Spike Protein & Long Covid | Summer Powers, DNP, CRNP, ACNP-BC

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of you're the Cure. I've got a special guest today talking about the Spike protein. Man, I'm telling you guys, this synthetic man made, influenced or however you want to describe this protein, this foreign protein in the body can wreak havoc. And we're seeing that in the clinical setting for sure. At least some physicians and clinicians around the country are. Others are seeing it and they don't realize they're seeing it because they're not aware of it. So to be able to get continuing medical education outside the pharmaceutical only model of cme, you've got to get outside that box to think differently, to help your patients. And that's what we try to do here. And our guest, Summer Powers is here to tell us about how she got outside that box too, and also what that led her to. She works at the Microvascular Research foundation, so that's a new organization. I'll let her explain all that. But I just want to say this is the Spike protein is now something that we here at Veritas, our clinicians have to consider. When we have patients with symptoms of unknown etiology, unknown origin, just these random weird symptoms that don't fit into any other diagnostic category, we have to start looking at the Spike protein. There's a lot of unknown about this and there's more and more being known and there are treatment options, but a lot of physicians only get educated through their email inbox. It comes from the AMA or Medscape or I don't even know where I've been out of that world for so long. So they're just unaware. And nothing against those guys, they're busy. They're seeing 50 patients a day like I used to and they don't have time to look outside that box. But unfortunately a lot of patients are suffering. They contact our office and I know our guest Summer Powers, their office too. So we're doing this to try to raise awareness and to help people. So, Summer, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. [00:02:06] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to get to talk to you today and share with the audience something I hope that'll be insightful that hopefully they can use to empower themselves and to get the care that they need and if they're a provider to help, you know, look outside the box and take care of these people. Because it's been quite a journey with COVID and this bite protein, as you know, in your practice as well. [00:02:32] Speaker A: Yes, ma', am, it for sure has. We've had to think differently and, you know, try. And that's what I do want to remind any practitioners that may be listening, that original definition of evidence based medicine, I like to always go back to that because it is the best available published research data. But in conjunction with your clinical experience and expertise as a clinician. And obviously the more experience you have, the many more years you've done this, the more you can rely on that and other experienced clinicians. But then the third part of that definition of evidence based medicine was considering the patient's wishes and their belief system. I mean, they're a part of this too. And actually the patient's beliefs trump clinical experience, which trumps the published data. And so we sometimes we forget and get that flipped out of order. So we always need to go back to the patient, the patient, the patient, what's best for the patient. What do they think? What's their gut hunch? I'm not saying it's always right, but you can gain a lot from that. And obviously if they want to pursue a certain area, you know, walk with them through that and try to help guide them through that. And of course, our clinical experience, I've learned that more than anything, especially through Covid. We just. I shouldn't go on this tangent, but had a sawed in the news recently, a very prominent local medical authority talking about Ivermectin just went over the counter here in Texas. But part of the article he said, and there are absolutely zero studies that show ivermectin is effective at all. For Covid, that's a whole nother podcast we don't need to get into. But my point being we need to be open minded in that evidence based medicine. Let's do look, look at the data, but then let's take in clinical experience. So, Summer, let's talk about maybe some of your history. [00:04:22] Speaker B: Okay. [00:04:22] Speaker A: How you got into medicine, why you got into medicine and what you were doing. And then, you know, obviously it's a big story. We want to hear the whole thing of into what you're doing now. And then we can actually talk about some of that science too. [00:04:34] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, so I am a nurse. I'm a nurse practitioner, actually. I went to nursing school many years ago and no one in my family really is medical, so I'm not really sure how I got led into that, but I really just felt called into nursing and then, you know, went on to pursue a master's degree in adult acute care as a nurse practitioner and spent majority of my time as a clinician. In cardiology, in private practice, and then kind of hopped over into academic medicine. I went back and got my DNP and I started teaching nursing. And so for the last 16 years I've been working in inpatient cardiology and also in the academic, you know, world as a nursing faculty. So that's kind of where I was in a bridge, working clinically a day, a week and teaching full time when the pandemic started in 2020. And I remember when we first heard about what was going on, it was March and we were about to go on spring break and we were kind of talking about shutting, people were shutting things down and all the things, I don't really know. We thought what we knew quarantine would look like at that time, but that's what everybody's kind of talking about, that's what we're gonna do. But we kind of all took it, I guess, light heartedly. We'd be back after spring break. So I kind of got some stuff out of my office and went home. I still had to work clinically a day, a week, but my faculty job became remote at that point because they had shut pretty much everything down on the academic side. So I started teaching remotely during that time. And I had a two year old that was potty training, so that was fun. And I was working one day a week as a nurse practitioner in inpatient cardiology. And of course, you know, we were, you know, necessary staff. They considered us, you know, critical staff. So we had to go, you know, so the days I had clinical work, I had to go to the hospital. My husband, he's also a nurse, so he had to go to work every day, you know, that the clinic and hospital was open. So basically we just tried to piece together child care and get through it and, you know, work remotely. When I was working, you know, teaching and then go into the hospital, it was interesting because the first little bit of going into the hospital working, I mean, it was really terrifying, you know, because at that point we just knew there was a pandemic and we didn't really know how this virus was transmitted. We knew people were dying, they were getting infected. They started, you know, quarantining us, masking everyone, you know, 6ft distance. But we weren't entirely sure, you know, exactly how it was transmitted. It was just going really. Everything was kind of going really quickly. Of course we were inundated with social, social media and, you know, every time you turn on the news, you're hearing something and you don't know what to believe. But I remember walking into the hospital, and every time I would pass, you know, someone, you know, six feet away, obviously I would be thinking to myself, like, are they carrying it? Is this. The person who's going to give it to me is going to, you know, I'm going to take it home to my child. I think I had a lot of guilt, you know, the moment, you know, going to the hospital, exposing myself to this, you know, by no choice but exposing myself to it, and then coming home to my