Do you remember those doctors and nurses, taking videos of themselves and showing to the world how surgical face masks don’t cause a drop in blood oxygen levels? I remember them. I also remember that these experiments were done because many people complained of dyspnea when wearing a face mask.
These medical professionals wanted to show the world what kind of ‘psychosomatic’ symptoms people can experience when they become ‘convinced’ that masks cause low blood oxygen levels. These videos were another exercise in gaslighting, because those doctors who made them, did it so knowingly that there’s more to dyspnea than just blood oxygen levels.
Basically, the conclusion was that if you experience dyspnea, it means nothing more than you being hypochondriac and thinking that masks reduce your oxygen intake. So you should just shut up and stop being an uneducated, despicable, human being (or something less than a human being).
As an uneducated, medically ignorant layman, I also believed that my dyspnea/shortness of breath/feeling that I don’t have enough air when trying to wear a surgical mask was due to the fact that I was getting less oxygen and my blood oxygen levels dropped. It was a simplistic inference, just as you would expect from a layman.
My understanding of these things has changed drastically after a nurse yelled at me for five minutes for not wearing an N95 mask in the doctor's office (my neurologist). I bought myself a pulse oximeter and wanted to test the effects on myself. My interaction with doctors until this year has been marked by outright lies or lies of omission and do not trust most things that come out of a doctor’s mouth. And I was sure that the blood oxygen saturation would drop in my case.
I did the experiment in April, forcing myself to wear an N95 mask while lying down in bed. I had been lying in bed all day and the days before - this is important. I attached the pulse oximeter on my finger and put on the mask on my face, making sure I was wearing it properly - pressed down around my nose and my cheeks.
After 5 or 10 seconds, I started to feel that I didn’t have enough air. A mild dizziness set in too. My breathing became difficult, as I involuntarily kept trying to inhale more air for the next 2-3 minutes through deep breathing. At some point, my body became tired of taking deep breaths. I became weak and I started experiencing a slightly altered state of mind, as if I were far away and not there, present, in my bedroom.
But the oxygen saturation was normal, just as the doctors showed in their videos. I had been looking at the device during the entire experiment and it constantly showed 97-99 SpO2. I remember thinking that “well, then, it is possible that my symptoms aren’t that bad/real, since the pulse oximeter proved I had enough oxygen in my blood”.
I took off the mask and the pulse oximeter after about five minutes. I thought I was well, even as I tried to read the pulse oximeter’s manual, that had small print, and my vision was blurred and I couldn’t read it. It didn’t strike me as unusual, even though just five minutes prior to the experiment I had been able to read every word perfectly.
So I got to a sitting position in my bed, put the mask and the pulse oximeter in a drawer next to my bed and, when I got back to lying horizontally in bed, that’s when it hit me. The sudden severe nausea, weakness and involuntary/incontrollable crying that made my entire body shake in bed. I became puzzled. I didn’t know where this came from.
Until I remembered experiencing the same things back in 2016, when I was hospitalised and was forced to walk every day to and from doctor’s appointments in the hospital. Back then, these symptoms preceded each episode of hyperventilation accompanied by loss of control of my eye muscles. My eyes started rolling in all directions, uncontrollably, for 15-30 seconds, while I experienced faster and laboured breathing. Those episodes stopped once I stopped doing anything (talking/walking/moving) and just lied down on the bed with my eyes closed for thirty minutes to one hour.
As far as I could remember, back in 2016, while trying to figure out what those symptoms were, I had stumbled upon acidosis and alkalosis, and it had to do with lactate, carbon dioxide, nausea, hyperventilation and other things. That’s when I reached for my portable lactate analyser, which I had bought at the beginning of this year, when I looked for devices that could help me objectively measure my body’s ability to do physical effort without reaching overexertion. I had read that athletes routinely use the device for this purpose during their workouts.
