Today we’d like to introduce you to Betsy (Elizabeth) Moll.
Hi Betsy (Elizabeth), thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
In early 2022, I hit menopause, and it was one struggle after another. At the end of September, I developed cough variant asthma. It was a little over 5 weeks before I was correctly diagnosed. I don’t remember how many times I’d been to a doctor trying to get relief. I used so many cough drops that they now severely irritate the tissues inside my mouth. Since I can’t tolerate hydrocodone, the only prescription cough medication I could take was Tessalon Perles, and those didn’t really help. Mucinex Fast Max DM Maximum Strength helped some, but still, it was bad. My husband took me to the ER twice. The second time I’d been coughing nonstop for an entire day. I finally agreed to take a hydrocodone cough syrup even though I knew I wouldn’t sleep with it in my system. I really didn’t expect to survive the month. The relief when a doctor told me I had asthma was intense. It was no longer a mystery. It could be dealt with.
Then the Friday before Christmas, my husband’s rock climbing partner texted him to let him know that he had just tested positive for Covid. Jason did an at home test and it was positive. I remember thinking, “Well crap. I’m next.” Sure enough, Christmas morning, I woke up feeling like a building had just been dropped on me. We isolated in our bedroom, treated the symptoms, the kids left water and chicken noodle soup outside our bedroom for us. We got through it.
Near the end of January, I caught a cold. A few weeks later, I got home from work and collapsed into bed completely worn out. I kept having these episodes where I felt like I had Covid again, but the test was always negative. By March, I had seen the phrase Long Covid. Finding information on it was hard. Things kept getting worse. Mid-summer, I found out that WakeMed had a Post Covid Rehab program. I was able to get referred there and finally started therapy in early December. As I left my intake appointment, I was stunned. I had learned so much. Long Covid was the reason why I kept getting sick, why I couldn’t get enough sleep, why I was so brain fogged and kept making mistakes on basic things, and why I was becoming so horribly forgetful. And I mean forgetful in a frightening way. I could look at a recipe and turn my body 90 degrees to get the spice and have no clue which spice I needed. Long Covid was why I’d started having panic attacks, why my asthma had gotten so much worse. It was why I’d had to leave the first job I’d had since staying home to take care of the house and my family. Why wasn’t this ever talked about? My therapist had told me that about 20% of the people who had had Covid likely had Long Covid, but that many didn’t know it. I once did the math, that translates into about 5% of the US population, or 1 in 20.
The next day, I was in a virtual workshop led by Hal Elrod (author of the Miracle Morning) on goal setting for the new year. After reviewing 2023, he told us that before we started setting goals for the upcoming year, we needed to figure out our mission in life. In that moment, I felt a gentle hand on my left shoulder and a quiet voice telling me that I would become a coach for others living with Long Covid. My faith is very important to me, but I never imagined that I would hear His voice giving ME a Mission.
I learned how to be a coach. I learned how to teach others the techniques that help me manage my symptoms. Along the way, I realized that 1-1 coaching would be challenging given my own health issues. In general, I do quite well. But there are still rough days, weeks, and sometimes months. Plus, it was going to be hard to reach a lot of people one at a time since I would only be able to work with a small number of clients at a time. I started my own learning community on the Skool platform and started learning how to set it up and run it.
One thing I’d really struggled with was the idea of charging people for the help that they desperately needed when I knew that many, like me, struggled to work when they were able to work at all. Insurance definitely won’t cover coaching, so how to pay for the platform and the back end systems and still make it affordable was a burning question.
I decided to apply for nonprofit status. At the end of August, I got the IRS letter showing that I was now a registered 501c3 corp. Now I’m focusing on building my community up and getting funding.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There have been a lot of obstacles. My own health has been a challenge. In 2024, my weight kept climbing and my health kept getting worse. I was trying to get my coaching business off the ground, but I was almost as exhausted as I had been before starting therapy. I felt like I was going backwards. I finally decided to have weight loss surgery. I knew that if I could just lose the weight once and for all, it would help a lot of the health issues I was dealing with. But every time I started to get focused on nutrition and so on, some other aspect of my health would start getting worse. I had one too many medical “balls” in the air. I had a gastric bypass on August 2, 2024 and my health started to improve immediately. First, the heartburn was better. I’d been taking prescription strength omeprazole twice a day. After the surgery, I was able to cut back to once a day. You have to take omeprazole for 3 months after surgery to help your guts heal, and once that time had passed, I stopped it all together. I haven’t taken it since. I no longer need my CPAP, my asthma is a lot better, and I have a lot more energy now.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I run a nonprofit community where I teach others the same techniques that help me manage my Long Covid symptoms. I teach symptom tracking, breathwork, mindset, nutrition, movement, pacing, and planning. My program is based on what I was taught in that rehab program.
When I get a new member, they get a copy of my symptom tracker/planner. It’s a blank 3 month planner that I’ve designed specifically for others with Long Covid. I’ve started running a Boot Camp in the community. As soon as a new member has filled out a release form, they are put into the next Boot Camp. The bulk of the camp is 4 weeks of group working sessions where they start using the tools that I teach.
I’m proudest of the fact that I haven’t given up. It hasn’t been easy figuring all of this out, but I’ve noticed that the people or resources that I need are there when I’m ready for them.
To my knowledge, I’m the only nonprofit platform that teaches holistic tools for managing Long Covid symptoms. There are other nonprofits focused on Long Covid, but I don’t know of any that are learning communities that include coaching. I could be wrong, but I haven’t found any others.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Believe in yourself. Don’t be afraid to stretch yourself by learning something new. At the same time, don’t spend tons of time trying to learn something out of your current skill set that it takes away from the time you need to spend on your vision. I’ve hired coaches, etc to do some of these things for me because I simply didn’t have the time to figure it out and still get launched.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ylct.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourlongcovidtransformation/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YourLongCovidTransformation
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@YourLongCovidTransformation
- Other: https://www.skool.com/long-covid-transformation/about
