Category: Long-Haul Covid

The Vaccine Gave Me My Brain Back

In my previous post I wrote about the effect that long-haul covid had on my mind. As of right now, I feel about 80% or 90% cured from LHC. I still have less energy than before, and there are times that parts of my brain selectively turn off for a few seconds, but I am functional. I credit most of this to the vaccine. Within days of receiving my first vaccine I felt my covid brain fog lifting, and within a week I was wondering if I could declare myself cured. I have accepted that I might never be back to normal, covid may permanently reduce my capabilities. But still, I am way better off now than I was during my long-haul covid crisis.

Here is how my major mental symptoms have been alleviated. As far as I can tell, other than low energy and minor vascular issues like enlarged veins my physical symptoms are gone, so I won’t really discuss physical symptoms here.

Social anxiety: covid wrecked my already fragile brain’s ability to handle stressful situations. Many, many times my mind would go blank any time I ended up talking to someone I didn’t know, in a situation where I had to think on my feet, or when I had to think things through while also engaging in a discussion. At time all my brain’s defensive systems would go off, and I’d start to slip into a near-paranoid state where I’d disconnect from the world.  

Just think of how common those situations are. A while ago I absentmindedly walked off with someone else’s cart at the grocery store, and when they said “excuse me sir, I think you have my cart” I stood there with no idea what to say, even though I fully understood the situation. Or in work meetings I would write out what I had to say, and if my boss asked me an unexpected question I would often struggle to answer it. Now my brain seems able to generate answers on the spot. Even if I ask for a moment to think, I can think quietly in my own brain without alarm bells ringing. If I go into a public place like church I am not having to try to avoid conversations.

Multi-step processing: if you wonder what this is, imagine something that you think of as one motion but is actually multiple, smaller motions all combined. Think of all the different movements involved in getting out of bed. I knew a person who forgot how to get out of bed temporarily from severe depression, his brain just couldn’t handle all the steps. Jordan Peterson has also spoken about having to re-learn getting out of bed. For me, at the worst of covid brain fog I struggled with anything that was more than two or three steps. That is not good when I work as a data analyst, most of the things I do in my job involve multiple steps. The most complex calculations I do take up to twenty steps. I was struggling to the point where I was thinking of seeking out disability leave. I eventually realized, after some trial and error, that I could first write down the steps I needed to take, and then work through them step-by-step, so if I blank out I just look at my second screen and remember where I am.

Now I am able to do complex, multi-step calculations again. I still do sometimes write stuff down for convenience or to make it easier to document what I did, but it is not necessary for performing my job. There are times I still struggle with little things, but they do not get in the way of me living my life. I made a mess in the fridge one morning because my pre-coffee brain could not figure out how to move a plate of leftovers out of the way, and I dumped food all over the fridge while getting the eggs out. A normal mind might have realized that I could just put the place of food on the counter while removing the eggs. But my messed up mind decided to rotate/pull the eggs out from under the plate and that obviously didn’t work.

https://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20150923/researchers-pinpoint-brain-region-that-manages-multistep-tasks

I googled this issue because I was unsure of what it is called. I refer to it as multi-step processing, several websites call it processing multi-step tasks. I found this WebMD article which explains how easily that ability is damaged.

Energy: I suspect I am back to about 90% energy. Even six months after I got my negative covid test I was having several-hour naps during the day, that is totally gone. Right now I feel like my winter slump is coming on early, but I have enough energy to get almost everything done. I haven’t vacuumed in a while, but that’s fine. Not vacuuming is not even close to the same as being afraid of ending up homeless because I can’t work.