child who's, you know, with strangers basically all day that we're trying to piece together child care, you know, am I going to pass it to her? And, you know, what's going to happen? So there was, you know, there's a lot of unsettled, you know, feelings, a lot of guilt. But, you know, I mean, in healthcare, you just do what you have to do. If it snows, you go and you sleep at the hospital. You know, you do what you have to take care of patients. And we work together as a family as best we, to get our job done. So that went on for a while, actually, and we kind of carried along for several months, making a new routine, trying to figure things out. And then in December of that year, 2020, there was a huge patient surge in our local hospital. And the nursing staff was just getting hammered, and there were patients everywhere. You know, they're running out of ventilators and space and all the things. And so reached out to the faculty and asked, you know, anybody with a nursing license, you know, would you be willing to come help us in the hospital? And of course, when they said that, I knew that I was going to go do that. I have no idea why. I just felt led to, you know, go help. These are our, you know, partners. These are our peers. Some of them were my former students. So I just felt the calling to go help. So I actually facilitated a staffing pool from our faculty or our nursing faculty and students. So we formed about 120 faculty and students to take over to the hospital to do team nursing to help the nurses with the, you know, crisis that was going on with the patient influx and the staffing crisis. So we started organizing our teams and we started asking people, and we're talking about people who haven't been in the hospital in 20 years. Some of my colleagues and of course, the students hadn't been in the hospital in several months because we had to stop their clinical rotations because of the pandemic. They cut all students out of, you know, educational training at that time. So we started dividing people. You know, if you want to go, it's voluntary for the students. And the faculty obviously weren't going to force anybody to do that. And then we started asking people, would you be willing to work with an actual COVID positive patient or do you not want to do that? So that's why we kind of divided people. Once we got them separated into Covid versus non Covid, we started putting people in, like, med surg and critical care areas. So my team, I had four students. We actually got assigned to the COVID icu. So what was designated at the hospital as the COVID icu, that is where my team went. So I had four students. They were senior nursing students. This was around at the beginning of December. And we were going to be what they called the prone team. And for anyone who's familiar of what was going on kind of during that time when people got severe, you know, infections with COVID and they basically developed ARDs in their lungs. Very sick. You know, it's one of those things that viruses and other things can lead to. And you see on occasion, you know, in sick patients, certainly in ICUs and major medical centers, but this is an entire unit of those sick people who are being mechanically ventilated to try to, you know, support the respiratory status through a virus. We have no idea what's actually doing to their lungs. But sometimes when people have ARDs, they can improve oxygenation by turning them on their stomach. So for those of, you know, pruning is. That's what we did. We would turn these ventilated patients on their stomachs to try to improve ventilation. To do that, it takes like nine people and 45 minutes because they're hooked up to. They have a ventilator, they're hooked up to continuous dialysis. They have all these, you know, IVs and things. And so the staff really, you know, everybody on the unit is sick. Everybody on the units on a ventilator, they all needed to be turned. And of course, they don't have nine nurses every single time to do that. So we, what me and my team and other teams that we disseminated throughout the hospital, we helped prone the patients. That was our job. So the tricky part of that is that we were going into these ICUs with these COVID positive patients on ventilators, and we had to don all this ppe, which, again, you know, everyone's certain that this is some sort of respiratory transmission. But how exactly, you know, is it droplet? Is it airborne? We're not exactly sure. [00:12:46] Speaker A: So. [00:12:46] Speaker B: So we're going at rapid speed, learning how to put on this ppe. And so we were get on these masks and gloves, double gloves and shields, face shields, N95s, two gowns. You know, we don't really know what. What it is or how it's transmitted. So they just rapid speed teach you, you know, this full PPE to go in and then, you know, to take it off when you go outside the room. So, you know, we're going in these rooms for 45 minutes to an hour with all this PPE. I will say, oddly enough, that when I started doing that, working directly with COVID patients and donning all the ppe, I actually felt safer, honestly, from. From getting the virus than I was before in the hospital, because I would just have on a face mask and go take care of patients, and I would be, you know, definitely not six feet away from them, assessing them, taking care of patients. And for. For whatever reason, knowing that a patient was COVID positive in the ICU was different. And I felt more protected with all of that on and knowing that the patient was positive. I didn't have to guess, you know, when I was seeing other patients in the hospital. So I actually felt, you know, more comfortable taking care of those patients, which is crazy. Another one of our jobs was to help clear dead bodies out of the unit. Unfortunately, during that time, I did not see any patient get discharged. They went in, they were on a ventilator, and they basically passed away. And we, the students and our team would help prepare bodies to take them to the morgue and help turn over the room for the next patient. So basically, there was one way in there and there was no way out. It was pretty traumatizing. When you come into the unit, I just remember walking through there. All the patients were on complete isolation. They had pictures of their family members, like, stuck to the windows, to the glass. If they had children, maybe the children had drawn, like, a picture or something and. And stuck it to the glass. So these patients were in total isolation. They came in in isolation. No visitors were allowed. They died in isolation. There were times they would facetime, maybe the family, like right before they died or while they were, you know, trying to resuscitate them. But basically they came in, they were put on a ventilator, and they didn't leave. So it was. It was pretty traumatizing, I would say. I lived in a lot of fear, contracting it, not. Not for myself, but giving it to my child. So sometime pretty quickly on In December of 2020, we heard about the vaccine. And everybody wanted it because we're watching these people die at lightning speed. And so people ask me all the time, you know, were you vaccinated? Were you forced to be vaccinated? So there was a requirement in my institution to be vaccinated later on. But when I got the vaccine, I ran down there like I had. It was a Christmas miracle. I wanted it. We thought that was going to be the answer to stop this. I did not want. I did not want to give this to my child. So I was put on a high priority list because we were, you know, we were in a very high risk area. And so we were put on the list to get vaccinated first. And I wanted to be vaccinated. And so when they called our unit, I ran down there like I was the first contestant on the Price is Right. Like I had won the lottery. I was very excited to get the vaccine. Hindsight, I will tell you, was not a good decision. But at the time, that's what I wanted to do. So I did get my first vaccine in December of 2020. And, you know, I thought, okay, well, this