Momoko Uno on the Loss of a Parent During Covid Quarantine

 This is The World Circle, a podcast about the ups, downs, and all arounds of the human experience. I'm Beth Huddleston, host of The World Circle. My guest today is Momoko Uno. Momoko is a doctor of integrative medicine, certified functional medicine practitioner, acupuncturist, and board certified Chinese herbalist.

She is also a writer and recently published the book "14 Days: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Quarantine Hell." The book is about the death of her mother in Momoko's home country of Australia, while Momoko was attempting to see her one last time. But was confined to the Australian government's two week mandated hotel quarantine during COVID.

It's so nice to have you here. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for asking me. I want to jump right into your professional background. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yes. So I am a doctor of integrative medicine. And a lot of people ask me exactly what integrative medicine means. It's actually not a very specific term.

 📍 Integrative just means that you're mixing a whole bunch of different things together. So it's not a standardized term at all. Integrative medicine for me is blending in functional medicine, some western medicine, Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, and psychology. So that includes counseling too. So those are the main things that I blend together.

What kind of people are you working with when you do your work with that?  I'm a general practitioner. So I would say that about a third of my patients come for pain management. So that's you know, but usually it could be arthritis could be chronic pain. Once in a while, I'll get somebody who just has some kind of acute pain crisis that they're going through but it's usually people who've been in pain for a long time, they've tried all sorts of different modalities and it hasn't been successful and then I have patients who come in for more like internal medicine because my training is mostly in internal medicine.

So, you know, they have like chronic gut issues, allergies, all sorts of different things. I also have a lot of women's health. So people struggling with getting pregnant or women who have issues with menstruation pain or... All sorts of other GYN related issues. So those are the, the main areas that I cover, but then there's all sorts of other things as well.

Like autoimmune issues are definitely something that I commonly see these days. People who come to you, have they often just hit a dead end and they're looking for something that helps them after trying several different things?

Correct. Yes. I would say that they've tried just medication and a lot of my patient population, I would say, doesn't do well with medication and they need something alternative. And I think that, you know, when you look at the population at large, that the majority of people do well with medication, but there is a significant portion, I don't know what percentage specifically, but significant that doesn't do well with drugs.

They have adverse reactions to them or if they take them for long periods and they start getting side effects and they actually end up dealing with the side effects which are actually worse for them than the symptoms that were being controlled by the medication in the first place. So that's usually when they come to see me.

What types of treatments then do you offer for them? So if I get someone who's complicated, who's on like, let's say like five to ten different types of medication, I try to find them some kind of alternative.  supplement that might be helpful, and we try to wean them off medication. And but, you know, the first thing that I usually try to do with everybody, if they're on medication or not, is to work on their basics.

Like, for example, like cleaning up their diet, for example, that's a big one. Making sure that they're getting enough sleep working on sleep hygiene, a lot of people have trouble sleeping, making sure that they're getting enough hydration are they exercising properly? And then the big thing is really how they are managing their stress.

So we try to go through all of that stuff, and once we figure out all that stuff, then we're really down to about 20 percent of the issue that we started with anyway, just getting those basics down and then at that point we can start to look at medication and what's working and what's not and trying to figure out what kind of supplements that we can add or subtract and to start managing their health better.

I know that you have a condition called mast cell activation syndrome. I believe that's what it's called. So tell me about that. What, when did that present itself and how does it continue to present itself? That started when I was probably when I was pregnant. So that one is probably about 17 years ago.

I was actually exposed to toxic black mold in an apartment that I was living in, in Brooklyn, and that triggered this disorder. It's actually quite common with mold exposure to develop mast cell activation syndrome. It wasn't very well known at that point. So I was diagnosed with more like a psychological disorder slash just allergies and that I was being a hypochondriac. But the most severe thing that symptom that I was having at that time was I was eating things and I was having a severe reaction and I was, I was actually getting seizures. So I was sent to a neurologist, and I had a lot of testing done, but they didn't, they couldn't find anything on any of the testing, so it was, it was, it was often mislabeled or just kind of seen as, you know, this invisible disease that, that they weren't really sure what was going on, and it was only really until, like, you know, several years ago that I actually got a correct diagnosis, and there's a lot more information about  mast cell activation syndrome now, especially because of COVID, long, long COVID, there's a lot of people who've developed this disorder too.

So there's been a lot more information about that now. So at this point in my life, I had a little bit of a flare up recently, especially when I go through like severe stress or I'm re-exposed to mold again, which unfortunately I was relatively recently. Then a lot of these symptoms kick up again and they manifest as like, it's almost like anaphylactic reaction to like foods with neurological symptoms as well.