Traumatic memories: this is one area where I’m not sure I can say I am close to healed, nor can I definitely blame this issue on covid. Before I had covid it was easier to push those memories out of the way and try to live a normal life. They’d come up again when I was alone, but I could be mostly functional during the workday. They’d come up at lunch sometimes, I feel like any alone time is a trigger for a flood of painful memories and paranoia. So I had been living alone and working from home for weeks before having covid during a stressful time. But I feel like covid broke down a berm that held back the worst of the memories, to the point where they overwhelmed me at times. And I don’t think that getting the vaccine has made it easier to deal with them. Every weekend I think that this will be the week I start up therapy again, and every weekday I come up with excuses to not call. Maybe I’ll call tomorrow. I finally found a good therapist who specializes in helping men who have been abused, most therapists struggle with that demographic.

Words: there are still times that I struggle to find words for what I am thinking. But my inner voice is back. When I was in the worst of the covid brain fog I could barely even know what I was thinking. Now I’m just temporarily disconnected from the external world. And I’ll be honest, I’m fine with that. I don’t need to always be able to speak, I’m fine being alone occasionally. Today I was helping a student and trying to explain how to alter a supply and demand graph. I was struggling to put all the words together to explain the relationships between supply, demand, quantity and price, but then I got out Microsoft Paint and visually explained it all. If I had been in deep covid brain fog I may have looked at that familiar diagram and not had any idea how to even describe it to myself.

My second vaccine is a rather annoying speed bump in this story. I felt so good after my first vaccine I thought that I might be fully healed/cured/fixed. Within a week my brain was back, it happened so quickly I could barely believe it. And then my second vaccine knocked me out for about four weeks, it was like having covid again. I even had the fake heart attack at week 3. I think it took a month or two for my energy to come back after the second vaccine. At one point I wondered if I would have been better off not getting the second vaccine, I worried it had reversed any improvements I had. Fortunately, I have recovered from that relapse, and I am feeling decent. I suspect my winter slump is coming on early, but that is to be expected. I’m still bipolar, even if the long-haul covid is slowly becoming part of my past.

Long-Haul Covid Vs. Bipolar

Warning: this is a long post that is potentially not interesting to you unless you have experienced long-haul covid, either in your own life or in someone you know.

Google “long-haul covid” or “post-covid” or “long covid” and you will find that a significant portion of people who had covid will experience symptoms long after the viral infection has gone away. Some people have fatigue and mild cognitive dysfunction that lasts a few months, others are still totally without energy or sufficient brain function over a year later. Some people will probably be permanently disabled from it. For me, it felt like the virus knocked body systems out of whack, and the body has difficulty returning to normal. I jokingly told myself that the virus erased my backup point so my body didn’t remember what normal was like. Thanks to the vaccine I am now at a point where I feel 95% cured, with just the occasional lack of energy reminding me that I was really messed up for most of 2020 and parts of 2021.

What I found interesting was that long-haul covid often felt like a bad winter’s depression. I had covid in April 2020, and summer 2020 felt like winter. My brain didn’t work right, I was often quite tired, and for the first time I had regular twitches. At times the typical covid symptoms like heart pressure and difficulty breathing would come back and get me wondering whether I had covid again. Even after the recurring heart and lung symptoms went away I had the fatigue and the so-called “covid brain fog.”

I think that having long-haul covid would have been scarier if I wasn’t bipolar. Years of difficult mental health issues have made me fatalistic. Sometimes I wonder whether I am too fatalistic. Life can feel like me skiing down anything other than the bunny hill. I can’t stop what is coming and I can’t get off the track without potentially hitting a tree. So instead I just steer as much as possible to get to the bottom alive. So when I was dealing with difficult covid symptoms my experience with bipolar made it easier to accept that I was borderline functional.

While there were times that I wondered whether I actually had covid, the long-haul symptoms were sufficiently different from bipolar depression that I knew it was long-haul covid. Here is a comparison of my main long-haul symptoms with their bipolar equivalents to show how they are different.

Facial Twitches

For much of summer and fall 2020 I had facial twitches around my eye or mouth, and my limbs would often randomly tense up for a bit.  Occasionally I got the urge to tense my whole upper body, or just my right shoulder. Lucky for me I worked from home, I would look weird in an open office. I once got “Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga stuck in my head and my face began to twitch to it. If you want to see what my face twitches look like, google “What’s With Ethan’s Eyebrows?” and watch the video where Ethan Klein talks about his Tourette’s. I was going to post the link, but WordPress kept trying to embed the whole video in a way that messed up the neatness of my post.