will protect me. I got the second one a couple weeks later. So I had to. My husband, he was essential staff, but he was lower down on the priority list because he wasn't in a high risk area like I was. So he, he was, you know, a month or so, I think after I got vaccinated, he also got vaccinated. But things kind of continued like that. We were still working remotely. I was still taking students to the hospital almost until the end of the next summer. And then In August of 2021, they had opened up daycare again to essential staff. So if you were medical or you were someone who had to go to work, they had allowed our children back in daycare. Of course they're not masked in six feet distancing or, you know, anything, but, you know, so I drop her off at daycare, go work at the hospital. We were also having another surge then delta had come through at that point and we were, you know, still going to the hospital, help facilitate staffing and taking care of those patients. But they called me while I was at work one day and Millie, she was running a fever of like 105. So I mean, I knew right away she had Covid. What else could it be? So I went and got her. She did test positive and crazy enough employee health where I was working asked me to quarantine. From the family member in my house that is ill is my 3 year old child with 105 fever, which I'm not going to do, obviously. And so eventually, you know, I got sick as well, because I'm taking care of my sick child. You know, she ran pretty high fevers. I maybe had a sneeze or a cough. It really didn't. I mean, I worked out every day. My husband got it. He had really bad GI symptoms. They were pretty sick. But I was not really that sick at all. I worked out, I cooked, I took care of everyone. The worst part to me was being quarantined for two weeks and House with them with nothing to do. But I wasn't very sick. So we kind of just carried on while, you know, we worked out our quarantine and she was able to go back to daycare. And I remember I was working on my cardiology unit. My inpatient unit wasn't in the COVID icu, it was on the cardiac unit one day. And I, you know, tell my co workers, like, gosh, I don't feel right. I think I'm just having chest pain. Something isn't right. So we got an EKG on me, of course, and it was abnormal, and something was just weird about it. And the cardiologist I worked with was like, let's just send you down for an echo. So I went down actually with one of the fellows that I worked with who did the echo and read it with me at the bedside, and they were kind of perplexed looking at me, and I. I could see on the screen it wasn't normal. I actually had an effusion. So I had developed pericarditis basically from the virus. So it was interesting because they drew lab work on me, checking inflammatory markers and stuff. All of those were negative. So they weren't really convinced that I had pericarditis. In fact, my primary care physician tried to give me some muscle relaxers and anxiety medication because my lab work was normal. But I had a very clear pericardial effusion on my echo and I was having chest pain that was textbook pericarditis. Chest pain. From its presentation, my friend and cardiology colleague agreed to order a cardiac MRI on me. And sure enough, the cardiac MRI showed that I had pericarditis, which, you know, again, no inflammatory markers were positive. So, you know, they didn't want to latch on to that. But so I started treated treatment for that. And then Millie started getting colds from daycare shortly after that, and she would get a cold, and all of a sudden the both of us would start wheezing and have like, respiratory distress. I think between the two of us, we had about eight trips to the emergency department in respiratory distress. So she would get a cold. It was not necessarily Covid, although every time we got sick and had a symptom, they would make all of us test. Employee health would make us test. We basically drove through and got tested multiple times a week. And we had to fill out a symptom, symptom tracker every single day before we could go to work. But we never, we didn't get Covid. It would be a cold and it would develop into this really severe asthmatic type illness where both of us would go to the emergency room. Both of us would need, you know, nebulizers, inhaled steroids, oral steroids, all kinds of antibiotics. And so something was clearly not right about this. And that continued for several months. And of course I got sent to pulmonology. They sent me to a Covid clinic, a long Covid clinic or post Covid clinic. And they basically diagnosed me with post viral reactive airway disease, which is what they told me she had as well in December of that year. So that was 2021. Both of us got the flu and both of us were back in the emergency room, super, super sick. Negative for Covid, but very, very sick with the flu, respiratory distress. She was so, so sick that we basically were having to wake her up at home every two hours to give her nebulizer treatments just to keep her from being hypoxic. And I'm also nebulizing myself this entire time. So, you know, the other thing is I started developing these weird symptoms. My heart would race, my muscles would ache. So not only was I sick from a respiratory perspective, but like, my whole body would shut down. I would be in the bed for weeks. Even when my breathing would get better, my muscles wouldn't work. I couldn't walk to the bathroom without, you know, my heart racing, feeling like I was going to pass out. I had floaters, I had involuntary muscle contractions, all sorts of weird things, brain fog. I. I couldn't remember my phone number, my address, all sorts of things. So something was clearly wrong. And, you know, I'm medical. So I tried to, like, you know, advocate and get myself help. You know, I'm seeing a cardiologist now. I'm seeing pulmonologists. Like, what else do I need to do? Who else do I need to see? So pulmonology ran all the tests on me. You know, they didn't. Pulmonary function test. Oh, they look great. They would tell Me, they look great. Your pulmonary tests are or great, look at these numbers. But I would almost pass out and have to take my inhaler during the test. So I'm like, okay, I'm glad you're looking at that computer screen. It looks good. But can you look at me like I'm passed out in the chair? That's not okay. And I think that's when I first started like experiencing the gaslighting that unfortunately became all too familiar to me and my family because they would consistently say to me, your numbers look fine, your numbers look fine. And I would ask for a scan. So I had multiple scans of my lungs. I had a CT scan, I asked for a high resolution CT scan, which they did oblige to. I asked for a cta, which was declined, except once I was in the emergency room. They finally agreed to do a CTA after multiple times of the emergent emergency room visits. All of those were negative. And they kept saying, you know, it's reactive airway disease, it's reactive airway disease. But I just, it didn't seem right to me. It was, you know, and the fact that my daughter was all of a sudden having the same. I, I was trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together in my head, but I was so sick, I couldn't really do that. So somewhere along this road, I end up getting five Covid vaccines. Every time I would get sick, my pulmonologist would say, you're, you're very high risk. I don't know what's going on with your lungs, but you're reacting to it. You cannot get this virus again. You need to get vaccinated. So I did end up receiving five Covid vaccines, which oddly enough I also got Covid four times along the way. So clearly those helped me. Unfortunately, I also, we also made the decision to vaccinate my child because for the same reason she was now, you know, in distress. Respiratory wise, we assumed she had the same sort of issue we were trying to prevent her from. And she also had Covid four times. So clearly that helped her. I had no idea that I'm just making