My Experience with Covid

The beginning of September my family and I caught Covid.  Before we go any further I want to mention that I am not a doctor or a professional healthcare provider.  I am sharing my experience and what helped me.  I strongly encourage you to do your own research.    

Since we started hearing about Covid, I started really taking care of my immune system.  Eating right, hiking a bunch, and taking immune tonic herbs.  I know that there are a lot of people out there that won’t believe in this, but I think if you get sick this can be a good thing.  I am not saying that I purposely get sick, but I am saying I don’t get nervous around sick people.  I think of the immune system like it’s a muscle.  If I don’t use it, it's going to get weak.  When you work out a muscle, it gets sore, and it sucks, but it also gets stronger.  Same thing with the immune system.  

Anyways,  I am not going to lie, the first two days were horrible!  It started off with a headache.  I don’t ever remember having worse body aches in my life. I got a mild cough and a little bit of sniffles. I could smell and taste, but most things tasted horrible!  By the 3rd day, thankfully my headache and body aches were gone.  I just felt like I had a moderate cold for the next few days. Things slowly started tasting right again.   

I also had a touch of brain fog, but it wasn’t horrible.  However, I was anxious for two weeks after I tested negative.  I knew prior that this could be a problem.  I read a few months ago that covid can affect the nervous system.  When people lose their smell and taste, this is a struggle with the nervous system.  

I thought I would share with you what I did for both my immune system and nervous system during and after covid. 

As soon as we tested positive for Covid, we started taking supplements of vitamin C, vitamin D, NAC, and Quercetin for our immune system.  I added Reishi and Turkey Tail powder to my food and drinks.  

Since we had body aches, I knew we had fevers, so we drank yarrow and peppermint tea.  Yarrow is a diaphoretic, which means instead of stopping the fever, it dilates the pores and pushes out what is causing the fever.  Peppermint is also a mild diaphoretic, but it also helps mellow out the bitter taste of yarrow.  My husband is picky and he was all for this tea.  I do want to add that the diaphoretic action only works when the herbs are warm/hot.  

I took mullein, yerba santa, elecampane, and wild cherry bark for the respiratory. I used Planetary Herbal Old Wild Cherry Bark Syrup which is very popular, however, I also really like Honey Gardens Wild Cherry Bark Syrup.

I also started taking a vitamin B complex and Omega 3 fatty acid for the nervous system and brain.  I added Lions mane powder in my food and drink to help prevent brain fog as best as possible.  I made a lot of herbal teas with nervine tonics and also added some nervine tonic tinctures to my drinks.  

Nervine tonics are herbs like ashwagandha, lemon balm, oat straw, linden, skullcap, passionflower, chamomile, St John’s wort, motherwort, and hawthorn. I concentrated on oat straw because it is packed with a bunch of vitamin Bs, which is so important for the nervous system.   

I do want to add that on the first day, I became very nauseous.  This could have been a Covid symptom, however, my gut is telling me that I threw too many supplements at my system at one time.  So the next few days I broke up my supplement, I took some in the morning, and some in the late afternoon and this really helped.  

A few days into Covid and about 2 weeks after, my anxiety flared up some.  I continued to focus on nourishing food, and nervine tonics.  In the past, I have realized that if I am not active enough, this can also cause me to be anxious.  I was just in my house for 10 days, not feeling the greatest, and not doing much.  I have a theory, and I have had this theory for a few years now.  Our body is always producing energy, if we are not doing anything with this energy that our body is producing for us, where is it going?  For us anxiety sufferers, it's going to cause us anxiety.  

So I started hiking a bunch once I was well enough.  This helped so much.  I also think all the movement helped remove the remaining mucus I had in my body.  It took me about 3 hikes and I was 100% back to normal.  I am not telling you that you need to hike, but I am recommending that you get outside, get some sun and fresh air, and movement!  

One more thing that I want to add, about a year ago I talked with two nurses, on two different occasions.  They both had the same theory, which is for the most part (there are exceptions), people who got really sick are people who didn’t move at all when they were sick.  They are the people who have really bad respiratory symptoms.  This made sense to me, so I did a lot of gentle moving while sick.  I did the dishes and tidied up the house.  Checked up on my family and made sure they were taken care of.  Nothing crazy, but some movement.   

So this is what I did, and I am hoping there are some things in here that can help you!