Researching and Managing Dysautonomia
• 10:10 Finding the Right Medical Support
• 16:17 Building a Recovery Framework
• 24:46 The Role of Trauma in Recovery
• 33:06 Adapting and Healing the Nervous System
• 36:38 Signs of Recovery and Moving Forward
• 42:13 Daily Practices and Maintaining Health
• 48:45 Final Reflections and Hope

Transcript

Jackie Baxter: 0:55

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long COVID Podcast. I am so happy to have Rachel Rock with me here tonight to discuss her recovery story. So, yeah, a very warm welcome to the podcast today. It's so lovely to see you again.

Rachel Rock: 1:13

Thank you, jackie. It's great to be here from Boston Massachusetts. Yes, it's a journey right Like much of life. This long COVID story healing, recovery story is a long one.

Jackie Baxter: 1:28

Sure for sure, it's quite an adventure, isn't it? So can you just say a little bit about yourself and maybe what life was like before you became unwell?

Rachel Rock: 1:44

maybe what life was like before you became unwell. I got long COVID, may of 2022. Not a terrible case of it. I was sick but whatever you know, took those few days as many did. I had all my vaccines and felt like, okay, you know it was inevitable. I had kept myself from getting it for several years, but there it was. So I got better, fever passed, everything that seemed part of long COVID passed.

Rachel Rock: 2:04

And because I was in the midst of training for a bike ride here in Massachusetts called the Pan Mass Challenge, which is a two-day bike ride that I had been doing, by that point, for some 12 years. It's in August where you ride over two days, anywhere from 192 miles to 165 over two days, and so it's something I, you know, have been doing for a long time. And so, because I was in the midst of training in May, had just sort of started, you know, I gave myself a break, waited a few weeks and decided I'd go out just for a 10-mile or something. Short, easy, nothing, thought I felt good, did that and ended up back in bed for two days. Seemed kind of odd, but I thought, okay, tried it too early. Tried a few weeks. Another 10 days went by, tried it again and same thing happened, and a few more times, and even after dog walks and other what to me was minimal exercise. I was flattened by it and I knew whoa. This is not how things usually go for me, and I remember, early on, speaking with a friend who's a cardiologist. This was, of course, the time still where we just didn't really have a handle on what was actually happening, but we had a name for it already, which was long COVID, and he, in his cardiology practice, had already started seeing people and trying to figure out, kind of through the heart by measuring the heart and running people through a variety of things what he was seeing as everybody was doing at the time, all from their different perspectives. And I remember him saying you know, I don't want to say it's long COVID, but you should just take it easy, because I have a woman who runs marathons. She's had some similar experiences and you could do more damage by pushing too hard, so you have to. That's a reframe, right? Not the. I'm an athlete, I can push through and I'll make this happen. So we know now, of course, that's what it was all about. We were in just new territory as the summer went on.

Rachel Rock: 4:21

So I am a journalist and as I approach everything, I did a deep dive into every possible corner to try and figure out what was going on with me, became a journalist on myself and found excellent information in some corners of YouTube and Jazz Medrinker wouldn't ever miss any of his episodes and so started to realize about this thing called dysautonomia, and I had actually even prior the word. I had gone looking, I realized that there was something going on with my blood pressure and I my mother-in-law happened to have had a blood pressure cuff all the time and she, we decided, let me just check it out and see. And sure enough, I had this thing where you know, you stand up, you lie down, you stand, you measure your, your blood pressure at these various points, and the drop in my blood pressure was very, very significant and it wasn't coming back up and so no wonder I feel a little lightheaded, dizzy, etc. I also was noticing this shrinking from the world phenomenon. This you know, I just can't have conversation, I can't go on walks and talk, I can't even talk very much in a given day, and just how it was draining me. Now I already by this point in my life. There were several things that I brought into this, one a realization, that is, I am a you know there are lots of names for it, but I am a, you know, closet, introvert and extroverted, introvert this or that but that I already knew enough about myself that I realized at any time if I couldn't be very social, but if I put myself out there too long I always needed to retreat. So I already understood how that was, sort of again another sign that things were just off kilter. For me it was much more severe than it had ever been. The other piece about it is that I have had ADHD my whole life, because most people do and I've been managing it with meds for 20 years probably, and I started to notice how my medications were making things worse, but I didn't yet understand what was actually going on Went through that whole summer, tried to sort of do my own research by the fall, went to see my primary care doctor here in Boston where one I would have expected, of course there'd be some good answers, but because you know, no one had figured much out.

