Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curic and this is next Question today, part two of our Long COVID Deep Dive. If you haven't listened to part one yet, you should start there. It's right there in your feed. In part one, we left off with the stories of Shamir L. Smith and Deepest Sing Too long COVID patients whose symptoms and experiences in their own bodies were being dismissed by doctors and hospital staff. Often was told that I wasn't well in
my head, I was too anxious. I was starting to believe that the providers who are telling you was psychosomatic and it was anxiety driven. I truly felt like, Okay, well, I'm having a mental break. Unfortunately, these experiences are not unique. I think it's been an absolute nightmare for most people. Diana Barron is the founder of Survivor Corps, a grassroots COVID patient advocacy group that has shifted its focus to
long COVID. Survivor Core has about one hundred and eighty thousand members, and Diana says she's heard these stories of time and time again. It became in just like other chronic diseases, almost a modern day diagnosis of female hysteria where patients were going to doctors and being gas lit and being told that they had anxiety when they were actually having tachiccardia, which needs a cardiologist, not a psychologist.
And yes, people are anxious. I'm sorry. If you're not anxious in today's day and age, then you're not paying attention. But this isn't just anxiety. This is, you know, debilitating physical distress. Most people think that they are losing their minds. They might have survived, but they are dying a slow death. People come in good faith to try to seek help. They encounter a health care system that's still prepared to help them again. Dr Harlan Crumholtz, a Yield cardiologist and
long COVID researcher. Without objective measures of the illness, it becomes easy for professionals to dismiss them and to doubt even their existence beyond in someone's mind. And when I say that is it's sort of a lack of respect for what people tell us. It's sort of uh skepticism about people who are reporting these kind of symptoms. So many of these people, when they interact with the health care system, are seeing people who are who are skeptical
that this is real. It's real, but we don't understand what it is. And when when things don't meet the patterns that we're used to seeing. We're trained as pattern recognition professionals, as doctors. I mean, that's how we diagnose what's this pattern. And we're bringing together multiple pieces of information, what you're telling us, what the lab tests are saying. But when we lack the lab tests, we lack imaging tests,
we lack other measures of of what's going on. Then when we're left with what people are telling us, and right now with the health care system, its reaction to that is to be dismissive largely, and so we need to fight against that impulse and we need to figure out quickly what can we do to really understand what's
going on. We have to trust people, we have to listen to them intently, and we have to try to appreciate what it is that they're going through and and have be a call to action for us, not just something to dismiss, because there there is a lot of suffering. Thankfully, for me, last year May um which was also ironically my birthday, UM, I got a wonderful chance, a marvelous
chance that I don't take for granted. Tremir struggle to find help for more than a year, but her persistence eventually paid off and I met a wonderful Dr Lauren A. Bobbio who changed my life. She is a black woman, a young black woman who's just starting out her medical career and UM. She was the very first doctor that I met who said, Shamir, I believe you and UM. I still get emotional about it today because it meant it meant so much for me UM and so much
to me UM. Not only did it mean that I was going to be able to develop a healthy relationship UM with a with a doctor, but it it meant that she was actually taking notes. I could see her as she was typing, listening to me, UM, typing notes about my condition. She was the very first doctor who wrote a letter, a very uh sound letter to address to my my employer, to let them know that I
was simply unable to work. And here with the reasons why I believe that her affirming me and validating my condition is also the reason why I luckily have been able to UM be accepted. My claims for disability have been able to be accepted. Had I not met her, had I not fought so hard to reach her and to get a doctor like her, had I not fired all of the other doctors that I had to get to her, I may not be able to celebrate that today. That's a that's a huge win to me after experiencing
such such devastation in my life. I fell ill in February, and it wasn't until August twenty through tele medicine that I found a provider who introduced me to the term long color again. Deeple was just twenty eight years old when she started seeking answers for her long COVID symptoms.
