My brain was producing a redacted document, live.

* * * *
There does not need to be a term more precise for the phenomenon of brain fog than “brain fog.” Of course, one may want to quantify things, determine a precise number with a decimal point and a percentage sign to let people know that under this number one does not have brain fog, but above it … hoo boy! Above this percentage point, one should not be able to complete, you know, those things that people write. You know, sentences!

I spent most of 2024 in a case of brain fog. It relented in August, eight months after my first and so far only case of Covid. I do not know how bad a case of post-Covid brain fog I lived with this year, and medicine does not have a firm, numbers-with-a decimal-point-and-percentage mark grasp on the phenomenon at this point anyway. I still have it, a little, and I now consider brain fog to be a part of what I refer to as me, like my gray hair.

Physicians around the world started to publish papers in 2020 that describe and measure cognitive deficits patients encounter thanks to Covid; patients score lower on IQ tests while sick and also after, and some patients of a certain age (around my age: mid-to-late 50s) exhibit symptoms of early-onset dementia post-Covid. Those who have contracted Covid more than once display even more serious cognitive troubles. The library of peer-reviewed articles in medical journals about the nervous system problems experienced during and after Covid grows each day. I do not have a comprehensive list, but there are many social media accounts that compile the articles, and I can direct anyone who is curious to those. The articles are cautious, as they should be, yet all describe a condition that is still only partly understood. Millions of people who have had COVID have suffered cognitive deficits if not declines.

I do not know if I am one of those cases. I only know what I experienced this year. I only know that until August I sometimes had trouble following what people said to me and what I read, and that when I started a sentence, both in conversation and at the keyboard, it felt like an adventure to reach the end.

* * * *
It started in January. At a social gathering the first weekend that month, I overheard one person say as he grabbed a slice of pizza: “I tested positive for Covid yesterday and negative today, but I haven’t felt sick at all.” I thought to myself, “This will not be good.”

I made an effort to stay away from this case of Schrödinger’s Covid as well as the pizza, but we were in the same enclosed space for more than an hour. Two other friends who were at the same gathering were in a different room from the one that the possible Covid patient and I were in, and they did not get sick. If I had donned my mask, I likely would not have become sick.

Thirty hours later, I felt dramatically unwell—overheated and unable to sleep—so I decided to take a Covid test. The two colors burst with an unhappy neon brightness long before the ten-fifteen minutes on the test timer had expired. It was my first positive Covid test, my first personal experience with Covid in this entire five-year nightmare.

As my father died of Covid in May 2020, I felt many emotions about the fact that I had my first case of Covid. In addition, my mom and sister were sick with it hundreds of miles away from me at the same time. Two friends, one a fellow member of the Covid-bereaved community and the other a dear friend, asked about my emotions because of the loss. That meant a lot to me.

On day one, I was sleepless and hot, and the water stream from my not-hot and non-strong shower felt like lava pebbles thrown by a thousand catapults per second. On days two and three, each joint in my body hurt; none so severely that I needed to pursue a solution, but overall, my entire body ached. Ibuprofen and general tiredness allowed me to sleep. Two friends dropped off food and medicine and bottles of electrolyte drinks outside my door.

Day four, I noticed that the generalized body ache had lifted but that I could no longer taste or smell anything. It was like one part of my nervous system handed off a baton to a different part in a relay race of symptoms. Because this is one of the most common symptoms that Covid sufferers mention, when I noticed that I had this particular issue it brought home to me that I really was sick with Covid, even more than the first positive test had. Any absence of sensation is one of the oddest of sensations; even my slightly paralyzed legs have enough sensation that I can choose to not notice the absences. This was a first for me. I had to force myself to eat, and I was glad that one friend had dropped off Mexican frozen dinners for me to microwave. The slight spiciness helped. The same friend took a grocery order from me, and I asked her to get me cans of soup: “I have soup here, but they are all ‘chunky’ and whenever I look at one of them to heat it up, it looks too complicated. Please get a bunch of cans of old-fashioned Warhol-brand chicken soup with rice.” I needed comfort food from childhood.

From then on, it was exhaustion. Some days I would get up at around noon, clean up, eat something, think to myself, “This was a full day,” and start to change back into my still-warm pajamas. The “full day” usually lasted around a whopping three hours. For a lifelong insomniac like me, Covid felt like a permanent cure for my history of sleeplessness.

The second week, another positive test. I started to read something, and English felt like a second language. What remained of my cognitive abilities grew afraid: “Do I have a case of ‘long Covid’ while I still have a case of classic Covid?” I went to bed.

I spent February in a state of Covid recovery micromanagement. Everything I read always had an extra thought running alongside it: “Do I understand this? Y/N? If no, is this a long Covid symptom? If yes, am I really, REALLY sure I actually understand it?” Thus, the answer was always NO. With that continuous extra thought, I understood nothing I read and almost none of the conversations in which I was a participant for, well, February.

Months later, I was asked to speak at a recovery meeting, which is something I have done hundreds of times. My story is familiar to me, and the way in which I tell it is pretty well-honed, which is partly thanks to this website, and I was comfortable at the start. Then, at an unpredictable rate, I would notice that a word that I was going to need in a few seconds was not available. Sometimes it was a verb and sometimes a noun, and probably because I was retelling anecdotes that I have told many times, it became more stark to me that something was off, that words were gone. It was not the familiar experience of the momentarily forgetful, “it’s on the tip of my tongue,” sensation, it was something entirely new to me, like there were holes where words ought to be and they were not even the right-sized holes. My brain was producing a redacted document, live.

For example, one small part of my personal story is located in an ambulance. As I started this two-sentence section, I noticed that, up ahead, a word was absent, and that word was “ambulance.” The ambulance did not appear, in exactly the way that one hopes an ambulance will never not appear if one needs one, so the EMT in my brain changed the location to “emergency room,” which was far better than what first silently floated through my mind: “hospital truck.” (Remember, I was in front of an audience while this happened.) The sensation in the moment was that I did not know that “ambulance” exists as a word, and I would have congratulated you for coining a new term if you’d said it to me. In fifteen minutes, this happened ten times.

I made the analogy later to a friend that it was like my brain was riding on a road filled with pot-holes, and then I learned that “pot-holing” is indeed a term used in dementia studies.

A friend recommended over-the-counter solutions like vitamin B-12 and some sort of mushroom pill. As you can tell from my use of the expression “some sort of,” I have yet to try the mushroom pills. They are expensive, more expensive than a lot of mushrooms. However, at around the time that I started to chew a daily B-12 candy, my brain started to feel like my brain again. I realized that my personal experience with my morning coffee—it can feel like caffeine reconnects my cerebral cortex to the rest of me, and this is wonderful—had been absent all year, and then one day in August, I experienced that familiar sensation. This is wonderful.

Perhaps the vitamin has helped, or maybe it simply took several months for my brain to heal a bit from its post-Covid misadventure, and the timing is just a coincidence. I continue to take the daily B-12, though.

In 2025, if I ever need a “hospital truck” in an anecdote, I think I will remember that they are called “ambulances.” May none of us need a hospital truck in the coming year.

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Mark Aldrich is a blogger for Yokel Enterprises, an award-winning humor columnist, and a writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, which just completed its thirty-fourth season:

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