Rachel Rock: 6:59

The good news for me was, from the minute I leaned into the medical establishment, I was never questioned that something was off, something was going on. So I was very lucky that way and that was enormously important, of course, just that somebody believed that what I was experiencing was what I was experiencing. I had a full battery of tests. I had every major organ checked, and that brought me good news because they were all fine. But it left me, of course, with no real answers about what was going on with me.

Rachel Rock: 7:32

And as the fall went on and I started to read more about and I got a huge amount of information from David Petrino's lab at Mount Sinai, I got the protocol that he was developing. I went and tried to find a physical therapist here in Boston who understood the protocol, which was how you rehabilitate somebody, and it was being likened to people who had either traumatic brain injuries or stroke victims that you have to bring it back, bring people back physically in this very, very gradual, measured way. And something he said at the time really stuck with me, which was you know, all the scales we had prior to long COVID, all the scales we were using to measure fatigue or exertion, that people he was finding people with long COVID couldn't even enter at the bottom of those scales. We were so far below it. So that again was another sort of piece of information for me, and at the time too I did a lot of acupuncture, which was something I had already been doing in my life for pain management. But of course the acupuncturist had a way to help me with my blood pressure issue and he, every week or twice a week, I would go, I'd do acupuncture and he and I would measure again the dysautonomia and so we could see. So I had some physical measure that maybe something over one thing was good for me and it was helping versus another that wasn't.

Rachel Rock: 8:59

The other thing that was so consequential for me in the early days was the app Welltory that I had on my watch, apple Watch, and I was watching. I had already been tracking myself as sort of you know the worried well type, like trying to figure out what my HRV was and was it what it should be and how did my sleep affect all the stuff that people spend a lot of time looking at. But what was great about it was I had it from the February before I got long COVID, and I could see and it was as I was learning that there was metrics around my autonomic nervous system that I could see in this app through HRV. I didn't quite yet understand how it all fit together but again, I had some data for myself of if I didn't feel well on the day. I could look and see, oh, you don't feel well and your body knows it, and your body is registering it, even if you don't understand how it's registering it.

Rachel Rock: 10:40

And that sort of theme will run through my whole story because you know, as you talk about a lot on the podcast, there's a lot of this recovery journey, which is about letting go of knowledge and recovery vis-a-vis knowledge, because we don't necessarily know the how and the why. But having said that, there's so much that if you learn to recognize the signs and you learn to read your body and you learn ways that for thousands and thousands of years people, humans, mainly in Eastern cultures outside of the Western culture have used for thousands of years to understand what's going on in their bodies, and that was such a huge piece of learning and recovery for me.

Jackie Baxter: 11:29

Like learning your new body, isn't it? I remember someone saying that to me while I was still unwell. You know, because everyone thinks well, I know what my body's like. You know, I know how my body you know, and actually, in hindsight, I didn't, because my body had been screaming at me for years and I had just been, you know, not even acknowledging it, let alone listening. But you know, then, when you do become unwell, you do have to learn a new body, or maybe more intimately, learn what your body is telling you and start, as you say, to start to understand a bit about what is it telling me? What do these things mean? What does my body truly need in this moment and how can I give it? That and that kind of is part of that recovery journey, isn't it?