She listened to my symptoms. She ordered panels and tests, and I had a follow up a point now with her to go over the results, listening to the symptoms I was having, looking at the blood work UH and the antibody result, and also comparing this to what she was seeing in other patients. She introduced me to this term long collar and asked if i'd heard of it before. I hadn't. She explained that some folks were experiencing lingering problems from their COVID infection, and I had an inkling already.
That's what was happening, but it was good to finally I feel like for the first time that year, I wasn't losing my mind. When that doctor I think she's located in Florida, who met with me through an app on my phone introduced me to long Collar, I felt like, metaphorically, of course, not literally, metaphorically, I could breathe again. My medical journey and experiences are unacceptable. I have gotten more acknowledgement validation from providers now than I did two years ago,
but nowhere near where it should be. You shouldn't walk out with absolutely no answers, in tears, feeling more frustrated, like you had yet another dead end. I still walk into some provider appointments and walk back out with that experience. On the other hand, I have had a couple of acquaintments recently where at the very least provider acknowledged I know what wonkin of it is and I'm so sorry
you're dealing with that. So validation. That's the progress that I've made in two years, and if if we're calling that progress, I think that indicates much larger problems at hand.
The very last time I was turned away from the hospital, I said to myself, if this is happening to me, this type of dismissal is happening to my students, students who I know live in nuclear houses and families, Students who are always around their grandparents, their aunties, their cousins, Students who can't articulate their symptoms or why they feel like that. And I did not want them to to
face what I faced. So I thought to myself every day, if I wasn't going to die, and that must mean that I'm supposed to do something to help myself and someone else live. And I just slowly started to email anybody who would listen. I started to email JOHNS. Hopkins Patient Engagement Services. I emailed city councilmen and women in
Baltimore City, emailed state delegates. I even email doctors who at Hopkins were writing h journals and writing uh small articles about COVID because I wanted to know, um what I could do to help treat myself and pass the information onto other people. While Shamir is still unable to return to the classroom to teach full time, she has transformed her experience into patient advocacy. She's a member of multiple long COVID groups and is on the board of
Body Politic, a COVID nineteen support collective. She offers advice to fellow law COVID patients and is often invited to speak on their behalf. I just want to make sure that I saved myself, and I want to make sure I save those other people in my community. And when I say other people, I mean other black people who are poor, who are disenfranchised, who don't have the same health care access, and who don't have the same financial
means as other people. I testified before Congress on Thursday, April two thousand twenty one, and the purpose of that congressional hearing was to talk to researchers and doctors about COVID, but to also hear about the patient experience. It's been the generosity of my family and my friends and those who support my advocacy that I was even able to live for the past two years, and so I wanted Congress to know how serious I was about my station
in life. I was very moved by the fact that many of those congressional leaders admitted that they two new people who experienced and were experiencing long COVID. However, I've been very disappointed nearly a year later, because there hasn't been much movement or action on the behalf of long COVID patients. We acknowledged it and then we left it. They are not very many people in power who are
standing up for us. What I have seen and what I will continue to champion, is the fact that smaller groups, smaller organizations, grass root organizations, have been at the helm of informing us about long cod and body politic alone has informed so many people with their platform. It's been groups like m E Action, which is a group about you know, UM M E and chronic fatigue syndrome and um other chronic illness groups that have helped to inform
long COVID patients. It hasn't been many politicians. It hasn't been our president, It hasn't been the people that we entrust with that kind of power. It's been the smaller groups, the the everyman, the average woman, the average man that has reached out their hands to help us. And so that's who have led us down this road of information. It wasn't the people in power. When we come back, I tracked down some of those people in power again.
Our long COVID cohort deepest Sing, Rebecca Hogan, Liza Fisher, Jack Guest, Shamir L. Smith, and Janine Hayes as far as with a long COVID community needs from the paris that be in this in my opinion, First, we need financial support. I've lost everything. We've gone through our savings. We've whittled away everything. I used a lot of that go funding money to pay for Cobra. That money has run out. Is this a forever thing? How long am
I going to have the income that supports that? As a teacher, I was saved ten to dollars a year and I lost all of that in the first couple of months of my inn Second is job protection. You know we're still people. We if we had jobs previously. We need to know that our jobs will still be available to us. When we were checking, I worked UM at one of the top management consulting firms I was.