this worse on myself the entire time, giving myself more spike protein all along. But you know, I did not know that at the time. I was just basically trying to live back and forth with doctors. I was in doctors appointments all the time to be told there was nothing wrong with me. I ultimately got sent and referred to psych because they thought I needed a psych evaluation since there was nothing wrong with me. I've Actually been referred to psych three times. But I was trying to be a good patient. I was trying to get better for my kid. So I did go to psych and they evaluated me and they put me through cognitive retraining. So I would go online with them for an hour and on a zoom call and they would teach me how to do a to do list and like, teach me how to make a grocery list. And it was really insulting, you know, And I would tell them, I don't. There's something wrong with my brain. I can't. I mean, I can do what you're asking me to do. I have a doctorate degree in nursing. I can't remember my address. And that just happened. It's not like this has been building, you know, for a couple of months. It just. I was fine yesterday and now I'm not. I'm not crazy. There is something wrong with me. But the more I pressed, I think the more they pushed back and, you know, the more questions I asked, the more pushback I got. So eventually I did become very depressed. I was definitely suicidal. I had many conversations with my husband nights of, you know, not being able to walk or breathe, of telling him, you know, I'm having these really deep, dark thoughts. I don't have any plans to execute because I know that's something as medical people we want to hear is if someone says, you know, they're thinking those things is, do you have a plan? And. And I would always say, you know, I'm in a bad place, but I don't have a plan because we contemplated taking me, you know, somewhere for the sake of, you know, you know, persevering, you know, and, and saving my life and my kid and my family. Looking back, I really think that it affected my brain and my neurotransmitters and it probably interfered with all those things. And in talking to patients now, I think that's definitely, probably the case. But at the time I just knew that I was sick. No one knew or believed that I was sick. And I just couldn't get well. So I started doing a little bit of research on my own when I could. And I found a case study out of UCSF where they had given some Covid, long Covid and we're starting to learn this term now. They had given them a trial of Paxlovid, which as we all know, is for emergency authorization for acute Covid, a five day treatment. So I took the article. They had given it to three COVID patients and they had some of their symptoms had subsided. So I took it to an immunologist at my facility and basically said, look, okay, no, no one believes me, but, you know, I'm having these persistent symptoms now. Your allergy testing me, testing my immune system. What if we try this? You know, what if I took this and, you know, and she was like, well, it's off label. And I said, well, I understand that, but here they did it, so can we try it? You know, I'm willing to do it. I'll sign a consent form. So she basically told me she was going to consult with her colleagues and get back to me. And I expected really to never hear from her again. But she did contact me a few days later and say, okay, we've agreed to give you, you know, five days of Paxlovid. What can it hurt? So I took it. And now what's interesting about Paxlovid is it's a very dirty drug. It has a lot of interactions and contraindications, if you're familiar with it. So I had to go cold turkey off of all of my breathing treatments, all of my inhalers, which I had not done in, like, almost two years. So I was very scared to do that. But it was kind of like a Hail Mary. So I did. And the whole entire time I was on the Paxlovid, I did not wheeze one time. I felt good. So I knew from the way the drug was made, it's basically two antivirals. It's one that is directly against SARS and one is HIV antiviral that they were using combination. So I knew it had something to do with viral persistence because obviously this virus is still in me. It's still replicating, doing something. So it did something. So I basically begged for more, and they told me no because it was off label. And at this time, I had been on a wait list to go to Johns Hopkins to their Long Covid clinic. And the people who were taking care of me, my pulmonologist, they knew that I was going to Hopkins. So they. They absolutely refused to do anything off label. They didn't want that in my chart that they had recommended that. As a matter of fact, they altered my chart when they found out I was going to Johns Hopkins. I could see where they had made changes and. And the data and, and. And the things I had said in the way I had presented my case and how I had asked for things, and they had denied it because they were off label and that they had, you know, told me against, you know, medical advice, things that I'd done and things. So I later found out that my charts were altered, which is interesting. But I decided I needed Paxlovid, that that was my answer. And so I started posting on social media, begging people, do you know anything about a trial? Does anybody know anything about the drug? Is there anyone willing to give me this drug? I will come to you. And this was, you know, such a godwink. I had a friend text me, and she's like, hey, I was on my daughter's Facebook account tonight, which my friend does not have a Facebook account. She was on her daughter's Facebook account. She said, I don't know anything about this drug you're talking about, but I know this crazy doctor in Birmingham who's treating Long Covid and treating Covid now I live in Birmingham, and he's literally 10 minutes down the road from me. So he's. She's like, you should contact him. And I said, oh, great. So I start, you know, looking him up. Dr. Jordan Vaughn in Birmingham, and he's at Medhel, which is literally 10 minutes from my house. So I decide that I'm going to go see him, and he's going to give me some Paxlovid. And so I called the office multiple times to talk to him. I mean, like, they're going to let me just speak to him on the phone. It must have been that brain fog getting to me. But I decided I was going to talk to him on the phone, and that did not work out for me. So I made an appointment to be seen. And I went in there with stacks of my scans and all these medical things and, you know, all these articles I had printed out, and I had no idea what I was going up against. He was way more informed than I was. But I met his nurse practitioner, Katie. She came in to see me first, and she listened to me and thumbed through some of my stuff. And I just remember her looking at me and saying, okay, well, we're gonna go get you. We're gonna get you better. And I smirked at her. It's funny now looking back, because I work with her. I'm like, okay, whatever. I don't know who you are, who you think you are, but I just need to talk to him and get some Paxlovid, you know, because I've been seen by all these people, hematology, geneticists, you know, at this point, I've. I've seen them all. They've sent me to all these people. And she heard my story and was like, we'll get you better. Okay. So I remember Dr. Vaughn coming in and he popped open his computer and he said, you know, I've talked to Katie and I want to show you something. And he starts going through this PowerPoint with me talking about Spike protein and talking about micro clotting and explaining what he was doing in treating Long Covid. And he was following data out of South Africa and the UK and he explained. Explained all that to me in PowerPoint. I just remember, like, putting my hand on top of his and just bursting into tears and thinking, yes, yes, there is something wrong with me. This is what it is, and he knows how to fix it. And so basically after that, I didn't care what he said. If he told me to swallow razor blades, I