Rachel Rock: 12:11

100%, and it is. And and that's the learning is we actually hold within our own selves and with you know, some learning and knowledge of people who have spent a lifetime understanding the human body from this other vantage point. Not only do we hold the tools ourselves, but the tools are all around us. But it's what you just said, it's understanding when our body says I need this, and knowing what this is. So recognizing the body is telling you just what you need and then knowing how to find what you need and then how to give the body what it needs. And I mean almost everyone I can think of in one way or another has done something in their lives already that speaks to this, and what I mean by that is. So in this first stage, for me, I pretty quickly came to realize that everything in my story is about my autonomic nervous system, and for me, I've always really thought of this recovery journey is I'm just sitting on a stool. I've been building the legs of a stool, my stool that I am trying to stabilize, for everything else is the autonomic nervous system. It starts and ends there, and it was so curious to me in the earliest days that I couldn't find anybody. There's no doctor of medicine, of allopathic Western medicine, who completely works on the healing of the autonomic nervous system. There are plenty of doctors, neurologists, others who work on helping you manage symptoms, mitigate symptoms. They recognize when there's dysfunction. But I kept thinking but who can help me heal my autonomic nervous system? And that's then, of course, I crossed over and that's where the next part of my story was really about learning about what are all the things that are making my autonomic nervous system, what's making it unsafe? Why is it not regulating itself? Why is it not bringing itself back into balance? And that partly goes to, as you just said, jackie, you know my whole life, especially because I had ADHD. That was the sign. Adhd is essentially this you know upregulation, where you know it just stays up there and you live your whole life up at the higher level of the cortisol scale and until something happens. You're doing fine, I mean you're moving quick, you're getting stuff done, you're energetic, you're you know you get more done than anybody else, and so on and so forth, but, as you point out, like until you realize that there is a cost to that and it is going to come get you at some point. And for me and for many of us, it was long COVID that just tipped. It, tipped the barrel over, you know, put the little bit too much water in the barrel. The barrel was already way, way, way high with, you know, almost at the edge and then one drop and it just sent the whole thing rolling.

Rachel Rock: 15:15

So, ans being my stool that I'm building, my recovery is building the stool, and the stool for me, as I look back on it now, had several legs. One is finding somebody who could help me balance my autonomic nervous system, and that's where Dr Lydia Knudsen comes in, who has been on the show and lucky enough that Dr Knudsen is here in Cambridge Massachusetts. Lucky enough that Dr Knudsen is here in Cambridge Massachusetts. I was connected to her through a very dear friend whose own sons had gone to her for years around all sorts of other things that the autonomic nervous system and chiropractic medicine and energy medicine can heal, but for me chiropractic medicine meant cracking bones, meant manipulation. I just never even occurred to me that somebody who practiced that could help heal me. And as I won't really tell her story because it's all in the other episode, but she is one of the, I think, few healers right now of long COVID and started doing it in January of 2020. She didn't even know what it was that she was doing, but something was going on that she'd never seen before. She does really practice-based medicine, in other words, she really learns from the patients who walk in. She has a very rigorous scientific approach, but she doesn't work on a bench and in the lab to figure this out. She works with her patients to heal them and has healed enormous numbers of people. At this point, people are now coming from around the US. Her combination of her use of chiropractic medicine and energetic medicine and kinesiology is truly remarkable. But what she did for me was she had her long COVID protocol, which she talks about in the episode.

Rachel Rock: 17:07

Mine went beyond that, because what I had also, which many of us who ended up with long COVID didn't know we had but I was carrying all of the viruses for my whole life that got reactivated Epstein-Barr and herpes zoster and I had Lyme disease and they were putting this stress on my system continually, and so I had actually several I called them my fake recoveries where I finally believed I was better. I declared to my family at one point long COVID is over on New Year's Eve of whatever year it was, and you know everyone chirped in long COVID dies tonight, and that was the big thing, and it became the you know title of our text string and everyone was so excited and I had regained my life, I had regained myself, my energy, everything, only for a few months later to crash again and I just couldn't figure out why. What was I doing or not doing that kept causing this to happen. And that was when I first discovered there was something else in my story. So I had the autonomic nervous system is sort of the stool. I had this practitioner who also led me to somebody. I started doing a lot of functional medicine testing, discovered a bunch of allergies and it turned out to be, of course, gluten intolerant, many other things. I did a whole supplement regime and worked with a functional medicine doctor around some other testing. So that was sort of number two. Number three then, of course, was diet, and I've since become keto, but now I'm not, and that helped for brain fog for sure.

