187 - My experience of long COVID and changing hormones with Dr Marianne Tinkler

The Dr Louise Newson Podcast

Dr Louise Newson

Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Medicine

4.8 • 798 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr Marianne Tinkler is a respiratory consultant from Swindon. In March 2020, Marianne contracted Covid-19 and had to take a month off work with a severe cough and extreme fatigue. She returned to frontline work on the wards at the height of the pandemic but found it difficult due to ongoing symptoms of tiredness, breathlessness, a racing heart rate and significant brain fog. Later that year, when long COVID became more recognised and Marianne was continuing to experience severe symptoms, she was encouraged to take an extended break from work, and this gave her time to reflect on her hormonal journey as well as learning how to navigate life with long COVID. In this episode, the experts discuss the relationship between long COVID and the perimenopause/ menopause, the barriers to accessing treatment and some of the benefits of diet, movement and HRT for those suffering with long COVID. Marianne’s advice if you have long COVID: Pace yourself carefully and don't ‘push through’. Track your symptoms on the balance app and consider HRT if you think some of your symptoms may be due to perimenopause or menopause – even if you think you’re ‘too young’. Look at your diet and activity levels and eat foods that are good for your gut microbiome. Try and get outside every day, even if your energy levels will only allow you to sit on a bench.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Dr. Louise Newsome and welcome to my podcast. I'm a GP and menopause specialist and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-Bron-Avon. I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity and the Menopause support app called Balance.
0:29.9	On the podcast, I will be joined each week by an exciting guest to help provide evidence-based
0:36.5	information and advice about both the perimenopause and the
0:40.9	menopause.
0:45.7	So today on the podcast I've got with me, Dr. Marianne Tinkler, who I have been hearing about
0:52.3	actually for a little while and up until today never seen her
0:56.8	face to face as it were. So Marianne is a respiratory consultant who also has long COVID and reached
1:04.1	out actually because she was very keen to talk about her experience and hopefully allow others to learn
1:09.8	from it and maybe resonate with some of what
1:12.7	she's going to say. So thanks, Marianne, for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Louise. It's
1:17.5	nice to see you in person and, yeah, meet you face to face. So respiratory, I was, many people
1:24.0	know, I was wanting to do oncology when I was a lot younger. And I did my hospital jobs and one of them was working for a respiratory consultant in Manchester and I really enjoyed it actually.
1:35.6	And, you know, our lungs are obviously incredibly important but there are so many conditions that can really affect our lung function that we often don't think about
1:45.5	and sometimes just think about lungs in isolation, don't we, rather than how other body
1:50.8	processes can be affected with our breathing. So what made you decide to go into respiratory
1:55.8	medicine? Respiratory was my first job that I did as a doctor in training. I trained in Wales.
2:02.1	And I was lucky that I had great consultants that I worked with and I really enjoyed my job.
2:08.2	And I think there's just a wealth of diseases as we talked about from asthma, from lung cancer.
2:15.6	And it is the whole spectrum of young people to old people, diseases that we can
2:21.1	cure and you can get better from to the diseases that we can't cure and the end of life. And that's
2:26.7	really what I enjoy about it. So that's why I went into respiratory medicine. I think medicine is much
2:33.5	more than just prescribing a drug. You know,
	...

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