would have done it. Because he, for the first time in almost two years, had looked at this disease. First of all, he listened to me as a patient number one, where they're all looking at the screen, looking at my numbers, telling me I'm fine. But he validated that I was sick and, and, and heard me say that and, and believed that I was sick. And then he explained in my whole entire body what was going on. And what I had been doing before was a segmented. Go to the cardiologist, get, you know, get something for your symptoms there. Go to pulmonologist, get an inhaler. Everybody was treating their own system. No one was thinking about what on. So I was very happy that he was listening to me. We decided that day. We talked for several hours that day. He wanted to try to infuse me with monoclonal antibodies and then start me on triple anticoagulant therapy. And I said, yes, let's do it. Let's do it right now. So he infused me that day with monoclonals. I've never been so sick in my entire life. I remember laying on the bathroom floor. That weekend was my daughter's birthday. My parents were here in town from Mississippi. I was puking my guts up, every joint in my body, every muscle in my body. I was writhing in pain, vomiting on the floor, thinking, wow, this is what Covid detox feels like. I don't. I mean, there's something happening in my body. Covid was bad, but this is. This is bad. I'm detoxing. And I remember texting Dr. Vaughn and saying, you know, I think I'm dying. I feel like I'm dying. I kind of want to die. I felt really bad. And he was like, this is great. This means it's working. It's moving stuff around. And I told him, I said, I really want to throw punch you right now. I feel awful. But he's right. He was right. I knew that it was moving stuff around in my body. I could feel it. And I knew that he had the right idea. And so a couple days later, I started on anticoagulants. I took those for nine months and progressively got incredibly better. Now, right when I started treatment, finally my brain could start working again. And I told him, I said, I've gotta. I gotta prove this to these people. Like, I've got to prove to them that they're wrong and. And we're right and there's something wrong with me. So I finally get a D dimer. It's elevated. No one has ever checked this on me, which I find really interesting, that I'm a female going into the emergency room with, you know, shortness of breath and respiratory distress. Not once has anyone ever checked D dimer on me. They did a CTA for the audience. [00:36:57] Speaker A: Guys, that is a blood test to see if you have clots, big clots, little clots, any kind of clots. So it should be a typical test. You would check if someone has some unexplained shortness of breath. And the anticoagulant, she just mentioned triple anticoagulant therapy for nine months. And those are various sorts of. We think of them as blood thinners, but basically ways to thin the blood or deal with clots. But I just want to interpret that for the audience. Go ahead. Yeah, you're good. Got a D dimer check because you wanted to prove those. [00:37:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I wanted to prove. And so I started looking at. In Italy, they were doing some scans, they were doing some spec CT scans, and they were finding perfusion defects on these people who did not have anything on their CTAs. So then I'm taking these articles to my pulmonologist. I want this. I want a spec ct. I want you to do a nuclear perfusion scan, one or the other, on me. I. I want you to do this. And they said no, because all of my scans were normal. Well, I had taken that at face value up until this point because I was so sick. So I went and got the scans myself, and sure enough, the summary read normal. But I went back and read the actual scene scan. And in every one of those, I had atelectasis in my basis. So for the audience who doesn't know the bases, the bottoms of my lungs were collapsed. And if I'm 85 and sitting in the bed, not doing anything, then okay. But I'm a 40 year old who was exercising a few months ago and I have collapsed lung bases. That doesn't make any sense. So now I have these abnormal CT scans that they basically read as normal, but they refused to do a spec CT or VQ scan. So I basically went to my cardiologist who is my friend, and I said, look, I'm going to Johns Hopkins, I've got to have this scan done. They want me to have the scan done inside network and I can only have it done here. So my cardiologist actually ordered it on me. I remember I was at my office at the School of Nursing. He called me on my cell phone and he was freaking out. He said, summer, you have clots in your lungs. And I said, I know, I know, thank you, thank you for calling and telling me. He's like, what do we do? I said, nothing. Like, I know that I have them. I'm thankful that you saw them. He said, I'm going to call your pulmonologist. I said, go ahead. And they quit answering my portal messages after that. They refused to see me as a patient, basically because I had gone around them, which I find interesting because now I am a patient of theirs with a elevated D dimer, with an abnormal VQ scan, perfusion defects in the same places that my adelectasis was on my CAT scan. I mean, if any reason I need a pulmonologist, now is actually the time. But I was basically, they refused to see me after that. I did end up going to Johns Hopkins because I was already on the list. And now working with Dr. Vaughn, he, he had proposed the idea of, you know, I want to open a long Covid clinic. Would you be interested in working with me? And I said, yes, absolutely. I had a day, a week that I could do clinical practice and I shifted that away from the hospital to working with him in his clinic. And I said, look, I've already got this appointment with John Johns Hopkins. I'm going to go up there, I'm going to show them all this data we have. I'm going to show them myself, I'm going to show them all my scans and then they're going to believe me and then they're going to help us. So I kept the appointment. I flew to Johns Hopkins. I was the wellest person in that clinic, which is really scary and sad. Every patient in there was in a wheel, in a wheelchair. They were on oxygen. I heard someone at the desk tell the lady I Can't pay for this visit today. My co pay because I lost my job. I'm on disabled, you know, I can't get disability. And I just remember thinking to myself, this is terrible. Like they're not doing anything for these patients either. It's the same situation I've been in with my pulmonologist and I want to just lead them out of here, you know, tell them the truth. But I ended up seeing a doctor there. She was very, very unkind to me. I had printed portfolios of me and my daughter and our story, trying to get help. She took it, I took it everywhere I went. I spent thousands of dollars getting these printed. She threw it in the trash in front of me, told me that I'd wasted her time, my time, and basically to leave. I had disclosed to her that I was anticoagulating, getting anticoagulated at that point on the blood thinners. And she basically mimicked that idea and kicked me out of her office. So that didn't work out very well. But in my trip to Baltimore, we actually had a zoom appointment with Dr. Risha Pretorius, Dr. Vaughn and I, where she taught us how to use the microscope and see stain patients plasma and look for these amyloid clots. And for the first time we learned how to do that. I was in my hotel room, my dad had accompanied me and he's like, I don't know what you are doing, who you're talking to. Dr. Vaughn was in Birmingham and she was in South Africa. And so we learned how to do that that day. And then we started storing my plasma. Every week that I was on treatment, I went and we froze plasma. I have a whole freezer full, just my plasma. And we kind of learned about this microscope thing. And that's when he started testing patients and looking under microscopy and learning about those things, which really propelled our