Rachel Rock: 18:52

But the fourth leg of my stool and I don't know that it is for everybody but is trauma. And so the story for me was I was going along, I had thought I was better. I declared myself better, only to have something hit me again, not even knowing what it was that hit me again. So whether it was a virus or an illness or oh, that trauma my mother died when I was 15. I, you know from the outside world's perspective and my own had really triumphed Phoenix out of the ashes. I was super resilient. I didn't mean, I didn't cry. I cried plenty through the years. I wrote about it, I went to a therapist, but what I never did was process the trauma of the 15-year-old girl. And this was where Sally Riggs came in. When she talked about that as a piece for her. I realized, oh my, wow, that makes sense If I look at all the reasons that my nervous system doesn't feel safe.

Rachel Rock: 19:58

That's the question I wake up and ask myself every day. If I sort of trip and fall again, I say, okay, what is making my nervous system not feel safe? Why Right now? Why am I back in that hole again? And it can be because I'm eating something poor that's not good for me at this point, or I actually have another virus, or, you know, there's something has triggered my trauma.

Rachel Rock: 20:22

So I started doing EMDR. The full name is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing EMDR, and it's a process by which you work with a professional who's been trained in this and you kind of go back and visit traumatic memories and in so doing you desensitize the brain and you reprocess the memory so that it isn't like it's happening over and over again, the kind of notion of PTSD. And there's lots to read about it and lots to learn about it, and it's been for me, incredibly powerful. And what was incredible was so I started EMDR. Then I had to take a break because I wanted to do the safe and sound protocol, which is, of course, how I met you, jackie, and learned actually what it felt like to live in this body with this nervous system. And that class taught me the physical signs of upregulation, downregulation, upregulation, downregulation and the latter that was a game changer is learning about how do I know that I'm crashed and how do I know that I'm coming out, and the small signs. And that goes back to what we were talking about is it's learning a language that you never knew, you had to know before. And so the safe and sound protocol.

Rachel Rock: 21:46

Really I had to stop the EMDR because you actually can't do EMDR while you're doing safe and sound. So I paused, I did the safe and sound protocol and that was when I realized that the EMDR I had done enough of it did the class with you and then came back to it and what was stunning to me was when I would get near one of those traumatic memories. I mean I can't even feel my body now, the way I feel it in my body, and that when you're doing EMDR you're being asked, you know where do you feel it Like and has it moved? And then you know the eye movement. You're following someone's finger back and forth or you're tapping. It's bilateral stimulation, that's kind of shifting the traumatic memory. I couldn't believe how exact the feeling was in my body between when I was reliving a trauma or experiencing trauma and chronic fatigue of long COVID. They were the identical body feelings and that was where I was like, oh my gosh, of course. I mean, yes, I already knew my ANS recorded it all. The only thing that mattered every day was to make sure my autonomic nervous system had what it needed.

Rachel Rock: 23:01

And when I made the reference earlier about how most of us, in one moment or another, are doing things to care for our ANS, because we just know that it is good for us. It is good for us. In other words, yoga, breathing, meditation, exercise, walking, holding your dog, holding your cat that you taught me all of that. We're actually all programmed as humans to be doing this because it feels good. So it's not even like there's some complicated language to learn. You're doing it all the time. It's just some of us got to a place and have gotten to a place and are still in a place where we cannot afford not to keep our eye on our nervous system all the time and really care for it, and so the EMDR has been a big piece of it.