I was an associate partner there. I never thought I'd be out more than two weeks UM and now you know, we're going on thirteen months and I have not stepped foot in my classroom for almost two years. I went to nursing school to help other people, but also to give my family a different life, financial security. There was a structure, it was good, it was good, and it was all snatched from us. Third, it's communication. Now we
we're seeing these big vaccine campaigns. We know that communication at a large scale candy set up and delivered upon quickly and efficiently. Why are we not talking about long COVID at that same level. That is completely unacceptable in putting people in harm's way. There are people at our scale don't know about long COVID. They don't or if they have heard of it, they don't know exactly how
detrimental it can be. If the information isn't out there, then you don't know when you're like lost in this situation. There is not enough information, data statistics that capture the amount of fipock women and families who have had long COVID who are experiencing it. Now, how can I go anywhere to inform anybody in my community about what to look for, how to take care of themselves, mental health resources, long COVID plants. If we don't know who's being affected,
it's like being a teacher with no lesson plan. If I have no lesson plan, I can't teach. And everybody here in this community, just like in other communities, deserve the right to have a COVID and along COVID lesson plan. We don't think about how difficult to navigate the health care system is. Like I'm a nurse. I'm a nurse with a genius like you, and I'm so I'm struggling. I'm dying. I'm struggling so hard to navigate the health
care system. And I don't even know what I'm struggling with because like I've got all these appointments and all these doctors, nothing's happening. I don't know what's going on. I don't know. It's like I'm the middleman. I'm the one in the middle coordinating at all. What's the point of that if I need fourteen specialists? Am I really
capable of being a middleman? Oh? This whole long COVID journey has exposed some rather ugly troots about our medical system for folks who have chronic conditions and have suffered for decades in some cases, without attention, without acknowledgment. Now we're dealing with something on a tremendously large scale. I hope someone is taking note that the amount of people being affected by this will have unforeseen circumstances unless something is done help the people that are sick. We are
people who contribute to helping things run. We are people with lives with families. Help us get better. That is why these systems were supposedly in place to protect the people. So protect the people. This community deserves some answers. So I started calling elected officials to convey some of their urgent needs. Are you I'm good. Congressman Don Buyer, a Democrat from my home state of Virginia, was the first
to bring long COVID legislation to Congress. This was back in December of He then reintroduced the same bill in April of What motivated you to take the lead on this issue. We were getting lots of feedback from people that I represent in northern Virginia, and we are to pay attention to it because, um, long COVID is so fuzzy, I mean, two hundred different symptoms, really difficult to diagnose,
but very real. It reminded me a little bit about where we were with flon disease twenty years ago, where people say, well, that's in your head, um, but we know this isn't in your head. And it was affecting people and really bad ways, like they were getting turned down for disability assurance UM, but at the same time they couldn't really go to work, so then the Employment Commission would say, well, we don't qualify for unemployment. So
people are getting a really bad economic situations. And we thought this is also at a time when the country had divided, this would not should not be a partisan issue. The connersman, Jack Bergman, who is a Republican from Michigan, has been my partner on most of these things, which is great because that way we can go forward together. I was going to say, I think a lot of people in the COVID long COVID community are really frustrated because they feel like, you know, where's our government, why
don't people care? And you know, the symptoms can be just terribly debilitating. And I know that the Long Haulers Act, your bill, hasn't really made any progress for almost a year, so a lot of people are out there saying what the heck is going on? Where is Congress and now? And and part of it is I mean, it's sad, but the COVID has greatly restricted our ability to get things done. We had the state of the Union address, and almost everyone was there without a mass because of
the new CDC guidelines. So I'm hoping we'll be able to work once longer, harder weeks and get more things done. And this Carly needs to be at at the top of the list. Senator Kane introduced a new long COVID build a Congress. It's called the Comprehensive Access to Resources and Education for Long Covid Act. It's legislation designed to help people living with long term COVID symptoms. Have you had a chance to review this and and any thoughts
on that? Yeah? I think it's a great piece of legislation. And what what Senator Kane's legislation does is build on the different iterations of the last two years you've started with. The very morning I interviewed Congressman Buyer, Senator Tim Kane, who himself continues to experience long COVID symptoms, introduce the Care Long Covid Act to Congress. Could this be the boost of adrenaline the long COVID cause needs to get federal help? Is it even enough? Hey Katie, Tim Kane here,
Hey Tim Kane here, how are you? I talked with Senator Kane to find out. Tell us a little bit about the Care Long COVID Act and how it's going to help these you know, literally millions of people who are experiencing this, Katie. The first bit of news good news is we got a little bit of a head started in an American rescue plan that we passed um a year ago in Congress because we put funding into that bill for the NIH to do research on long code.