But at this point, the mold has been cleared out and my, you know, that I'm not in the going through an acutely stressful period in my life. So most of my symptoms are at bay and I'm slowly reintroducing different foods back into my life. So I'm not that, that affected by my disorder right now.

But there were times when I was, I was really only eating, you know, there was a period of my life, probably like 15 years ago when I gave birth to my oldest child that I was only eating like rice and lentils for like a couple of years. That's all I could digest. Which, you know, as you can imagine is not, not the most fun diet to be on. When you were trying to get a diagnosis, when you were going through that experience, and you were getting things like hypochondriac or psychological issue, what was that like emotionally? Well, it's very dismissive, and you know, I must say that you know, somebody also told me maybe it's just postpartum depression, which it was, it was quite a maddening experience being told that, most people don't have a seizure when they have postpartum depression, you know, that that'd be a lot of different things probably to get to that point, but yeah, I just, it didn't really make much sense to me and I felt very dismissed and upset and hurt that, you know, here I'm also medically trained too.

And I'm saying, look, hey, there's something really seriously wrong with my body. And being told, Hey, it's probably just in your mind and the difficult thing was that people say if you're feeling tired Why don't you go rest? And so I was resting which was you know helpful, but I was, the mold was in my house, so it was in this apartment in Brooklyn that we were renting and so the more I rested the more the more exposure I had to the mold and the sicker I got. So the way that I finally figured it out is that we took a trip out away and we were gone for about a week and I started feeling much, much better just being, you know, in a mold free environment for a few days and I thought, okay, it must be something to do with apartment if I'm feeling so much better.

And that's when I started putting two and two together and I had the house tested and discovered that we had a very high amount of mold in the apartment. And that's when I started getting, you know, more of the right diagnosis and the right treatment after that. Have you heard of this happening to a lot of other people, specifically with mold exposure like that, in their homes?

Yes, it's quite common, unfortunately. Yeah, a lot of people are walking around with mold related issues. And they, it's not unfortunately recognized very well in the medical community. There's not, there's no real testing. There is in functional medicine testing, there's this test called mycotoxin testing, which tests mold in your body.

But Western medicine tests, most labs don't, don't really test for it.  It's difficult. So you have to go see a specialist that does functional medicine testing, which is also expensive and, and most often not covered by insurance too. So it's unfortunate that most doctors aren't aware of this disorder and how much it can affect people's health. Taking a step back, I know that you grew up in Australia, you are in New York, and you moved to New York as an adult, and we're going to talk more about your return to Australia and your book about that. But what was it like growing up in Australia? It's, you know, a mixed bag. I think a lot of people can relate to, like, a childhood being kind of mixed, right?

There are some really lovely things about Australia. It's such a beautiful country. It's very, very clean. Relatively safe. You know, I had a pretty In many ways, a lovely childhood running around in the park and and, you know, enjoying lovely weather. I mean, although it was like 120 degrees often where I grew up, so very, very hot and dry.

You know, but, you know, as a kid, I don't think I was that aware of the fact that it was hot. Like, yes, I had a headache most of the time because it was so hot. Everybody did. But it's, it's a really a beautiful place to grow up. The mixed part, it was, it wasn't very racially diverse.

So, you know, there was a few other minorities, but in general, I was , it was probably at, minorities were probably at around, I would say, 5%, maybe. So in a class of a hundred kids, there were a few, you know, some bullying that happened from that, which I think that a lot of people who grew up in a community like that can relate to.

So that was, you know. That's challenging, but that's very, that's kind of very American too, isn't it? You know? Yeah. That's, you know, especially in New York, like I, I feel like I, I feel like it's really home here because most people have a very similar story. So what is that like living in New York?

Can you imagine living anywhere else? Or are you just really happy there? I'm quite happy in New York. I mean, there's pros and cons obviously living here. But in terms of like minded people. I feel like I fit right in here, so it's nice. A lot of other large cities like L.A. I lived in L. A. for a while. I felt very much at home right there, too.

So I think a lot of the biggest cities where there's diversity. I feel like I fit right in. So I want to turn to the experience you had that you wrote your book about, your book called "Fourteen Days" about your return to Australia when your mother became very sick. And so this was during covid and you had to quarantine in Australia.

My mother actually had been sick pretty much her whole life. So she had received a kidney transplant about I think maybe around 10 years before she was diagnosed with cancer. Her cancer diagnosis happened, if I remember correctly, like around the beginning of the onset of the pandemic. And we initially thought that it wasn't, you know, I think at the beginning was like stage 2 cancer.