Rachel Rock: 24:00

I did the safe and sound protocol that was really like classroom learning almost of the autonomic nervous system, and the EMDR for me has been, then, really combating one of the major assaults to my nervous system, as has work on my diet and learning that I'm actually I just discovered I have an allergy to dairy, which I never knew, and other things that I have to still take care of myself. But there are things that I can avoid doing. But there are things that I can avoid doing because, knowing that they will tip my autonomic nervous system into a zone that is not good for me, I stopped working all this time. I mean I would do a little bit of writing here and there, but because I'm a freelance journalist, you know nobody was coming after me, it was just I wasn't pitching, I wasn't.

Rachel Rock: 24:55

And the hardest part of the healing journey was the loss of self, the loss of the person I knew. I just didn't recognize myself and I think that is the most painful part of all of this for any one of us is just knowing that this is not who I am. And Ed Young wrote an article, a story, about chronic fatigue in the Atlantic, and there was a line in that that I found incredibly helpful and powerful, which was depression is when you're sitting on the side of your life and you really don't care about getting back in or not. Sitting on the side of your life and you really don't care about getting back in or not. Chronic fatigue is sitting on the side of your life, desperate to get back to what you love to do and just unable.

Rachel Rock: 26:12

And that was really helpful because I could at least keep telling myself and surely there was elements of depression in this because we don't know who we are right and we can't be who we want to be, and of course that goes to community and the incredible community that you've built through the Long COVID podcast, through the breathing groups. We all know, right, the silence is what paralyzes us not being able to share, not being able to see that there are others going through the same thing, and that's, in this kind of weird way. That is the beautiful outcome of long COVID, in that we are so connected that we would do these classes and you'd be in Scotland and I was here in Boston and we would have, you know, one person in Germany and one out in Seattle and somebody else in England, and here we were all just trying to heal together. And so you know, there are things about long COVID that have strengthened us and our connections to each other.

Jackie Baxter: 27:18

But of course, I can now also say that because I'm healed and you know, what I love about chatting with people who have recovered is that everyone's story is different and, like there are often, if not always, a lot of commonalities and similar themes, but everyone's route is different and the puzzle pieces that you have put together in your own journey and what a journey they are unique to you journey, and what a journey they are unique to you. So you find all these things that helped you. How did you know that you were fully recovered and what did that look like for you?

Rachel Rock: 27:59

So the way I knew I was healed was, you know, I was getting better and better. There were sort of several things that I held out to myself. One was being able to ride the pan mass challenge. Again, that was big, so I wanted to see if I could do that. Um, I was able to do one day. So 86 miles last summer, um, august, um, but I'll never forget and the way I did it actually.

Rachel Rock: 28:18

So, there, there, there are parts of the ride where you have to go up hills not a ton in the days that I was doing, but anyway, there's hills and, of course, your instinct and this is a metaphor for what you were saying about how we live our lives, certain types of people. But the hill comes, you gear up, you give it everything you have, you go as hard as you can. You can barely breathe at the top, and I had learned, though, that if I was going to do this, that was the last thing I could do. I had to fight as hard as I could against that instinct to get up the hill. Instead, I had to go the opposite direction. I had to downregulate, I had to close my eyes, I had to breathe in four, breathe out six, breathe in four, breathe out six. Everybody else would be flying by me. That's fine, but I'm going to get to the top of the hill and I feel like that is really what allowed me to do it and also got me through to being healed. I managed it at the end. I'm in the last mile riding with my husband and I turned and I said so.

Rachel Rock: 29:19

Do you think this means I'm like recovered from long COVID? Because I did this and we both were like I don't know. I mean, that's the big question. When you have a chronic illness, what says you're over? You still are in that same body, you're still having all the same vulnerabilities that you always had. But was I better? And so I sort of decided I didn't need to have an answer to that. I had written something that I set out to do. I knew that I was better enough to do that ride and that was very powerful for me.