treatment. I did, you know, as I said, go on board with him working. And then we were trying to figure out what to do with my daughter. So I started, you know, researching pediatric Long Covid clinics. I knew there was some genetic component to this, obviously, because we have the same, you know, situation going on. But I found a clinic in D.C. at Children's national, where they quoted Dr. Richa Pretorius in one of their articles about Long Covid and pediatrics. So I knew they were working off the same theory. So I contacted them. It took me eight months to get in to see them. We ultimately did go take my daughter to dc. There was a hematologist there who saw her, who agreed to also treat her and anticoagulate her. We started her on a mix of kind of what we were using aspirin and some other things. And in about five months, she came off of all her breathing treatments. So we did find out that both she and I are homozygous for PAI1 polymorphism, which, if you don't know, it's a very common genetic clotting disorder that like 30 to 40% of the patient population has, but it interferes with fibrinolysis. And both of us were homozygous for it. We found out. So it would make sense that if the spike protein and induces this, you know, micro clotting, we have a hard time breaking those down. It's deposited in our tissues. So I carried on for a while. She finally got better. I was still doing my teaching job, but I was working now two days a week with Dr. Vaughn. And then we had talked about, you know, me transitioning full time and. And what that might. Would look like and, you know, had. I had been at that institution for like 20 years, so it's kind of hard for me to, like, you know, jump and make that decision. But I knew that my heart was in patient care, and I had been taking care of patients now in the clinic with him, seeing patients like myself who've been all over the country to Mayo and Duke and, you know, Hopkins and all these places as well. And they come here and I can say, I know I can help you. I can fix you. We can, you know, we can do this together. I've been there. My heart was really tugged toward that, but I was trying to, you know, figure out a plan, a transition plan. This summer, I got called into the university compliance office, and they were investigating the practice that I was doing with Dr. Vaughn. And they began questioning me. But they were very obscure about their questioning, asking me what I did in my clinical practice and things that I prescribed and things like this. And I finally just bluntly said, what is it that I've done that you're accusing me of? You know, or what. What can I tell you? Because I. I mean, I. I'll be honest with you if you'll just ask me. And they finally asked me about prescribing Ivermectin. So I knew right there when I heard that, that this was a witch hunt, that I was not going to win. And I, you know, said, yes, I've prescribed ivermectin. I take ivermectin, I give it to my patients, you Know, I think it has its place and what I do and you know, I've been doing this through contract for two and a half years. You know, it's not a secret. It's. I've never, you know, hidden that. But after that phone conversation and the investigation and they told me they were going to carry out, you know, full investigation of, of me and all the things and my clinical practice, I just made a decision that day. Like I'm in a place where my missions no longer align. It is obvious to me that I cannot help people in a place that didn't help me and now is trying to restrict me from helping others. So I had a conversation with Dr. Vaughn that evening and we just decided to pull the trigger and jump over full time. It's kind of funny the, the place that treated me that nothing was wrong with me now investigating me, which I feel certain they would have ultimately, you know, there would been some sort of punitive action for something that's not illegal, which is crazy to me. But so I decided to come full time as a clinician and we, Dr. Vaughn, it's been, you know, over a year ago, he developed the Microvascular Research Foundation, a non profit, to start doing some trials and looking into, you know, things he was doing, partnering with other people. So he asked me to be the director of clinical research of the foundation and also to do clinical practice. So that's what I've been doing for the past several months, is working with him full time and kind of wearing many hats, which I love. So I've been doing a lot of education, getting some clinical stuff going, clinical trial stuff going, partnering with other people, reaching out, trying to make collaborations and spread the word, and also getting to work as a clinician and taking care of long COVID patients. I've recently partnered with Carrie Hodges, who is our Lyme expert and we're going to be starting a Lyme long Covid program because there has been a lot of crossover. For those of you who are familiar, Long Covid has reactivated a lot of Lyme disease. Lyme patients are getting sicker because of COVID A lot of them are vaccine injured, so. So that's what got me here today. And to talk about all the things and spike protein, which I'm completely embedded with, but I've done a lot of detox myself. I think we learn things every day. I think, you know, clotting is certainly, micro clotting is certainly a huge foundation for the problems that Covid causes, but it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. You know, it sets off an inflammatory process. We're learning about all sorts of other things that the clotting is actually the easy thing to deal with. It's what, what do we do? And we've disrupted all these other systems. So it's, it's been a huge learning curve for me. It's been a huge, I would say, lifestyle change. I'm a rule follower. I was always taught to follow the rules. I was taught critical care. That's what I've done my whole life. You check a box, patient has a symptom, you give them a pill. It has completely changed the way that I look at things. I've had to basically unlearn everything that I've ever learned in medicine. It's sad. Being a patient on the other side has taught me a lot of empathy. It's taught me a lot of humility. I can't believe that we have a healthcare system. I think it was already broken, but I think Covid shattered it to pieces and exposed all of that. I can't believe we're still haven't moved forward from that after, you know, almost five years. We've learned nothing. Patients still come to me every day, and they've gone through an entire system of brokenness to get to us. They've spent tens of thousands of dollars to be told there's nothing wrong with them. And so I get up every day trying to fight the good fight for myself, for my kid, and trying to figure this out for everybody, because I think we're still learning every day. And I'm thankful to be in a clinical place where I have the ability to use my brain, because clearly, where I was employed before, that was not an option. It didn't follow their rules. So I'm thankful today that there are other people like you, Dr. Edwards, who also think outside the box and can promote healing with the body. I think there's a lot that we can do naturally and in an integrative approach, which we use both pharmaceuticals off label and by, you know, holistic things that we do. And I'm thankful to be in good company. I learned that we have a tiny army, but there's more people I meet every day, and I'm grateful for that, you know, marching forward for sure. [00:50:45] Speaker C: Are you ready to take control of your health together? You're not alone. Dr. Ben, as well as a mission driven team here at Veritas, created this online wellness membership. Because so many are suffering. We want to help more people by sharing the truth that we believe will change lives. Veritas Wellness Membership is more than just a wellness program. It's a movement designed to empower you with truth, practical tools and a support community at a price that's accessible for everyone. One membership covering your entire