And so it didn't really sound like anything that was very urgent, and it was expected that she would go through chemotherapy and surgery and she'd be fine. And there was, you know, significant travel restrictions at that point, and I think Australian borders would have been closed, and so there was no really...

any possibility for me to travel back to Australia.  And then when the borders did open up and they started the Australian, you know, hotel quarantine, which is this two week mandated I don't know, solitary confinement situation you know, it sounded very unappealing. And my mother said to me, look, hey, I'm going to get better its stage two.

Why don't you just, we'll just ride out the pandemic and we'll see each other later. So that's kind of how it started. What happened where you were prompted to have to have to change that and go? So I think it was like around March 2021. She was given a clean bill of health. They said, oh, surgery successful chemo, everything worked. Everything's in remission. Now, I had looked at some of her tests, and and it looked a little bit fudgy, and I, I asked to c ommunicate with her doctors and I said, look, I don't, I don't think this is  stage two. This, is sounds, you know, it sounds worse than this, you know, but I got totally brushed aside.

 I'm not an oncologist and then they were like, no, no, no, you're wrong. And so I, you know, remained quiet and I didn't say anything, which I obviously regretted that later on, but and then one month later,  she was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

So, did it go from remission to stage 4, or did they not catch it? And my instincts were right? We will never know. But it, and by, I think it was April 2021, it was stage 4. And even at that point, though, she was given like a prognosis of, you know, probably a year. So I thought,  hey, we have a little bit of time, maybe in the summer, I could go back and take a little bit of time off and spend some quality time with my mom.

And because it was expected that her decline would be relatively slow. And because she was actually still feeling pretty good at that point. But what was really unexpected is from that time that we found out that she had stage 4 and 1 year prognosis, she only lived, I think, about 6 weeks. So her prognosis, it, it she got worse very quickly and because of the fact that the hotel quarantine was two weeks long, that also complicated the situation.

I went into the hotel quarantine, I'm already not sure if I was actually going to be able to see her alive, and she passed away while I was in quarantine. I know you mentioned in your book that you were given permission to go see her for literally 30 minutes.  And you did. You were able to do that.

But tell me about how that went. Well, I was one of the fortunate people that actually got this 30 minute exemption to go see my mother. I was part of this group on Facebook called, I think, Australians Stuck Around the W orld or something like that. There were all these of thousands of people on here who couldn't get back to Australia during the pandemic because of the low cap that they were allowing Australians to come back.

And, of course, I wasn't the only person with a dying parent. And many people were trying to get back and many people didn't even make it back to Australia. They actually had to watch their parents die from overseas and or another loved one. But I was actually one of the fortunate people that got back to Australia and the people who were fortunate enough to get back to Australia, nobody on that group had ever got to got through to the exemption to actually get an exemption. Nobody people have talked about it. How do you do this? Not one person had had a positive experience, but I was determined to find a way. At first, I thought, why bother? Because I had heard that it was, you know, it sounded impossible, but one of my friends actually told me that lived in Australia, that one of their close friends went through the same thing, and that he actually did get an exemption, but he was coming through from New Zealand, which is, I mean, you know, they were in a travel bubble, so it was easier for them to give somebody from New Zealand an exemption.

But I was coming from America, which was considered like a hot spot for COVID. So they, I knew that it was going to be an uphill battle to get an exemption, but I was just determined. And I, at first, you know, I felt like I wasted a few days trying to be polite and like waiting for responses.

And then what I ended up doing is that I found every single email address that I could find online. And I mass emailed everybody and anyone that I could think of in the government who was managing the hotel quarantine, probably like 20 different email addresses. And I just blasted everybody.

And I said, please, you got to help me. And then finally, somebody responded and we went through this and then it took me days, took me days because they kept changing the criteria, what they wanted. And it was just it's kind of like this game that they had, a guessing game, of trying to figure out their requirements.

So basically they wanted three letters from three different places saying that to validate that my mother was dying. I don't know why, but that was the criteria and I had to figure that out. It didn't say that in the letter. It was a guessing game. I know that you also mentioned that there was, I mean, it was sounded extremely strict, extremely strict.

The conditions, this quarantine, in terms of your syndrome, being in that situation with the food provided, the refrigeration provided, how did that work with your syndrome? It was a huge problem. The fridge that they have, those little tiny little mini fridges that they have, they're tiny, they're they're actually not even called a fridge, it's actually considered a cooler.