Rachel Rock: 29:53

Then, 10 days later, I got COVID again and I got over COVID, but I got over it in two or three days. I did it on my own, I didn't take Paxlovid, and I recovered and 10 days later I was actually okay and so that for me, was sort of okay, I got COVID again and I got better, and now granted, there was a lot in the background that let that happen Again Dr Knudsen had been doing so much work on my system and helping me clear these viruses and all the other stressors that were working on my system. I knew much more now about how to care for myself, and you know, the last piece, though, is I still hadn't started taking my medicine, my ADHD medicine, because if I was going to go back to work which is what I, of course, wanted to do, knowing that work to work well, to work effectively engenders stress, stress is my enemy or too much stress is my enemy, or unregulated stress is my enemy. So, because the upregulated mind is what I have to be very careful of, could I take medicine that does that or helps regulate the nervous system and still work? And that was sort of for me, the last piece, in which I worked with a psychologist. She's a psychopharmacologist, and she really understood, actually, chronic illness. What I've really been blown away by is how many people out there, when you go looking for caretakers and healers and people who have their piece of knowledge in this story how many of them really met me right where I needed them to and said okay, first of all, you know, long COVID, I get it. Whether they had it or not, they never questioned its existence, they understood what it was.

Rachel Rock: 31:46

In this larger framework of post-viral illnesses, which I think that again, when we talk you and I, before we started we're talking about how everyone is still trying to solve for their peace. But I do think there is a really amazing effort to pull a lens much further back on this and say wait a sec, wait a sec. This is one of many post-viral illnesses that have existed over time. There's, you know, me-cfs, long Lyme, long COVID. This is a chronic disease state that we have seen for thousands of years. We might not have had the names, we might not have had all the tools, the understanding, but this is the body reacting to its environment and there are ways to help the body heal itself. And it's, as you know, it's a fundamental shift in how we think of it all. And so I sort of try and say to people who ask you know it's, partly I give others credit for this and partly I take credit for it myself, because I think that's we are an agent of our own healing. That's the whole point here. We're a biological system.

Rachel Rock: 33:03

So think about when a tree falls and in the forest, and the process by which the tree you know the tree doesn't stand itself back up right, the tree falls. But then the tree adapts to its environment. And I always go back to Charles Darwin. You know Charles Darwin spoke. Often people say Charles Darwin is survival of the fittest, that's who survives. But the truth is the ones, the creatures who survive and we are mammals, of course are the ones who are most adaptable to their environment. And so this whole journey has been about adapting to my environment, changing my environment a bit, or adapting to what the needs are. And you know, knowing that I'm going to have good days and bad days. And you were so helpful with that in those early stages of recovery when I would email you and I'd say, jackie, how do you know if you're recovered? And you know you would say, well, you're doing more than you could. It doesn't mean every day is in the forward direction, but it's a process and part of it is a mindset. So I thank you for that.

Jackie Baxter: 34:09

Well, it's a pleasure to have had a small part in it. But I think you know what you said a moment ago. You know that you did some of it yourself. I think you know you did all of it yourself and you know, I think you know you may have met with people or worked with people who steered you in the right direction, but ultimately it's you that search them out, it's you that put in that work and that showed up.

Jackie Baxter: 34:35

You know we were talking a moment ago, before we hit record, about the episode that I did quite recently about the recovery themes and for me, you know, I think you know number one was that consistency. You know it's finding. You know number one was that consistency. You know it's finding something that helps and then doing it consistently, not just doing it once and saying no, you know that's too much work. Or you know it didn't, it didn't fix me. It's showing up and continually doing it over and over and over and seeing those little wins become bigger wins.

Jackie Baxter: 35:08

So you know, I think I remember speaking to my partner and I can't remember it was one of those questions that just came up in my head and I said what's the thing that you're most proud of in your life? And he was like I don't know. And he gave me some answer and then he turned the question around to me and he said what's the thing that you're the most proud of? I thought I don't know. Actually that's quite a hard question to answer and I was thinking you know, I've achieved quite a lot in my life, but what's the thing that I'm most proud of? And I think I said to him well, when I recover from long COVID, it's going to be that and it was this kind of.