household. Upon signing up, you gain access to life changing educational resources, expert led webinars, live meeting, movement classes and exercise series, community groups and wellness initiatives, interactive classes as well as exclusive discounts on supplements and advanced lab testing. We also offer complimentary peace consults, a space for you to go deeper, discover who you were created to be and explore how stress contributes to disease. We believe in in getting to the root cause and understanding why what we believe truly matters. Our team of wellness navigators are here to guide you every step of the way. So whether you're just starting your wellness journey or ready to go deeper, there's something here for you. So jump in today. We can't wait to walk this journey with you. Visit veritaswellnessmember.com to get started. [00:52:24] Speaker A: What an incredible journey. Summer, I don't there's so many things I want to say. I mean, number one, just at the top of the show, what you described during those first days of COVID I mean, thank you for your selfless dedication to the patients and especially in those early days when it was a big unknown and just going in there and turning those patients every day and knowing they weren't going to walk out of there but you and your team giving it your all and your heart. And so thank you for your dedication and just, you know, it saddens me and you said it best right here at the end. I mean, this broken, broken health care system. And guys, did y' all hear Humble, excuse me, humbleness, humility. And I started saying that early on that there's a way to get out of this mess, there's a way to save this thing, there's a way to turn this around. But it's not going to happen until we can eat a couple of big helping doses of humble pie and say I'm sorry and say we were wrong here and we were wrong here and just there's zero. And then it's like it's been hardened even more hard. Hearts are even more hard and people are suffering. It's not about right and wrong. Y' all guys are wrong and we were right or any of that. And it's about people are hurting and suffering. And let's get, I mean for these poll, these doctors of yours, even at this point, so much evidence that you've Gathered these scans, the blood test, everything. And the clinical improvement. When you address the issue, you would think, and I know my audience for sure, that that's the reason they listen, they, they know the system's broken. I mean the name of the show is you're the cure. We've got to advocate for ourselves, we've got to educate ourselves. We're responsible for our diet and lifestyle choices. And unfortunately this is a perfect example guys to the audience this narrow, narrow, narrow training that we get. And this would take a whole nother episode that Summer could talk about. She's an educator, but we've been ever since that Flexner Report 1910 came out. Said kick all these naturopathic homeopathic education courses out and only allopathic. And this is what we've got. Symptom treatment with a pill, with a pharmaceutical. And it's just a, again a time and place for it. But it's so narrow. Give that life saving inhaler. Now let's open our mind, go deeper when something doesn't make sense, let's keep looking and digging and think outside the box and like I said, clinical experience from others. Let's call around, let's look at. Oh anyways. What. Just go, go ahead. Some. [00:55:08] Speaker B: You know it, I, I think I shared this with you when we first spoke, but I, I go back to this picture that I have found along my new path and it's a picture of a fish in a dirty fish bowl and it says, what do we do if this fish gets sick and we don't give the fish a pill? We clean the tank. We clean the tank and then we start from there. And what I have found along my journey is that we overlook that, you know, 100 of the time. The body is actually very smart and it can do a lot of things when given the proper tools such as food and nutrition, but also supplementing, you know, the things we don't have in our environment and boosting our immune system and getting those things right. Now I don't get sick at all because of the things that I do and the way that I eat and, and the supplements that I fuel my body with and movement and you know, exercise. I've, that has never been taught to me ever. It is, they have a cough, you give them a pill, you give them a med. I mean that's the way that we were taught. And when I began to question those things and they would say, well there's no evidence. And I'm like, I am the evidence. If you will look at Me. This is the evidence that you need. I understand your book and your checklist because I was taught by the same one, but I'm here. Like, look at me. I understand the number looks okay, but we have moved away from that. But I feel very blessed. Dr. Vaughn never did. And he always listened to patients. He listened to me. And he's. He has definitely allowed me the opportunity. I. I joined a group of wellness practitioners, and they asked me, when was your awakening from mainstream medicine? And I thought, I have joined a cult. I don't know what this is going on, but they're right. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. You know, we're in a system where you. You're drowning and you. You have to advocate for yourself. And unless you have that knowledge and you're empowered with it, either by yourself or for someone, through someone like you, then you never get that opportunity. People come to me all the time. They're not just long coveted patients. They're like, help me. My primary won't listen to me about X, Y or Z. They won't even check my vitamin levels. I mean, it's crazy to me. [00:57:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I. [00:57:28] Speaker B: Because, you know, but we're also bound by insurance. Insurance won't, you know, pay for it. And so I'm shocked every day. [00:57:35] Speaker A: Yep. Well, welcome to the cult. [00:57:38] Speaker B: Thank you. Yes. I'm so excited to be a part of it. [00:57:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So. And for the audience, especially any listeners that are suffering, that have gone to their doctor, they're not getting better. I mean, obviously spike proteins is subject today, but I learned along my journey, which started 13 years ago, there are other things. There's toxic black mold in this sheetrock of some buildings that you're breathing in every day. And if you're genetically predisposed and not be able to deal with that toxin, then that toxin can drive inflammation and symptoms. Anaerobic bacteria in the base of a root canal tooth. Anaerobes secrete some of the deadliest biotoxins known to man. And if you've had a root canal for years, and those anaerobes can constantly seeping that toxin into the system. Lyme disease that Summer mentioned earlier. So there's just certain toxins, germs, things outside the box that we never learned in school, in med school and nursing school. But they can drive inflammatory processes in the body, so there's always hope to go look deeper. Summer, we have just a. And we can go a little past the hour, but I do want to talk a little bit because people will ask on the spike protein, you've mentioned the micro clotting. So, guys, just imagine this spike protein in the body gets in the endothelium. That's the inner lining of the pipes of the blood vessels, and it can disrupt that, it can cause problems, and it can lead to clots. And especially genetically predisposed, like Summer and her daughter are to already not be able to break down clots. And 30 to 40% of the patients have this particular genetic defect or the population. So clotting is one thing, and. And we're still learning. As Summer said, we don't have a full understanding of what all it's doing. But I had a gentleman the other day, lots of brain fog. He was in his. I think he was 88, hypotensive episode. So he was getting lightheaded, dizzy, palpitations, brain fog. And he'd been healthy. I know he's 88, but healthy right up to this. And