Coming in on six weeks of lingering coronavirus symptoms, but fortunately I am physically pretty well. A couple weeks ago I finally stopped feeling the need to take a mandatory nap around 1 pm every afternoon. I love to nap. I'm like a cat in the sun, but this was different. This was like a tide crashing over me and pulling me under to where I had to stop everything and sleep. I am ready for bed at around 8 pm every evening though. It's as if my brain reaches it's daily capacity and is like "Ya done!"
Really the only physical symptom I have is that I will spontaneously feel some pressure on my chest, like a weight is on top of me. Which is kind of weird because I never had any trouble breathing while I actually had the virus. My muscle aches and headaches finally went away (hopefully for good) last week, although some days I do just feel *off.* My sense of smell finally came back (although I do smell cigarette ash at times and Joey smells like tootsie rolls when I know in reality she definitely does not,) however, my taste is still a little wonky. Yesterday I made myself a fruit salad. I had blueberries and cut up strawberries, grapes, an apple and an orange. I was so excited to eat it. And it tasted like vomit. Like literal vomit. That was very sad.
Unfortunately the one main loitering (no loitering!) symptom is my brain fog. I'm still grasping for words and I have the inability to concentrate if there is any sound to distract me. Even in silence sometimes my brain just refuses to cooperate. I've only read eight books so far this year. I know what you're thinking. Eight books probably actually sounds like a pretty impressive number. But these were mostly the equivalent of bad reality tv. There was nothing stimulating my brain at all. In fact, I had to stop reading three books that actually did seem interesting because I just could not concentrate. Suddenly I would have read five or six pages, but I wasn't comprehending any of it. It's like I would visually read the word, but then it would just float away into the ether.
I was in the grocery store and for a few brief seconds I couldn't remember where I was, or what time of year it was. There was literally nothing in my brain for me to anchor myself to. It was very similar to waking up in the middle of the night and momentarily being so disoriented you don't know what's going on. On more than one occasion I haven't been able to think of a word that I used in the sentence before. I was talking about making a pot pie for dinner, and ten seconds later I can see the pot pie in my mind, but I cannot for the life of me think of what it is called. Is this what beginning Alzheimer's feels like? Fortunately I am not a big talker, so these things are really only noticeable to me and my family. My brother came over yesterday and in the middle of a sentence he was also grasping for a word, and it was like looking in a mirror.
I'm thinking there are probably tons like me and my brother walking around, doing our daily routines, and randomly forgetting the simplest of things. I'm glad I'm not a neurosurgeon or a chemical engineer or anything like that. People have joked that this is just what happens when you get older, but this is not normal for me. Not yet at least. Although maybe this is normal for me now. I did read somewhere that coronavirus ages your brain, so who knows? There's still so much we don't know. I'm just taking it day by day. Hopefully one day the rest of my brain will return to me.
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