Jackie Baxter: 35:47

You know, it is such a difficult journey. It's a very difficult journey in terms of physicalness because it's so freaking uncomfortable. You know it's absolute hell to go through physically. But mentally it is such a tough journey as well because you, you kind of do have to do it yourself. Even if you have guidance from other people and you're lucky to have support and community with people that are helpful you are still the one that has to wake up every day in that body and continue to keep doing the things, even when you don't feel like you're going in the right direction. Over and over and over. Uh, so you know it's. It's like, yes, recovery, I mean, that's the goal and that's a huge achievement. But even for anyone listening who is going yeah, but you know I'm not recovered yeah, but if you are showing up consistently and you are finding improvement, even if it's half a percent, that is still such a huge win and like keep doing it, keep showing up and keep doing it, isn't it? I think that's so important.

Rachel Rock: 36:58

Totally, it really is, and I just wanted James Nestor's piece because that was for me. So again, there's certain books that have been passed around. The long COVID community right Breath was certainly when I was doing the Safe and Sound Protocol that that book really changed my way of looking at the world. But in this book it's in the end of the book, it's in the epilogue this chapter called A Last Gasp, and he's sitting next to a woman. He's now traveling around the US or the world for his book Breath, and he's on the airplane and a woman asks him you know, my sister has cancer. What can you tell me? Some stuff I can share with her to help her cure?

Rachel Rock: 37:52

And he talks about the fact that modern medicine still has its limitations. It's what we have to actually fully acknowledge, right, and I'll just read from it. He said dozens of doctors at Harvard, stanford and other institutions told me the same thing. Modern medicine, they said, was amazingly efficient at cutting out and stitching up parts of the body in emergencies, but sadly deficient at treating milder, chronic systemic maladies, the asthma, headaches, stress and autoimmune issues that most of the modern population contends with. And goes on.

Rachel Rock: 38:27

It says, like all Eastern medicines, breathing techniques are best suited to serve as preventative maintenance, a way to retain balance in the body so that milder problems don't blossom into more serious health issues. Should we lose that balance from time to time, breathing can often bring it back, he said. But to me, if there's one thing that again that has changed my way of thinking of my health and myself is my everyday job is to combat the chronic illnesses that inevitably are coming at me or are within me. And to the extent that we can, whether it's through breathing techniques, whether it's through yoga, meditation, emdr, all the different modalities that actually speak directly to the autonomic nervous system in a way that modern medicine and Western medicine can't and doesn't. That that is our job every day is to do what we can to protect that part of ourselves, and I give my long COVID journey all credit for that learning, and it'll serve me well for however many hopefully decades I have yet to walk the earth.

Jackie Baxter: 39:43

Yeah, and I think you know that's such a great point. You know we learn these techniques out of necessity. You know we get long COVID or we get ME-CFS or whatever it is, and your world falls apart literally overnight, practically possibly are desperately, desperately searching and we find these tools, these strategies, these techniques maybe people, practitioners, out of desperation, but these are tools that we have for life and you know it's like we learn them out of necessity in order to get well, but then, once we have regained our health, it's about maintaining maintaining our health. How can I stay this way? Because I mean, you know you've mentioned ADHD my brain is a very busy brain.

Jackie Baxter: 40:35

You know I have that, you know, constant. It's like the monkey with the symbols, fireworks, all the time, and you know it's a superpower. You know my brain is amazing. My goodness does it trip me up sometimes? And you know it's it's kind of knowing, okay, how can I use it in the right way? But also to turn it off. You know, I know the sort of things that are going to trip me up. I know the sort of characteristics that might be the ones that are gonna you, you know, pull me in the wrong direction, and I understand them now. So it comes back to this awareness, doesn't it? You know it's a breath awareness, awareness of your body, awareness of your nervous system, as you were saying, tracking your nervous system and understanding what state are you currently in, so we can then be the best version of ourselves, if that doesn't sound too cheesy, you know, maintain that health, and did you have?

