Next year people
A song for these times. Plus, the Antidote #49: the nervous system, qigong, Deaf culture, and disembodied legs.
The Tonic is a lighthearted, heavily resourced newsletter for folks interested in learning about long COVID, ME/CFS, and other health conditions. Come for the info; stay for the whimsy. Or vice versa.
If you are new here and curious about the tools that have been helping me in my long COVID recovery, please check out the Recovery Tools series tab on my Substack site. (Please start with part one, as it includes an important disclaimer about how highly individualized recovery tools can be with a heterogenous illness like long COVID).
The Tonic will always be free to read - Amy is so happy you’re here! However, if you are valuing the experience and are able, please consider a show of support by upgrading to a paid subscription. If that’s too much to bite off at the moment, you can also make a one-time contribution through Buy Me a Coffee. Any help is appreciated! Anyone who does gets a 📢 in an upcoming post. Thank you!
Make some money!
A fellow Substacker, Kira Stoops, posted about Ally Bank in her newsletter many moons ago. It’s an online bank that offers higher interest rates than most other banks. I used her referral code (thanks, Kira!) and opened a savings account with 3.5% interest (it’s gone as high as 3.8%). And, by using her code, she got $50 and I got $100 (after three months of minimal monthly deposits to a savings account). How can you go wrong? They have options for savings, checking, and investment accounts.
If this sounds good to you too, here’s my referral code. One of you beauties has already used my code and is on the way to making some dough. Could another of you be next?
Mish mosh
No big topic from me this week - life has been lifing in all good ways, but my screen time is way up with school sessions and my therapy/coaching appointments, so it’s getting a bit harder to devote oodles of time here. I’m trying my damnedest to strike a balance as things ramp up. It’s not easy, but I am finding my body will definitely send me clear signals when it’s not so happy with how busy I’ve gotten.
Along those lines, I bring you this from The Mindful Gardener. If you’ve never listened to him before, he’s a little ‘out there’ and brash at times, but I quite like that about him. He may not be for you though, so you decide:
R.I.P. Alice
In other news, the world lost an incredible human last week.
Alice Wong, ‘luminary’ writer and disability rights activist, dies aged 51. Gone way too soon. I remember watching a panel presentation that Alice was moderating, using assistive devices to speak, and I just remember being struck by her combination of fierceness, smarts, and - my favorite of all - humor.
Broadwaybabyto wrote a beautiful tribute post to her friend:
Torment and hope, all in one song
Do you guys know the singer-songwriter Colin Hay?
The answer is YES. Of course you do. He’s the lead singer of Men at Work, which boast such hits as Down Under, Who Can It Be Now?, Overkill, and others.
I have always loved his voice. When I saw years ago that he was touring as a solo artist, I got tickets. That was 2020. Some *stuff* was going on, so the show got pushed, then pushed again, then I couldn’t go.
But nevertheless, I persisted (see what I did there?). And all year I’ve had tickets to see him at a local theater in early November.
Before that, though, I got to see him with Men at Work (he is the only original band member left, but he now tours with a fabulous group of mixed-gender and mixed-culture musicians) as the headliner for the 80’s day of a music festival this summer. And they were FANTASTIC. He is in his early 70’s, and yet his voice has lost NOTHING, I tell you. It is vibrant and strong and unique as it ever was.
In November, he was still wonderful - a talented musician and an artful storyteller (the story:music ratio was a bit high for what’s billed as a concert, but we all happily indulged him). He has never achieved the commercial success he did with Men at Work, and he told a few self-deprecating stories about that. And I’m here to say that it’s a damn shame, because he is such a good songwriter (and I’ve already told you how good his voice still is).
My only regret is that when I saw him in November, he didn’t play my favorite of his solo songs: Next Year People. I share it here with you because I think it is a song for these times. It’s about farming people who live through a terrible, protracted drought. It is plodding and haunting, as one would expect it to be, but it is also a song about hope. It is a song about the human spirit, about never giving up.
I hope you feel all the feels I do when you listen.
COVID, Long COVID, and ME/CFS
💉 Vaccines: conflicting advice around COVID vaccine likely to drive uptake down even lower, experts say. And this: the flu vaccine of 2026 could be dealt a blow by events of 2025.
😵💫 Nervous system: could a WEAKENED fight/flight response be causing ME/CFS and long COVID? (many of us have been thinking our NS dysfunction is fight/flight overdrive).
🚸 Long COVID in young people: then and now (an opinion piece; also, wild to think we’ve been at this long enough to have a then and a now…sigh…).
😶🌫️ Cognitive symptoms in long COVID: this phase 2 randomized clinical trial failed to demonstrate differential benefits for online cognitive training, a structured cognitive rehabilitation program, and tDCS for cognitive long COVID. I did a structured cognitive rehab program last year, and while I got some neat ideas for improving my memory, I can’t say it moved the needle at all. Also, another study showing that supplementation with the NAD+ precursor nicotinamide riboside did not help cognition in long COVID.
🥦 Nutrient deficiencies in long COVID: Lily Spechler, a registered dietitian who recovered from LC and now treats patients with it, on the three most common deficiencies she sees.
🤧 Reinfection: more evidence that additional COVID-19 infections increase one’s chances for developing long COVID.
Resources
🗣️ Ring theory: what to say to someone who is ill or in crisis, a wonderful post by Brianne Alcala.
🧘🏾 The power of qigong: for chronic inflammation, by the always helpful Mardi Crane-Godreau, PhD.
