November Medicine Update

The vaccine question I’ve been avoiding, health sovereignty, and what my heart taught me

1. The trap of polarization

I’ve been avoiding the vaccine debate for a very long time, not out of fear, but because I find the whole conversation uninteresting. When things are reduced to black and white, we lose the truth. I refuse to be forced into a box, to take a stance, or to argue for or against. I am more than that, and the reality of human health is far more complex. The debate itself is simply too superficial to be meaningful to me at this point.

But in a recent podcast interview I was asked directly where I stand, and I had to say something. That was a gift, because it forced me to tune in to what is true for me. What came through was something like this: I think we focus too much on the potential risks of taking vaccines versus not taking them. I think the real question is: what does fear do to our health? Fear of the vaccine. Fear of the virus. Fear of vaccinated people. Fear of unvaccinated people. This is what we as humanity need to look at right now.

I saw this fear play out in many ways. During long stretches of the pandemic, unvaccinated people were excluded from many settings in public life. It was a period of intense pressure and division. What I saw in response was dating groups, private parties and social networks created only for unvaccinated people. I understand that this was an attempt to find safety and reduce fear. But to me it seemed to move the fear rather than heal it, turning it into an intense fear of the vaccine instead.

A reaction to fear and distancing cannot be more fear and distancing. That doesn’t heal anything; it just fuels the cycle. My response is different: I believe the only way forward is to go beyond the division entirely.

This constant cycle of fearing each other and building walls is part of what makes us sick.

I refuse to avoid someone because they are vaccinated, and I refuse to avoid someone because they are not. Whether you took the shot or didn’t, I see you and love you as a human being beyond all those labels. This is the healing I believe in.

2. The downward spiral

The podcaster was good. She had done her research and found out that I got a heart condition after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine in 2021, and she asked me how I dealt with that. So I had to open up to that topic.

Yes, it’s true: I got a heart condition after I took the COVID vaccine, and for a long time my narrative was that I got it because of the vaccine. It came shortly after, and many other people had the same experience, so it seemed like simple and very likely cause and effect.

But if I’m going to tell the whole story, I have to tell you where I was in my life at this point. When I took that vaccine, I had been going in downward spirals for a long time. I was doing an internship at a hospital, with shifts in the emergency department, and I had a lot of trouble with it. Those of you who know me know why it has been hard for me to work in hospitals. By all means, I am grateful that we have hospitals. But for me, working there meant strictly following procedures and putting down my intuition and my humanity.

It was five to ten minutes with the patient, and hours at the computer, writing carefully how I had correctly performed the procedures, so that if anything happened to that patient, I would not be to blame. That’s what medicine seemed to be about, and I thought: honestly, is this it? Forgetting everything we have learned, performing procedures and documenting that we performed them correctly?

I was so far out of myself by then that I didn’t even react. I just shrank another inch and did as I was expected to. I felt disconnected from myself, from nature. I felt alienated in there. I couldn’t take it seriously. I couldn’t take my colleagues seriously, I couldn’t take anything seriously. I was walking around like a ghost, deprived of life, for 20 hours at a time. And that wears on the body when you keep doing it for an extended period of time.

In this period I made a lot of choices that were not rooted in my sense of self. They were rooted in fear: fear of being judged, or even kicked out, if I didn’t do what everybody else did. Fear of making mistakes, fear of not being a good doctor, fear of never feeling happy again, fear of having wasted my life on learning something I could not use, fear of being useless, fear of failing my whole purpose of coming to this earth. 

Eventually that disconnected reality took over. Even on my days off I wasn’t interested in reconnecting. I only wanted to suppress the feelings knocking on the door. There was no space for me to feel anything. No resources, no safety. Better not to feel anything at all, and shut everything out, than to take in the immense pain of the situation I was in.

3. The breakdown

So I got ill. I got severely burned out, from years of going against my own heart, and then my heart started behaving very strangely. I got attacks of very high pulse, so called supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).

The attacks got more and more severe, and I started to get worried. In the beginning they came only during hard exercise, but they developed into appearing any time, even when I was resting. So I decided to seek medical help, and I was told: this is serious, you need to take beta blockers for the rest of your life, or you need surgery.

I was shocked. How could I have done something as stupid as take that vaccine, even though somewhere inside me I had felt a no? Beta blockers did not feel right to me. I didn’t start them. I needed to think it through.

The attacks got worse. At one point I was lying in bed feeling an attack come on, and it lasted so long that I lost consciousness. When the heart beats that fast, it doesn’t fill between the beats, so circulation drops and can’t perfuse the organs and brain. The attack must have stopped by itself at some point, as they always did sooner or later. I remember waking up with one thought: Wow, I have been far away just now, what if I don't come all the way back next time?

Was I going to die?

4. The shift

NO, I was not. Rather the opposite, I was going to live. 

I felt a power rising inside me, so strong that I immediately understood it was the power of nature herself. It was as if I all of a sudden came home to myself through that experience.

And lying there, I made a decision. I was not going to let that vaccine kill me. A voice started speaking from deep inside me: “I am stronger than that shot. I am nature, and nature is more powerful than anything that has been put in my arm. This is my choice. I hereby declare that this vaccine has no more power over my health.”

