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Brain fog symptoms treatment8/10/2023 They also described chronic nerve pain, severe headaches, and episodes of dizziness, nausea and fainting. Fifteen people we spoke to described experiencing similar memory loss. Ken struggled for four months with coursework at Georgetown University as he only remembered things in 10-minute intervals. Nineteen of the 22 people we interviewed struggled to complete routine tasks at some point during their illness. I can’t stand up, I can’t move, and I can’t function for hours, even days sometimes.” He described headaches and pain at five months after his initial infection and said that he felt worse having long COVID than COVID itself. He said, “When I’m having a brain fog day, I have to ask my wife to bring me a stockpile of daily necessities in bed before she leaves for work. We found people described brain fog differently from the mild forgetfulness that has become the popular definition.Ī 44-year-old father described to Ken how becoming completely debilitated by long COVID transformed his everyday life. Ken interviewed 22 people living with long COVID to better understand how their experiences aligned with or diverged from his own. Ken’s experience was at the center of this project he journaled for more than a year about his symptoms, including what we believe was severe brain fog. All brain fog is not the same, and it’s time society creates different ways of explaining how people experience the cognitive symptoms of long COVID so that those with severe symptoms are taken more seriously and receive the physical, financial and workplace or academic support they need to recover.Īs a medical anthropologist, Emily was interested in learning more about how people experience long COVID symptoms to disentangle them from how society perceives the condition. This was Ken’s experience, as two professors did not believe he had long COVID or needed accommodations to finish the academic year. This idea that brain fog is “fuzziness” and not serious predates the pandemic and makes it harder for people who need short and long-term disability accommodations to get them. Under the current understanding, we both had brain fog, even though our symptoms were radically different. But for Ken, long COVID was more than a year of inconsistent but extreme memory loss, extreme fatigue and immunosuppression that led to several emergency department visits. When the other of us (Emily) was sick, she would forget the occasional word or lose her focus, which are common in mild cases of long COVID. By calling all long COVID-related cognitive or psychological dysfunctions brain fog, it diminishes what people like Ken have experienced. Yet, when the fatigue remains and memory goes every 10 minutes, it’s also called brain fog. When someone feels hazy, tired and distracted, it’s called brain fog. But the term has become a societal and medical catch-all for the vast and varied neurological, psychological and emotional aspects of long COVID. People associate the term “brain fog” with confusion, trouble concentrating, anxiety, forgetting and sometimes headaches. About 46 percent of people who have it report some type of memory disruption. Its prevalence appears to be between 15 percent and 30 percent, according to numerous studies. Long COVID is a neurological disease that happens after people are no longer infected with SARS-CoV-2. This is what one of us (Ken) wrote in his journal about the periodic memory loss and inability to concentrate that he experienced throughout 2022, when he struggled with symptoms of long COVID. The term brain fog has everyone I meet expecting I’ll be better any day now.”
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