Health miscellany
🤧 Cold season essentials: a super helpful post by Dr. Lucy McBride. And my reminder to finally pick up some saline nasal spray, FFS. I have told myself to do this ten times in the past year, ugh…
💊 To medicate or not: another great post by Dr. Lucy McBride (yes, I’m a big fan) on when to start, stop, or question taking meds.
🫗 Clean your water bottle: I refuse to tell you the story of Baldy’s unclean water bottle and what happened as a result, but the images (and omg, sounds) are burned into my brain. Yes, it can make you violently ill. Wash that shit, and more often than you think!
🦠 Epstein Barr virus and lupus: research now shows that pretty much everyone with lupus has unhinged EBV in their system. EBV can also lead to MS and cancers, and most of us have the virus lying dormant in our systems (if not reactivated, which COVID or other viruses can cause to happen).
🍓 Gut health: how prioritizing it may soothe chronic skin conditions.
💨 The air you breathe: what it may be doing to your brain.
🤬 Government fuckery: things seem a little…quieter? in the health fuckery department since the shutdown ended, but there are a few local, national, and international bits. First up, Trump administration plans SNAP reapplication due to fraud after shutdown, because poor people didn’t suffer enough scrambling to get to food banks. Also, the media sucks: how about adding “alleged” or “perceived” before fraud, since we know this administration often likes to conjure up problems where they don’t exist as a method of distraction. And then a record number of U.S. adults are anxious about health costs going into 2026. From all appearances, we have every reason to be. And on the global humanitarian front: Western aid cuts could cause 22.6 million deaths by 2030, study warns. We exploit the world’s people and resources and then leave them to die. And then measles outbreak in Arizona and Utah could end U.S. elimination status, and the messaging coming out of this administration and its followers is directly to blame. Should we be surprised? A small Texas think tank cultivated COVID dissidents. Now they’re running US health policy.
💪🏾 Fighting back: I came across no examples of fighting back this week related to health or healthcare. Doesn’t mean it’s not out there, just means I didn’t see it. So don’t lose hope.
🩸 Menopause hormone therapy: FDA to pull boxed warning. For an informed analysis, check out Dr. Jen Gunter and this post.
🤟🏾 Deaf culture: education about it is missing from medical school curricula. I don’t know much about med school topics, but I do know that my own education about Deaf culture several years ago at my job opened my eyes to all sorts of things I couldn’t have known. A medical professional in the comments on this article expressed outrage (“what now, we have to learn about cultures in a jam-packed medical curriculum??”), which just shows a gross misunderstanding about how much this particular culture is tied simply to being able to communicate with others (and many cultures are, but maybe none more so than Deaf culture). And if you’re a doctor who doesn’t value the ability to understand and communicate with a specific disabled community, I might go as far as to say you’re violating some sort of code of ethics, no? (<end rant>).
💤 Melatonin: does it increase risk for heart problems?
😟 Time to worry: schedule it! I just recently advised a client to try this.
☕ Coffee: stop doing these five things when you drink it.
Inspiration & Recovery
🏆 Start small, win big: an inspiring post by Paolo Peralta.
👱🏻♀️ Woman change agent: Frances Oldham Kelsey’s refusal to approve thalidomide changed medical history.
👴🏾 Man change agent: a legendary transplant surgeon’s work isn’t done at 88. He fought racism in medicine and built a movement that saved thousands of Black lives.
🏡 Solving long-term homelessness: one village’s bold aim.
❤️🩹 Nervous system healing: five signs it’s happening (even though it won’t feel like it). I can vouch for having experienced all of these on my way to recovery. Confusing at times, but reassuring.
💖 You don’t have to be perfect to be loved: a guided meditation.
🦕 Dino discovery: a new species was discovered after an intact skull was pulled from the ground in Mongolia.
📸 Fun photog: check out Babycakes Romero, a brilliant street photographer based out of London. I especially loved his post on disembodied legs.
😚 Kiss kiss: the first known ones date back 21 million years.
🤦🏻 Buffoons of the week: anyone going to a plastic surgeon to request “Mar-a-Lago” face. According to one plastic surgeon who refuses to go this far: “you’re going to look like Maleficent.”
🏆 Winner of the week: it’s Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of godzillionaire Bill Gates, for donating $250 million to 80 non-profits focused on global women’s health.
🐈⬛ 💩 And finally, it’s this week’s Cat Dump. Nova gone wild edition.
Our new kitty is certified bonkers, and we love it. The latest quirks we’ve discovered are that she can (and will) leap onto the tops of doors, and she likes to play fetch with a very particular type of toy mouse (the little felt ones; she eschews all others we have laying around).
Fritzy and Birdie are starting to play with Nova more, and that’s been good to see. Also, we’ve started letting her roam free at night, and that’s been going surprisingly well. We don’t let our kitties in our bedroom at night, but we do keep the door slightly ajar via latch so we can hear any noises that might need our attention overnight. It’s always a challenge to start to let a new kitty roam freely at night, because often they will stand at our bedroom door and cry or try to get in. But Nova hasn’t woken us up once, which is kind of a miracle. She picks up on the rhythms of our routines very quickly. She also knows that when I sit down at my computer in the guest room/office, it’s kitty quiet time and she promptly curls up on a blanket. Such a good girl.
I’ll leave you with possibly one of the best photos I’ve ever taken: Nova playing with a wand toy, squatting like a kangaroo (or like Jackie Chan, as a friend pointed out).
I’m crazy about keeping mold out of my water bottle. It drives my wife mad. Seeing this was vindicating! 😂 I loved the video about the nervous system signs of healing. I’m definitely experiencing many of them and it’s helpful to have a better understanding of where these emotions are coming from.
Nova is the cutest ever and that last pic is stellar!!
story:music ratio was a bit high 🤣👍