I kept repeating it, over and over, until I started crying. And through that cry, it felt like I released years and years of tension, the tension I had built up inside myself to be able to ignore the whispers of my heart. 

Then a question came: what if my heart is breaking down because I haven’t been listening? What if it had been getting louder and louder because I kept pushing past it?

After that day, the attacks stopped. It was very strange. I kept anticipating them, because I had gotten so used to them, but they just did not come back. 

In the five years since, I have only had one attack. It came during the birth of my son, the most physically challenging thing I have ever done. I already knew how to tell myself that I am stronger than this. The attack stopped, and the birth went very well.

I can’t prove what my choice did, or whether it would work for anyone else. But in my experience, being out of my power was part of what broke my health down, including my heart. Coming back to my power, remembering it, allowing it back in, was what healed me.

5. To those of you who are afraid of the vaccine

I want to say something directly to those of you who are afraid. Afraid of the vaccine, afraid that it has damaged your health, afraid that you made a terrible mistake. I know that fear, because I lived in it. 

After my heart started acting up, I believed the vaccine had damaged it for good. I read, I listened, and I took part in conversations where that fear was confirmed and made bigger. Every attack seemed to prove it again. My body stayed on alert, my heart raced, and my fear grew. I couldn’t see that I was in a loop, where the fear and the symptoms fed each other.

I want to say this carefully. Some people do have real reactions to vaccines, and they deserve to be taken seriously by doctors and by all of us. I’m not saying yours isn’t real. But I also know that fear can keep a body stuck, and I don’t think anyone is helped when fear is spread, even when it is spread with good intentions.

What changed for me was the decision I told you about. I couldn’t undo the vaccine. So I stopped treating it as the thing that destroyed me, and I stopped fighting something I couldn’t change. I can’t prove that this is what helped. But after that decision my body began to calm down, and I began to heal.

If you’re in that loop, I’m not here to take your fear away or tell you it’s foolish. I’m here to say there is a way out of the loop, and it starts when we stop adding fuel to it. And to those of you who share these stories in groups and online: I’d ask us all to check whether what we share is spreading truth and support, or spreading fear.

And to those on the other side: fear lives there too, the fear of the unvaccinated, of who might be a risk to us. I’ve seen that fear shut people out as well. It doesn’t heal either.

6. What I stand for

So what is my stance on vaccines? I’m neither for nor against! And it feels SO liberating to say this.

I don’t know exactly what caused my heart condition: the vaccine, going against my heart's wisdom, or both together. I’ve stopped needing to know. What I care about is what we do with fear, in ourselves and in how we talk to each other.

What I know about health sovereignty is this: whatever happens to us, we can come back to our own authority. That means listening to our bodies, asking questions, and making our own informed choices with people we trust, without trusting anyone blindly, including me. For some of us that will include a vaccine, and for some it won’t. I don’t need you to agree with me, and I won’t avoid you either way.

For me, health sovereignty is about no longer outsourcing my healing to outer authorities. It also meant taking responsibility for my own part in how I ended up there. That was my way out of victim mode and back into the power of my biology.

One thing is important for me to make clear: I don’t believe that people who get sick have done something wrong, and I don’t believe anyone is to blame for their illness. But I do believe our power to heal is far greater than most of us have been taught. It works alongside medicine; it doesn’t replace it.

7. The November mantra

No matter what your health is like right now, no matter what vaccines you have taken or not, you can always come back to your power. It isn’t something you need to find or create. It is here, right here.

People sometimes ask me: you must be very special, very powerful, surely not every human can heal like this? 

I used to say, I’m nothing special, I’m just a human being. 

Now my answer is: yes, I am very special. I am a human being. And so are you. 

The power of nature, the power of our biology, is in every one of us. No wonder it’s hard to feel when we’ve learned, like I did, to push past our body’s signals and ignore the whispers of our hearts.

You may notice that you’re out of your power when you hear yourself thinking: I don’t really want to be here. I just have to get through this. I have no choice. Who am I to say no? It doesn’t matter what I think. I’ll just do what’s expected.

It can show up in the body too: a tight chest, a held breath, shoulders creeping up, a flat or heavy feeling, as if you’ve left the room while still sitting in it.

And in daily life: saying yes when you mean no, going along with something that doesn’t feel right, scrolling to avoid a feeling, or doing your duties on autopilot, like I did for those 20-hour shifts.

If you recognise yourself in any of this, try the mantra:

“I am worthy of feeling connected to nature and my own true power.”

Use it every time you feel a bit out of it, and you may begin to navigate your life a little differently, step by step.

I’ve come to believe that much of what holds us back isn’t only what has happened to us, but the fear we carry about it. The way out isn’t to fight that fear. It’s to come back, again and again, to our own power. It was never somewhere else. It was in you all along.

One last thing I want to share with you: My choice not to follow the medical advice I received was my own, and it is not a recommendation. Treatment can save lives. If you have a heart condition, or any condition, please don’t change your treatment because of my story, and talk it through with your doctor.