They're not, they don't keep food at acceptable temperatures. It's really not a proper fridge at all. So... Which I didn't learn, I didn't really know that until it was a little bit too late in my case and that my food actually started to spoil. And that's when I realized that it was that's what really triggered my mast cell issues because food that spoils has higher levels of histamine.

The longer you let food sit around, it just goes higher and higher in amounts of histamine. So, so the fridge part was an issue. And then the other really unfortunate situation is that so I was cooking my own food in, in the hotel and I had this very unfortunately, unfortunate delivery of moldy green beans.

And somebody had just decided that a bag of moldy green beans is what I had ordered. And I, there was, they were in this fridge that wasn't working. So of course, it got, it basically contaminated my, my entire fridge. And, and also because it wasn't cold, so had it been cold, I think that, you know, the mold probably wouldn't have spread in my, my little mini cooler.

So that's what really triggered my mast cell activation syndrome, and I got pretty sick from that exposure to the, probably to the mold. So you mentioned that you were not able, you saw your mom very briefly for that 30 minutes, she passed while you were still in quarantine. And so what was that experience like for you?

It was, you know, I ended up watching her die on zoom basically. And also keep in mind at that point, I was so extremely ill that I don't think I could have really been physically present or emotionally present because I, I wasn't eating. I was highly dysfunctional myself at that point. I'm not, I'm not sure how what I could have really offered to my mother in that, in that state.

So it was, in one way, probably better that I couldn't be with her because I was so ill. Had I been feeling well, I would have wanted to have been there and to hold her hand and, and to just be next to her. I think that's what I would have wanted had I been well, but because I was so sick myself, it was just to kind of get through the minutes of like taking care of myself was really challenging.

So it was, you know, it was a very kind of a mixed feeling, if that makes sense. I definitely felt like I, I missed out because  both my sisters were next to her and I felt like I missed out on being with my mother. I felt like I missed out on something really important, but at the same time, I was physically not capable of doing that.

Yeah, like so many things in life, it's complicated. It was extremely complicated, but I think that yes, ideally I would have, I would have wanted to be there and that's the whole reason why I went there in the first place and I, I didn't get that experience that I had really wanted. So that was very unfortunate and I had a tremendous amount of anger towards the Australian government for doing that to not just me, but to, to so many people that they didn't allow families to be together in such a crucial time.

What was your mom like? What was your relationship with her? You mentioned that she was sick pretty much her whole life. But you do talk in the book of how special she was. And so tell me about that. Yeah, my mother was one of the kindest people I've ever met. She always had something nice to say to everyone.

And then she always was, she gave gifts. Like she met somebody and then she tried to figure out what they would like and them would buy them something. I just think that's just really nice. Yeah. And  whenever I would see her, she would always give me something, you know? And some of the things were just, I, I didn't really understand.

I just felt like she was just giving me something just to give me something, you know what I mean? But it was just, some of it was just really funny, random stuff. She had a really quirky sense of humor. So she'd just buy these really just random, funny things. And I think like one, she bought me a banana slicer.

You know what I mean? It was just one of those funny things. It was like a, it was like this yellow little thing that had like banana slices. You could just put it on the banana and it had banana written out in the letters. It was just, wow, so odd. Who needs a banana slicer, right? I obviously do. Maybe she thought that I don't slice my bananas well,

but anyway, she is just kind of just like a funny, funny person. So that part of her. I really appreciate it. The part that was challenging was that she was very, very religious and I'm not particularly religious. I mean, I appreciate it. And there was a lot of value from religious teachings that I received throughout my life, you know, because I went through to a Christian school and then raised Buddhist as well.

So I really appreciate that. But at the same time, I'm not very religious. I have my own spiritual beliefs, but I don't go to church. I don't go pray in a temple, so there was some friction around that, but towards the end of her life, and also as I got older too and more mature, I think that we both handled our differences better.

You mentioned in the book that you also lost your best friend at a relatively young age, and that sounded really obviously traumatic. You lost your father as well, years before your mother, and then losing your best friend. What have you learned about grief? It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to get through it.

And the first year, I think is, is just awful. I think what a lot of people don't understand is the physical demand of the processing of everything that's happened. It is really exhausting. And to be able to take the time for yourself, to take care of yourself, and then to get the support that you need to be able to get through it.

There's usually just a period where most people just shut down, and they just need to isolate themselves to... To heal and and that takes usually months and a lot of people, I think when you shut down and shut out the world for a period of time, take it quite personally because you know they care about you and they want to hear from you and stuff.