So they've they've started the research. But what the what the care skill would do? And I want to thank my principal House sponsors, Don Buyer of Northern Virginia, and my co sponsors and the Senator Tammy Duckworth and ed Market Massachusetts in Illinois. What we will do is basically four things with the bill. First, we will try to really have a good federal database to catalog the kinds of symptoms and complaints that people am our. Public data.
Public health data infrastructure in this country was sort of week before COVID that actually hurt us in dealing with COVID. We want to do a very good job of gathering the data about patient experiences. That's number one. Number two with that data and with other studies that that hospital Sloan Sloan Kettering and New York is doing this, and theres are two um we we want to um basically
do a deep research into causes and cures. And then the last piece of the bill, sort of the third piece is once we've catalog the concerns and co plaints and we do research and the causes and cures, how can we get that information out to patients and how can we get that information out to providers, Because again, we don't want somebody who is experiencing this to go in to a provider and be told, oh, well, you know, um,
it might be anxiety, might be depression. It's been a tough time a lot of people were doing with tough issues. We we really want to communicate all these best practices and the research to the provider community and also the patients. The more information, maybe you reduce the uncertainty a little
bit and that might help people deal with this. You know, if I was experiencing severe long COVID symptoms, I might listen to this and want to pull my hair out because it's sounds like we need to study and really gather data, etcetera, etcetera. And I might be saying Hey, I love you, Senator came, but I need relief now. And this hasn't even happened. This bill hasn't passed, and you know, I'm desperate. So, um, are there more immediate
things that can be done? A lot of the patients we talked to said they really need financial help and some kind of job security. And I don't know whether there's uh something we could do with the Disabilities Act that might help people who are in this situation. But they have these mounting medical bills and they have to live, and they're they're really in dire straits. And you know, I'm not even one of them, but I feel for them so much because what you're describing sounds like it
will be a long time coming. With all due respect and even appreciating your the attention you're paying to the issue, we know, I think that's a fair concern. Even the dollars that'll be allocated a year ago to research. You don't necessarily get an answer on a research question just like that. You know, you really have to do it and do it right in order to come up with answers.
