INFLAMATION FATIGUE BRAIN FOG TREATMENT SERIES

In some professions, a jalopy won’t cut it. “We’re used to driving a sports car, and now we are left with a jalopy,” Vázquez said. But even when people recover enough to work, they can struggle with minds that are less nimble than before. Most people with brain fog are not so severely affected, and gradually improve with time. “It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.” “Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore,” she said. When she thinks of her loved ones, or her old life, they feel distant. Davis, who is part of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, can remember facts from scientific papers, but not events. The memories are there, but with executive function malfunctioning, the brain neither chooses the important things to store nor retrieves that information efficiently. Memory suffers, too, but in a different way from degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox.

INFLAMATION FATIGUE BRAIN FOG TREATMENT SERIES

For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. “It raises what are unconscious processes for healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me.įor example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Anything involving concentration, multitasking, and planning-that is, almost everything important-becomes absurdly arduous. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. At its core, Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”-the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. It is not a mood disorder: “If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.Īnd despite its nebulous name, brain fog is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. It is not psychosomatic, and involves real changes to the structure and chemistry of the brain. For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue. Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people-including many medical professionals-jeeringly compare it to. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives. It can afflict people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator-or any hospital care. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted. Her inner world-what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”-is gone. Former mundanities-buying food, making meals, cleaning up-can be agonizingly difficult. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages.

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