Rachel Rock: 41:31

you done that? Have you done that, jackie? Have you on your? Because you're you teaching me that looking for the signs right Yawns and breaths and things that you are shifting yourself? That is something I probably use every day. For me, my clear signal to myself that I am upregulated or in crash mode is when I can't get a full breath. That is when I know that something is awry. I just go and I can't get the full breath. And it happens when I'm doing EMDR all the time because I know that that is awry, like I just go and I can't get the full breath. And it happens when I'm doing EMDR all the time because I know that that is what's happening. It's that stress response, isn't it?

Rachel Rock: 42:12

It's that trauma response, those tiny little things that if you just knew to ask yourself or recognize, it's a game changer. It gives you a power to care for yourself in a way that nothing else can.

Jackie Baxter: 42:26

When it comes back to strategy number, I think it's number three, understanding, doesn't it? You know? Understanding what is going on in your body, what is triggering you, what are your stressors, where are you in your nervous system? And therefore, leading on to strategy number four, building your toolkit. And I think it's something that everybody building your toolkit and I think it's something that everybody, whether they're someone with long COVID, me, cfs, or someone who is quote, unquote completely healthy, everybody should understand about their nervous system. Because, again, it's that maintaining health.

Jackie Baxter: 43:00

If you're lucky enough to have not experienced something like long COVID, you know you want to maintain your health so you don't become unwell. You know, and I think you know we're looking at this from having been through this horrendous experience, you know, and as you said, you know you've learned a lot. I look at it the same. You know it's one of the silver linings of this experience is that I have learned a lot. You know it was a very hard lesson, but you know I have learned a lot and life is so much better as a result. I just wish I hadn't had to go through it in just in order to get there.

Jackie Baxter: 43:39

Um, but you know, kind of coming back to what you were saying. Um, you know it, it is that kind of you know, if, if everybody understood the power of health better, I think we would treat it with more respect. And I think maybe that's what it is it's valuing health above really anything else, because it is the most precious thing that we have, and you and I know what it feels like to have kind of lost that, and for me it makes me all the more grateful to have regained it. And to you know, treat my body with more respect. I suppose you know and that's not blame for anyone who's unwell, it's maybe the benefit of hindsight, or lessons learned, or just understanding cause and effect. Maybe, um, I don't know, but I think it was a definitely a lot of lessons and I value it a lot more now yeah, no, it's, it's true, it's uh, you know, life happens while making other plans, said john lennon, I think.

Rachel Rock: 44:45

And you know it wasn't part of my plan, but you know you need to. We have to again. We have to be adaptable and figure out how to react to what's being given to us, thrown at us, and and looking for the tools and being open and understanding what the connections are and, as you guys have also said a lot in the breathing techniques and everything, it's also just not exposing yourself to people or things that don't make you happy or don't make you fulfilled or don't. You know there's things in the world, I mean and you know it's the everyday right now, right, everything is being turned on its head, and so do you not pay attention? Well, that's a hard thing to do, it's incredibly stressful, but do you learn how to pay attention?

Rachel Rock: 45:41

Yes, you get. You get better and better. So you know there's, there's a lot of people out there who are still suffering, which that's the hardest part of of the conversation is. You know we've figured it out through all sorts of somewhat luck and somewhat effort, um, but the people who are still out there. So thank you for doing this podcast still.

Jackie Baxter: 46:07

No, thank you. And thank you for sharing your story, because you know, as you say, there are so many people who are still on that journey and it is so important to share that hope and to share some ideas, and I'm sure there are things that you've said today that will resonate with people. People will be having their light bulb moments and going, oh okay, that resonated, or I'm gonna go try that, or I'm gonna think about that in a slightly different way, which maybe allows me to access something different. Um, so I think you know it is so important and you know, as, as you said, you know, life happens and what our job is. I think, and what is important is that we are able to weather that storm.

Jackie Baxter: 46:52

You know, the resilient, regulated nervous system is not a nervous system that is totally happy all the time. It's one that is able to deal with those stressors when they happen, because they they do. We can't avoid them. So thank you so much for coming along sharing your story. It's been such a delight to chat with you and I'm so pleased that life is good. So thank you so much.

Rachel Rock: 47:19

Thank you, Jackie.