Iḿ hoping that you are already back into a pattern of improvement, with each passing additional day post-surgery. My reply, here, will be a bit off the beaten track, I think.

I had minimally invasive spine surgery about 4 months into my lingering COVID syndrome, and I was genuinely terrified about the surgery triggering some steep decline. My gut told me, though, that the surgery was the only measure I could pursue that would enable me to stop the neuropathic pain drug I was on when I caught COVID, and because that drug was a good candidate for contributing significantly to my post-COVID symptoms (mostly respiratory), I took the leap.

To my amazement, I did not lose ground after the surgery, and also got the benefit of getting off of the drug I no longer trusted (gabapentin), albeit after a lengthy withdrawal process.

So my thinking is that when we take a dip or crash after some intervention, like surgery, this may or may not be caused directly by the intervention. In this connection, it may help to look at long COVID as something that befell us not purely coincidentally, but, rather, as a consequence of some medical vulnerability that made COVID particularly noxious for us. That vulnerability, in turn, may be just as responsible for crashes after surgery as is long COVID itself.

Thinking this way helps me to choose treatments that have the potential to address not only the long COVID, as a syndrome, but also whatever syndrome/symptom may have predisposed me to long COVID. Sometimes it takes some deeply probing thinking to figure out what our vulnerability may have been, but if we can come close to clarity about that, we may be able to arrive at strategies that have really good chances of success. For my post-COVID respiratory challenges, therefore, I rely on symptomatic care (in my case, proteolytic enzymes) as well as a protocol for repleting and maintaining normal B1 levels (since all of the health issues I had long before COVID (both respiratory and non-respiratory) can be associated with B1 deficiency or B1 malabsorption disorder).