I took the Edge Lactate Analyser out of its case, pricked my finger and waited 90 seconds for the result. My lactate levels were 5.1 mmol/L. I couldn’t believe it so I pricked another finger and ran the test again. It was 4.7 mmol/L two minutes later. The device wasn’t malfunctioning.
Normally, my lactate levels at home range from 0.7 - 1 mmol/l while lying down to 1.4-2.5 mmol/l after going to the kitchen to eat or to comb my hair etc; all levels were measured with the same device in the previous one or two months. The Edge Lactate Analyzer is a portable lactate meter that has proven reliable and accurate in this study.
As I already had an appointment scheduled with my GP for some other reasons for the next day, I explained to her that my neurologist suspected I had an inherited metabolic (FAOD) or a mitochondrial disease. I also told her what happened when I tried to wear the N95 mask the day before and how my SpO2 levels were perfectly normal during the entire experiment.
She told me that of course they were, that the mask doesn’t limit the amount of oxygen taken in, but in case of mitochondrial diseases, lactic acidosis from wearing a mask was a normal thing to happen and that it had to do with a mechanism other than oxygen intake. And that’s when she gave me the exemption from wearing a mask, because I told her that the people in the neurologist’s office needed a written proof of exemption. Apparently, your symptoms are not real, debilitating or life threatening unless a doctor confirms and and puts it into writing. What a world I live in.
I didn’t ask my doctor what was that mechanism and why this happened. I tried to figure it out myself but everything about respiration, higher intake of carbon dioxide when wearing a face mask, oxygen and cellular respiration (where mitochondria is involved and where the balance of oxygen and CO2 is very important) is still beyond my ability to figure out and explain it to others. But I think it’s fair to assume that most people who experience dyspnea when wearing a face mask have a real problem. Mitochondrial dysfunction is rarely diagnosed/recognised and not always inherited and the levels of dysfunction will lead to various degrees of mask tolerance for each person.
I remember that I bought a mask for filtering air particles in 2017-2018, thinking that my symptoms could come from toxic air particles, and I tried wearing it. I gave up after 10 seconds because of dyspnea. So years before masks have been mandated for daily use, I still had these symptoms - my symptoms have nothing to do with hypochondria or fear of masks or resistance to masks whatever people like to invent about other people.
The problem with exemptions where I live in the EU, is that there’s no law that forces other people to respect this exemption. During my visit to the cardiologist last week, the doctor said that she shouldn’t have received me, since in their practice they DO NOT accept people without a face mask, regardless of having a mask exemption with a very solid reason. The cardiologist also said that well, lactic acidosis isn’t that bad (!) anyway, it’s not like I’m dying/I can die from it (!).
A mask exemption seems to be useless in granting me the right to be treated fairly, to have access to medical care and so on. It might be useful when and if I have to deal with police and fines. But if a medical establishment, a grocery shop or anyone owning a business decides not to offer their services to me, that’s perfectly OK in this lawless land.
There’s this big chain store nearby, selling BIO/organic products that decided not to let people with a mask exemption to enter their shop. I read it in the online reviews and the shop dared to reply and say that they have the right to do this. Not to mention the absolute stupidity of requiring from people to wear a mask even though they tested themselves and they are negative for the current infectious disease. I mean, wearing a mask has been promoted as a way to protect others IN CASE you are infected, not for your own protection. If a PCR test rules out infection, why is it still necessary to wear a mask at the same time?! There’s nothing logical about this rule yet nobody questions it.
As a conclusion, an exemption from mask wearing is not worth much. Experiencing dyspnea isn’t a psychosomatic manifestation of a hypochondriac mind. And just because people are really ignorant when they try to explain their symptoms, it doesn’t meant that that incorrect explanation negates the presence of a health problem. Those who posts videos and try to convince you that SpO2 is an absolute proof that your dyspnea is not a real symptom and couldn’t possibly be caused by wearing a mask, are just lying by omission. They know there can be other reasons for dyspnea, but choose not to talk about them.