From Timing a Walk to the Mailbox to Traveling Three Times in Three Months

Vera's Story: Living With Long COVID

I was born in the Soviet Union and I live in Winnipeg now. If you ask how long I've been dealing with this, I have three answers. I used to say December 2023, because that's when I got long COVID. Then I'd say 2020, because that's when I finished a big work program and ran out of the adrenaline I'd been running it on. Now I think I'd been unwell my whole life and just wasn't listening.

I could never live in the moment. I didn't know what that was. If I paused for five seconds, my mind would start swirling. I'd get through bottles of painkillers without really noticing. I had random food reactions. I thought that was a normal life. My nervous system had been telling me things for years.

I had COVID in November 2023 and kept going back to work after a week of it, and I got worse every week. By Christmas I knew I was on the edge. I didn't know I was standing at a cliff. Then on Christmas Day my father passed away, and I cried for two days without stopping. When my bereavement leave ended, I just couldn't get out of bed.

I had, I don't know, fifty symptoms, a hundred symptoms. They came and went. I couldn't eat most foods. Every digestive problem there is, I had it. I was sensitive to light and to smells. My sleep was terrible. My heart rate would hit 120 or 130 just from walking to the bathroom. Burning sensations all over my body. Full body twitches. Chest pain every day for five months. And the cement truck feeling, like I was lying under a pile of stones.

I come from a family of doctors and I believe in evidence. So I refused to join anything until I'd been cleared by every specialist, because I knew I couldn't commit while I was still wondering if it was my heart. The day after my cardiologist told me my heart was healthy, five months of chest pain stopped. That was it. That's when I knew it was my nervous system.

I was looking for a specific thing: live calls and a community. I joined a free YouTube live with Junior and Adrianne, and it was the vibe. You don't interact with the founder when you join something like this, you interact with the team, so I needed to resonate with the team. I signed up that day.

My first win was walking to the mailbox. I timed it. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds to walk there, open it, and walk back. After months of only leaving the house for appointments.

I kept daily logs of what I did physically, then cognitively, then emotionally. That's where the pattern showed up. I wasn't spending my energy on activity, because I wasn't getting out of bed. I was spending all of it on my emotions.

This experience taught me that consistency beats intensity every day. I was a project manager. My whole mindset was to put everything into something, get it done, then relax. You don't want to know the maximum you can do today and then nothing for a week. You want to know the minimum you can do consistently. That's how you show up for your recovery.

My insurance mandated a ten-week return to work, which no medical professional would have recommended. Crista helped me reframe it as my choice, because I loved that job and I wanted it. So I built a cognitive rehabilitation plan and went at it with open eyes. Lunches with strangers once a week, industry events, mentoring a recent immigrant. My occupational therapist suggested I play Dungeons and Dragons, so I did that once a week too. I got paid to play Dungeons and Dragons.

The other things I learned are the power of acceptance and of intention. As soon as I accepted where I was, my symptoms went down. And intention matters. If you meditate because you think meditation will fix your symptoms, your nervous system knows you're trying to fix it. You have to genuinely enjoy the thing.

The Science Behind Long COVID Recovery

In Long COVID, the nervous system gets stuck in a chronic stress response. Research suggests the issue may be functional rather than structural. Your nervous system may be stuck in protection mode, and even normal activities can feel overwhelming. This is what keeps symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and insomnia cycling.

Nervous system retraining uses neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to rewire itself, to help shift out of that stuck state. Instead of managing symptoms, it may address the underlying pattern. That's when real, lasting recovery starts.

Before vs. After: Vera's Recovery

Area	Before Recovery	After Recovery
Daily Life	Between bed bound and couch bound for months	Full-time leadership role, ten-hour days when a project goes live
Movement	Three and a half minutes to reach the mailbox and back	Strength training and daily walks
Travel	Counting the steps to her seat, knowing she'd pay for it	Ten days in Mexico and three trips in three months
Cognitive	Brain fog after 30 minutes on a computer	Work that's 100 percent cognitive, all day
Emotional	Caught up in everyone else's emotions	Handles other people's emotions calmly, at work and at home

Where Is Vera Now?

Vera works full-time as a project director in a demanding leadership role, has travelled three times in three months, does strength training, and walks while listening to audiobooks. She says her only limitation now is that there aren't enough hours in the day. Vera made this progress through CFS Recovery's recovery system, built on nervous system retraining. This story is one of over 100+ hours of filmed recovery case studies from real people sharing their real experiences. Not scripted. Not staged. Real people, on camera, in their own words.

We've helped people as young as 9 and as old as 86. People who've been dealing with this for 3 months to 50 years. People from bedridden to semi-functional and everywhere in between. Over 3,000 documented client wins across our community.