The people who are, you know, a little bit more emotionally mature or have gone through challenging experiences understand what that's like and will often give you space. But some people don't, they haven't gone through a loss themselves and so they don't know what that's about. They start taking it personally.

And they start to kind of crowd around you and they're constantly poking you and saying, you know, and it's from a good place, like, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? And I think that's, that's challenging to deal with too. It comes again from a good place, but, you know, you just kind of want to be left alone at sometimes.

And then, you know, eventually when, when that exhaustion passes and you want to start to connect with other people, then that's a little bit more appreciated when people reach out. So, but it is tough. And sometimes it's really like minute to minute. You know, when you're going through something just very, very challenging like that to ask yourself, you know, every minute like, oh, what is it that I need right now?

Because it can change rapidly. And so, you know, to do the best that you can to stay present with what your needs are in that moment. To get you through. I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about what it was like to write your book and your experience with losing your mom during COVID and quarantine.

What was that like, writing it? So I actually started writing the book when I was in hotel quarantine, and it gave me something to focus on. When I was going through such an emotionally challenging time, I really needed something that would distract me from the emotional discomfort and pain that I was going through.

So focusing on writing something like this gave me a little task. And I was able to throw myself into that. And I think it was one of those things that really helped pull me through. And that's not the only thing, there are other things that helped me through those really challenging moments throughout hotel quarantine.

But writing it, starting writing it then, just jotting down some notes, I think helped to at least structure the book. But but it was like one of the, I think, best coping mechanisms was writing during the quarantine experience. When we go through something that's really, really, you know, very emotionally challenging, right?

And we're faced with such adversity and we're in the depths of hell. It's good to have some kind of coping mechanisms, like some, some tools in your, you know, emotional toolbox to have so that you can reach into them because you never know at any point when you might be faced with something awful or challenging.

You know, that's life. It's unpredictable. So, I think it's good to have some kind of coping mechanisms or just reflect on your life about, you know, or when I went through a challenging situation, what coping mechanisms worked for me. And so you kind of have a, an idea. So if when you, the next time you're hit with something that's rough that you have these things to draw the strength that you, you already have acquired in the past, you know, that's there.

So I think that's, that's helpful. You mentioned that your book was a coping mechanism for you when you were in quarantine. And I'm curious if you have examples, the patients you work with or with yourself, just examples of other coping mechanisms that you think people turn to in times of really extreme challenge.

Yeah one of the things that I always try to do is I try to make myself laugh. Now it's, it is very difficult to do that sometimes when you're, it can kind of feel like you're insulting yourself when you try to make yourself laugh when you're really in such a dark place. But if you have a little like a crevice of the opportunity to make yourself laugh, I would say just go for it.

It can really shift the energy for me and like, I'll watch some like silly little YouTube video or something. And, and if I get little chuckle, it really helps to lighten my mood. So if I'm in a dark mood or something and I'm talking to one of my friends, one of my friends will always say to me, a very close friend of mine, she'll say, go watch something funny.

She just knows that about me. She'll just tell me. She just remind me. Just go, go, go watch something silly. I'm like, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I'll go and do that and I'll feel so much better. The only thing that I, I like to make sure that I do on a daily basis is do something that makes me happy.

So, I mean, there's lots of things that make me happy. I feel really fortunate that way because not everybody has so many silly little hobbies or new things that bring them joy, but I do think that finding things that make you happy in your life is, like, crucial for mental health. Whatever that might be.

It could be a small little thing, could be kind of like a big thing. It doesn't matter what it is, but, but something, something every day to make, bring you joy into your life. And then the other thing that I like a lot, and not everybody really likes this, but for me this is important because I grew up dancing, so I like to do a little happy dance.

And I try to do that daily, just put on some music, whatever it is, it's a little bit silly, you can't, you know, don't judge yourself and you just do your little happy dance because a lot of trauma and emotional damage happens actually in the body. So if you're dancing and you're jiggling it out through your body, through your energetic system, I think it really helps a lot.

There's books that have been written about that, too. I don't know if you know of the book I think, is it The Body Keeps Score? I think that's what it's called. It talks often about emotional energy and trauma being stored inside the body. So I think dancing for me has been a big tool to get some of that traumatic energy out and then getting hugs, you know, asking for hugs is really great from somebody that loves you and you love them or care about.

Hugs are really great that way,  just to be enveloped in somebody's positive energy. So those are just a few things. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here and thank you for your time. You're very welcome. It's lovely chatting with you.