But there are some there are some immediate term things that I do think are important one is um the Biden administration has already put out some guidance about long COVID as being a kind of condition that needs to be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act would suggest that in an employment setting, an employer should offer you accommodations if you have health related issues. Folks who have long COVID need
to be given accommodations at the workplace. And again we may need to communicate that that that out to employers and to employees about the way to ask for those kinds of accommodations. But there is a legal protection right now that I think would provide some help. And then the second thing is on the on the medical side. Even as we're doing big picture research, there there are
treatments for some of the long COVID conditions. So, for example, somebody would hear me describe when I'm going through and would say, well, that's a neuropathy, and often a peripheral neuropathy, tingling in the fingers and toes. That's not that unusual. It comes with follows diabetes and follows other things. There are treatments for some of these conditions already that could
probably be adapted to my circumstances. Now, somebody with a cardiac a racing heart rate or a regular heart heart rate, you know that's there's gonna be a different treatment. But but because um, after effects of viruses have been known before other viruses, we might be able to adapt some
of those treatments for people's conditions right now. And that's the kind of thing where you know, I'm not gonna practice medicine, especially as a non doctor in a zoom call with you, but as people could go on and say I had COVID, here are the symptoms. Okay, even separating apart from COVID the symptoms you describe, there are treatments for some of those symptoms, and hopefully those might
provide some relief to people. And what about sort of the financial assistance for people who have lost their jobs and have mounting medical bills. What's being done to address that? And is the government? Does the government have a responsibility in that arena? Well, Katie, we ultimately do, because look, it's not inconceivable that um, somebody with long COVID symptoms might eventually qualify for Social Security disability, where there would
be a financial assistance for them. In fact, I haven't done the research on this, but I'm sure, I am absolutely sure that there's already Americans who have been filing and going through the disability process because of their own COVID and the after effect. Is there more that can be done on helping people deal with the financial burden? I'm sure there is. The bill that I induced, the CARES bill is more about the research and therapy these in information than that. But look, this is gonna have
a huge effect on our healthcare system going forward. I I often say that on the labor force, by the way, absolutely in a time when the unemployment rates already really low and employers are like, where do I find a workforce? Um, I've been giving this talk where I say there will be a day when President Biden will say the national emergency is over and COVID is in the rear view mirror.
But the two pieces that won't go away are long COVID and the mental health aspects of an American public that seems it's almost a million people have died already. I mean, the death told to COVID is already over nine d and fifty thousand, and then you add the illness and job loss and business is closed. You stack all that on top of it, and then there's this mental health aspect of COVID that's gonna affect us long
after COVID is in the rear view mirror. Both of those things, the physical aspects of long COVID in the mental health consequences of the last few years are going to demand innovation and resources from all levels of government. Are you keeping in mind this prominent issue that I think surfaced and really in a critical way in the last couple of years about racial disparities and equities in
our health care system. I know that the racism described by the patients we interviewed for this podcast caused severe delays and accessing care, severe delays and accessing disability insurance. So, um, are you keeping these things front and center, the institutional and systematic racism that exists in our health care system as you kind of craft this bill and think about what's going to be in it. Um, The answer is yes, Katie,
and we need to. I mean, as you know that who has who has disproportionately suffered from COVID, the people who died from COVID have been disproportionately Latino and African American. The people who've died of COVID have been disproportionate in Latino and African American, and the people who've lost jobs because of COVID are disproportionately Latino, African American women and young people. So this is affect that everyone that hadn't
effected everybody equally. And so as we look at at cures and and treatments and who's getting vaccinated who isn't, we have to be really specific to deal with equity issues. It's very common in medicine where and frankly where this is probably demonstrated the most vividly as in issues of the maternal mortality. Yes we did. We did two podcasts on that, and and I'm sure people said exactly the same thing to you. I reported to my physician that
this was the way I was feeling. And you know, a white mom expecting mother reporting the same symptoms as an African American expecting mother is more likely to get oh, that's really a concern, how can we help? And then the African American expecting mom might get kind of fobbed off and if not completely dismissed, not taken as seriously um,
even in conditions that are very, very dire circumstances. So when you see that happening in something like the maternal mortality space, you can see the same thing somebody going in and saying I had COVID six months gon, I'm so deal with symptoms in the In the profession, they may not be taken as seriously. Many reports that they're
not taking as seriously. So we have to as we're you know, undertaking getting the patient experiences and doing the research into causes and cures, and then getting information out, we have to build sort of an equity component into each of those three pieces, because you can't discount um folks experiences and you know, and when you do and I'm sure you heard this in the maternal mortality space.