same thing. We checked the spike protein antibody level on him, and it was very, very high. So we initiated some things to deal with that. And he was 75% better in six weeks. And we've seen this. We could spend an hour talking about all these patients that we see like this, but give a little bit, maybe on the clinical side or. And what to do too come see y'. All. How do they find another doctor who may understand or what's the test they do? What about this spike protein antibody test versus a blood test? Y' all do just a little bit of that. We don't have a ton of time, but give a little bit of knowledge there. [01:00:07] Speaker B: So it's complicated because, as you know, in the US we don't have a direct measurement of the spike protein. I do know there were some working on it outside the country, and I have been in contact with those scientists. So we also test the antigen for the spike protein, but, you know, it's not a direct measure. We don't really know. I mean, we also test the nucleocapsid, which will tell us if you have natural antibodies. So if you've been exposed to the virus, the antigen, the spike antigen basically tells us you've been in contact with a spike. It doesn't necessarily differentiate whether it's the vaccine or the virus itself, but, you know, you. It does tell us you've had some sort of burden. I always ask people, when they come to talk to me, to see me the first visit, how many times have you had Covid? How many vaccines have you had? Because I think this is an Accumulative effect. The more you're exposed to the spike, the more you have it, the worse these people seem to be, you know, seem to be. In terms of symptomatology and getting rid of it, I don't think there's any secret potion for getting rid of the spike protein. I think that everybody's trying to figure that out. I think, you know, we, our mainstay is, you know, trying to calm down the immune system while we break up these clots and then, you know, getting rid of the spike protein. There's, there's lots of, you know, promising things. I think there's lots of detox kits and, and things that people are doing. I've actually done one myself, which I think worked. I took it for about three months. I could feel the spike protein moving around in my tissues. It brought back every long Covid symptom that I had had that has been stable for years. So I think that's sort of the great mystery is how to get rid of it. And I think there's some good promise about how to do that. I think the one thing that people can do most certainly right now is get their nutrition right and get their immune system right. And, you know, you can do that multiple ways. But, you know, seeing a practitioner who is willing to look into micro and macronutrients, look at your immune system, look at your inflammatory markers, look at those autoimmune diseases that it could potentially have set off because we are now seeing reactivated viruses, autoimmune diseases that are new, antibodies that are new. So the first thing is to find someone who's willing to look deeper than just getting a lipid panel at your primary's office, because that's not really going to tell you anything. And because we can't test for the spike, we have to look for what the spike causes. So that's kind of what we're doing is throwing the net really broad. Looking at antibodies, looking at, you know, clotting dysfunction, looking at anti, I mean, looking at inflammatory markers and trying to get to what it is that we can put pinpoint, right? And trying to get what the spike is affecting. Until we get those more direct measures, we do have a, an option to be seen in our clinics. You can do that remotely, you can do that on a hybrid basis. You can do that in person. So you, you can be seen in our clinic and we can help you through those programs. We're growing, so we have more practitioners now. We're starting to intake. We had, had a wait list that Was really long. But now that, you know, we have more of us on the team, we're able to intake more people. But basically finding someone who's believes, you know, in root cause analysis and that is willing to spend the time to listen to a good history and to look into further laboratory and diagnostic testing, I think is a good place to start. But also kind of has to start with you cleaning up. You know, I talk to patients so much about what they eat and, you know, what they expose themselves to because a lot of this is driven by inflammation and chronic inflammation, and we've got to get rid of it. And they can do that while we're trying to figure out the rest. [01:04:06] Speaker A: And you're speaking my language, guys. Summer's right on the money. Your body's so amazingly designed and it wants to detox itself, it wants to kill bugs, wants to restore things, wants to regenerate things, stem cells floating around in there to repair. And so the body has all this design healing designed into it. But like she said, you've got to give it what it needs to support those systems. So we need good sleep and sunshine and movement and deep nutrition and all the things. So you can start that today. And if you need help with that, Veritas Wellness Navigators are expert at that. So you can go to our website, veritas wellnessmember.com sign up today and get all that diet, lifestyle support. But Summer, what's the best way for people to follow you or the clinic? The foundation? Do y' all take donations if someone's just, you know, loves what you're doing and wants to help the cause? [01:04:57] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So we're med help clinics and you can go on our website and look up our long covet clinics and it will tell you how you can become a patient. Our Microvascular research Foundation also has a website that you can go to. We will happily accept your donations. We are trying to find some clinical trials because everyone needs evidence. But more importantly, we're trying to give patients assistance to get them the treatment that they need, which is often a lot of out of pocket expense. But we do have a website where you can donate specifically to patient assistance. And yeah, you can. We have a care coordinator who can get you in with our clinic if you want to be seen. [01:05:42] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Sommer, so much for sharing your story. I know it's been just such a journey for you and your family, but way to go. I mean, there's this love of the truth in you and you just kept going and going and going. And now you're going to be able to impact so many lives. And please give Our thanks to Dr. Jordan Vaughn also for him being a pioneer out there in Alabama. [01:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [01:06:08] Speaker A: Okay. All right, everybody share this far and wide. There's a lot of people suffering and unfortunately, you know, doctors go to med school and nurses go to nursing school with the right heart, the right intention, but then they get trained very narrowly. And so it's not all their fault, but they could be a little more humble. But share this far and wide because we want people to be well, too. So there are, there is hope. There's lots of practitioners now who are starting to kind of wake up and get re educated more educated. Broadly. More broadly educated. So there are places out there that can help folks that isn't just a symptom treatment, band aid. There's root cause resolution that can happen. So go find or utilize the online availability because right summer, y' all see folks from all 50 states. [01:06:55] Speaker B: Yeah, we do. And even outside the country, people are flying in. So we do have that ability. [01:07:01] Speaker A: Awesome. Okay, and one more time, some of that website before we go, med help. [01:07:06] Speaker B: Clinics long Covid and you can get directly on there and find all the information you need. [01:07:11] Speaker A: Perfect. Okay, everybody, I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. You're the cure. We'll be back next week with another great show. Bye. Bye.