Diane Sater-Wee and her family contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic. Their story includes the struggle to get tested, their range of symptoms, and their path to recovery which included the use of Chinese herbs along with western medicine treatments.
Co-founder of American Institute of Alternative Medicine Diane Sater-Wee shared her journey as a COVID-19 survivor with The Columbus Dispatch in a recently published article. In it, Sater-Wee explains that her whole family contracted the virus early in 2020 while vacationing in Malaysia. One by one, Sater-Wee, her wife Florence, and their daughters began exhibiting symptoms upon their return to the United States. Sater-Wee's symptoms were the most severe out of the four and she has had to contend with long-term complications from her struggle with the virus. Despite all of this, the family had a hard time getting diagnosed.
According to Sater-Wee, she traveled to Malaysia with her wife and children in December 2019, returning in January 2020. In February they began experiencing COVID-19 symptoms and asked to be tested but were refused because they hadn't traveled to China. Later, they received antibody testing confirming they had all contracted COVID-19.
Sater-Wee's family recovered but she continued to experience debilitating symptoms for months, at one point she feared she might not survive. As Sater-Wee describes it, "I had never worried about dying overnight before, but I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, my family is going to find a dead body in the morning.'"
Sater-Wee reports experiencing a range of symptoms from severe cough and headaches to erratic sleep and "loud, vivid dreams." As some symptoms improved, others got worse. One issue she faced was random spikes in her heart rate. A doctor told her that her symptoms were consistent with post-COVID myocarditis, a common complaint among COVID-19 patients.
When speaking with The Columbus Dispatch, Sater-Lee said that she woke up one morning in February 2021 and felt, "like a switch had been flipped." She says that Chinese herbs helped her recover from the disease and is grateful, stating, "I feel healed and whole again. I'm blessed that I survived."