If I report to you an experience I have and then you discount it, okay, well then I'll be less likely to report it to you the next time I'm in. And it's sort of a vicious downward cycle where then you don't have as the provider of the information you need to make good decisions. There's not the trust that is built up that allow that allows for communication, and then health outcomes get a lot worse. So we have to have in in both our research and our uh
in our communication. We have to build in an awareness of these inequities, or else the health outcomes not only are disparate, but they get even wider if we don't solve this. Congressman Buyer has been working on at least one of these systemic issues, collecting accurate data. In January this year, Representatives Buyer and Ianna Pressley of Massachusetts demanded better data from the CDC on long COVID's impact, specifically
on women and minorities. So has the CDC been receptive to your requests, because it does seem that a really fulsome research studies in order. It's a it's a yes and no. He had serve. Yes, they've been friendly and open. On the other hand, they're a little overwhelmed. Yeah, they're trying to keep some very different research balls up in
the air. As you know, they've been criticized for not being more forthcoming with some of their data, and of course they have responded to Dr Lensky and others that we don't want to get science out there that's not vetted, that could only be half right, and have people making their own decisions. UM for an overwhelmed agency. I think they're trying to partner with this as best they can,
but we've got to keep the pressure up. Would you like to take a moment to convince this community that you are going to stay on it, Congressmen, that they will not be forgotten, that you will do everything in your power to ensure that their suffering is taken seriously and the government can try to help. Katie, Yes, absolutely, we We can't forget the long COVID folks who are gonna be with us long after we stopped wearing mask
and everybody's back in school. Um, we need to continue to try to make Congress Um a more effective, faster acting body. I don't think our founding mothers and fathers ever intended for it to be as glacial as it is right now. And there are many really good ideas about there about how to make it a more responsive
legislative body. But in the meantime, while it is what it is, people like Senator Kane and I and Congressman Jack Bergman, I under Pressley from s who's we need to just keep the pressure on as hard as we can. A lot of long COVID sufferers are going to be listening to this podcast, Senator and closing, what would you say to them? Well, what Katie, I mean? The first thing I'll say is I believe you. And there's a lot of us up here too, because we've had this experience.
We believe both your experience of COVID, but we believe that these symptoms persist. Um. We are investing dollars now for a year in research to figure out what to do. And I would say maybe maybe the most powerful thing I could say is if you if you hang with us in this and you keep communicating, will not only figure out the answer for people who have long COVID, we were likely to figure out answers that will help people who have after effects of line disease or other
viruses or the other pandemics. They're gonna be coming, you know, down the highway in years to come. The study that we can do with people who have long COVID will not only help you, but they're gonna help a lot of other people who are gonna have you know, who either had COVID, are gonna have the next virus that comes. And that's why it's really important that we do this, and we do this together, we can help a lot of people down the line if we if we stay focused.
