I am very proud of my career and the building of our wealth management business. We have four bio children (and one we picked up as an exchange student in 2012). I am only more proud of them than my business. I felt like the company was our sixth child and we raised it from concept, through infancy and into maturity. The firm was the manifestation of the type of practice I had dreamed about, and I felt was sorely lacking, especially after my time in a major wirehouse brokerage firm. My plan has always been to continue to work and serve my clients well into my seventies.
This plan was abruptly altered on the second day of my stay in the local hospital diagnosed with Covid pneumonia. On this day, I was convinced that I would not make it out of the hospital and, in April 2021 I would be the third child to predecease my parents. Spoiler alert: I made it out and lived to tell about it. Fortunately, I had an amazing staff who stepped up and took care of all of our clients and their needs. Unfortunately, I was out of commission for a while. Longer than I ever anticipated.
I recovered very slowly and a physician friend strongly advised me to get out of bed, go outside, and make myself walk every hour. It was important to keep moving and make my lungs, which were still greatly diminished, keep working. Painstakingly, I did just that. I believe I would have lost a race to the old man from The Carol Burnett Show played by Tim Conway. It may have taken 15 to 20 minutes to make one lap around the outside of my house. Within weeks I could do two laps in the same time.
Fast forward several months and I was back at work for maybe four to six hours a day. By July, I found myself right back in the hospital, this time for tachycardia, which is a fancy way to say racing heart. My resting heart rate stayed above 100 beats per minute for 36 hours and between 120 and 150 for over 12. All the while stuck in a hospital bed in the cardiac ward hooked to machines and IVs. It was impossible to walk, even if I was not connected. I was exhausted. I felt like I had just set a personal record for running a marathon.
Even though I was scared, I did not think this to be a fatal affliction. But I did realize that it would be impossible to return back to the clients, staff, and career that I loved in the same way. I needed to find a successor who could take over and continue to care for our sixth child. We needed a foster parent.
We found the right foster parents and sold the firm. I stayed on for a couple of years to make sure that the transition would go smoothly, but I was always tired. I have been tired before. I have worked hard and felt the exhaustion of a job well done. But this was a different type of exhaustion, a fatigue, which could not be refreshed regardless of the hours I could sleep. It was chronic and debilitating. To an outside observer, I probably looked fine, but I would get winded just walking up a flight of stairs (or tying my shoes) and I would hit the proverbial wall by around 4:00 pm. If I chose to push myself and make myself work the hours I needed to, I am convinced that it would not have ended well. I felt like an airline pilot, who after 35 years of flying, developed a twitchy eye. Imperceptible by passengers and staff alike, but aware that it is best for all involved to stop flying.
This led me to explore ways in which I could recover. I groped around in the dark doing my research and working with physicians to try and figure out the source of my fatigue. All signs pointed to “Long Covid” which as it turns out, is a catch-all phrase that means ‘we don’t know what the hell is wrong with you.’
I continued to struggle for the next couple of years with no noticeable improvement in my stamina. As a person who in the past always prided himself on his self-reliance this was devastating. Finally, an MD friend of mine confessed to me that “our kind of medicine” will not be able to solve this for you. He suggested that I go to a functional health doctor, which is what I did two weeks later. At the end of my rope and with no other prospects available, I submitted to a battery of tests.
Guess what? He figured it out. As a result of the tests the doctor determined that I had stage three adrenal fatigue. This was both good and bad news. I suppose it was good to identify what the source of the problem was, but bad in that recovery would take years.
As a refresher from human biology class in high school, the adrenals produce cortisol to help handle stress and, also known as the flight or fight response when faced with a dangerous situation. Mine just shut down, so I had no reserve, my tank was empty. I am about a year and a half removed from that diagnosis and have been working hard to recover my strength, stamina, energy, and resilience. I am so much better than I was before the diagnosis, but not back to 100% yet.
In the year and a half, I have been under his care and direction with a treatment plan, but that only gets you so far. I have continued to research the issue and supplement his treatment plan with my strategies and tactics. It is this last portion that led me to discover more about my health, immune system, and how to support it than I otherwise would have. It is what I have learned that is the impetus for my desire to share what I discovered, which leads me to you, dear reader.
To the extent that you are interested, I hope to keep you engaged. I know that a blog about one person’s health issue is not that interesting. But now that I have time, and I am post-career, I plan on writing and delivering messages that I hope you find uplifting, diverse, educational and, compelling enough that you would want to read the entire post and even share it with someone you love. That is my goal and that is how I got here. I plan to use the written word, videos, an Instagram account, and photos to appeal to you.
Will you love everything? Probably not. Think of a Venn Diagram where two circles overlap greater than 50%. That’s my goal. BTW I love Venn Diagrams. I am glad you are on the journey with me, and I promise not to waste your time.