That was Senator Tim Kaine and Congressman Don Buyer coming up. We'll have some final thoughts from our guests. I have concerns that people are losing hope. I have concerns that people are being devastated financially and that we're not moving quickly enough to to soften that blow through policies. People are disabled and they don't know where to go to get evaluated and to be able to get get the kind of support that they need. When we talk about getting used to all of this, what it means that
we're getting used to mass disabling event. We are getting used to people in their twenties and thirties effectively having their livelihoods shut off from them, people who cannot go back to work, whose careers are being ruined, who have to downsize their homes, selling their cars because they need to pay for medications. We are not seeing the urgency. The hardest part of all of this the uncertainty of
it all. The unknown, I mean, besides not knowing if and when it will ever end, the unknown physically is really feeling like there's no adult left in our family, in our life to take care of us. The unknown emotionally, it's really scary, the unknown of what my capacity is going to be, Like how am I going to operate in this world. Most doctors that I talked to, all they can really tell you is that most people wake up and they feel better now you know, twelve of
thirteen months in. It gets more into like is this a forever thing? And nobody knows. Nobody can give me an answer to it. I don't know how long we could survive this. If this is often, what I try to do is to tell them to be to be brave again. Dr Harlan Crumholtz, to hold on because I do believe that that it's a galvanizing moment where we can come together and try to learn quickly and and
look what happened with the vaccines. I mean, the vaccines did progress really rapidly, and now it's it's something short of a miracle that that happened. I mean, but people came together in a in a concerted effort and tried to solve a problem. And what we need to do is try to do this similarly for long COVID and and again in this case, I think it's within partnership
with the patients. But but I tried to tell them that look, this this could be around the corner that we could be able to get insights that really cracked the case and how help us figure out what to make how to make their lives better. And so I think that that should light a fire under us to say that yes, we need to be able to have some blood tests or some reflections of disturbances of the physiology that are leading to we need to understand the
underlying mechanisms. But there's another piece to this is which we have to trust people. We have to listen to them intently, and we have to try to appreciate what it is that they're going through and and be a call to action for us, not just something to dismiss. What we've learned is that the number one criteria that any medical professional can have for you is a concern
about whether or not you make it. They have to care whether or not you're going to be okay, because if they don't, no amount of you know, of credentials, no amount of of education or achievement is going to help you. I know that we are all different and our experiences are different. But I am so proud to see how many long COVID patients with limited energy, limited money, limited resources have banded together to make people pay attention. Two years into this and if finally ready to start start,
I'm ready to talk about my story and experiences. I just refused to accept that this is where I'm at. So my goal is to be a nurse again, and and I don't know what that's gonna look like. I don't know if that means that I'm just gonna be all better and cleared to go back to work on set, or if I'll have to have some you know, combinations and limitations. I don't know any of this. I don't know what's next. I don't know what's out there. But
I'm not gonna just stay here doing nothing. I see myself in the future climbing Manchu Pichi I have had and when I was in the hospital, they have this incentive sperometer, and I wanted to climb uh Montopu too, and I took a video and I said, this is my Montu p To And I continues to think of this entire journey as my mountain and it goes up and down, so I'm trying to still get to the top and so along that way, I'd like to see change happen policy wise as far as healthcare access and
affordability for h chronic illness and marginalized communities. And I'd like to just be someone who can being pactful and effectful or yeah, effect change and support. Knowing that there are others that are suffering worse than I am. UM just makes me want to be almost a voice and an advocate in any way I can be UM for better care, better standards, better healthcare UM in this country to help us get through this. I'm proud of myself,
and so that's what gives me glimous of hope. I do this so that people who look like me never have to experience, as much as possible what I experienced. As much as we're hearing people Will try Will Will would prefer to talk about COVID in the past tense. You know. It's the truth is it's not over just because we're over it. What makes COVID such a perfect teacher is the fact that it's not going to stop. I hope someone with the power two change something is listening.
Thank you to all of our long COVID patients who spent time and energy they didn't have sharing their stories. You've heard from deepest saying Brian Mason and Janine Hayes, Shamir L. Smith, Liza Fisher, Rebecca Hogan and Jack Guest, and thank you as well to Dr Harlan Crumholz and Dr Akiko Iwasaki of Yale University, and to Diana Barrant
of course of Survivor Core. If you're suffering from long COVID symptoms and are looking for help, you can start with support groups like Survivor Core, Embody Politic will have links to those and others in our disc option. For everyone out there listening, you can do your part to get long COVID sufferers some care and attention. Just call your local representative and ask them to urgently pass the Care Long COVID Act. Thank you so much for listening everyone.
If you want to see and hear from some of the long COVID patients we spoke to, head to my YouTube channel for their stories, and a huge thank you to Lauren Hansen on our team, our producer, who puts so much time and energy into telling these stories. Thank you, Lauren. Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of My Heart Media and Katie Kuric Media. The executive producers arm Me, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen.
Associate producers Derek Clements and a Trianna Fasio. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter, wake Up Call, go to Katie correct dot com. You can also find me at Katie Correct on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,