Facial and body twitches were a new symptom for me. At times I have had minor eye twitches, especially on my right side, from stress and lack of sleep. But I never had constant and unstoppable twitches until I had covid. I think that I get a bit physically shifty when I’m going through a depressive episode, and I can get jittery while nearing a manic state, but those times did not include facial twitches.

Fatigue

Winters, from about November to February, are a time of low energy for me. I’ll often feel tired and groggy until mid-morning, regardless of how much sleep I had or how late I woke up. And then in the evening my energy would often drop again. So I could have perhaps 6-8 hours a day where I feel like I am able to do stuff. But when I had covid I would sometimes get aggressive bouts of complete tiredness unlike anything I had experienced before. I could be feeling fine, and then within about ten minutes all my energy would disappear. I could fall down in bed and not move for two hours. I’d feel so tired that just rolling over to find a more comfortable position could take some mental preparation. After about two or three hours of this my energy and brain function would suddenly start to come back. It felt like sunrise, where I could start to see the tiredness going away for a few minutes before my energy suddenly popped up over the horizon. Luckily I worked from home during this phase. I could not schedule these crashes, so if they happened during work hours all I could do is hit my bed and ride it out and then submit sick hours or work later into the evening.

Brain Function

A key feature of my bipolar depressions, which usually happen in winter and sometimes early summer, is that my brain slows down. Imagine that you know what you want to say, but you need to actively remember the specific words and grammatical functions needed to express your thoughts. It’s like the connections between different parts of my brain slow down when they should be firing almost instantaneously. This particularly hampers my ability to perform tasks that include multiple steps. I’m a data analyst, which often involves doing multi-step calculations in Excel or Microsoft Power BI. At my worst, I would first think through the calculation, write it down, and then work through it step-by-step while referring back to what I wrote. When I have normal brain function I can work through the process making it up as I go. I can have similar issues when writing. Sometimes my words can flow onto figurative paper, other times I need to first write down all my thoughts, then arrange them in order, and then work through them one by one.

In the past decade or so (since I entered the adult world) I have had about four really bad depressive episodes that brought me to the point where I was on the edge of losing basic functionality. I only once dropped a course because I couldn’t handle it, but there were multiple times that I wondered how I would finish the semester. Three of these four episodes were in winter, when I always struggle. One was during the summer when I had a bad case of pneumonia. My worst covid brain fog time was during the spring and summer, when I usually feel good. I had no other illnesses that could have caused it.

I should point out that I have managed to get a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree and then a full-time job while experiencing these symptoms. I use the term “borderline functional” to indicate that I can still get stuff done, even if my brain takes longer to do it.

Words

I have at times struggled to put my thoughts into words. In class discussions I would have a clear idea in my mind, but I couldn’t find the words. Other times I knew that I said something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out how to express that and then correct myself. With covid, I had this symptom far more aggressively. I could have an idea in my mind, but the word part of my brain would simply not work at all. I could sit in my seat and have no English, French, or Norwegian words coming to express my thoughts. For example, when I went to the hospital the triage nurse asked me what my symptoms were, and I sat quietly in my seat for a minute saying nothing.

Other times I have said something that was intelligible but did not reflect what I meant to say. I once made a dumb joke in a work meeting, and I felt like I needed to indicate it was a joke. I meant to say “pardon the exaggeration” but I instead said “pardon the arrogance.” Those two phrases are not substitutes. I had a similar thing when I tried to say I didn’t have a formal education in data science or stats but had instead taken multiple data and statistic courses. I bungled my words and said “I have no education in data or statistics” which is incorrect. When I have something to say in a work meeting I now write it down.

I am getting very used to replaying conversations in my head to listen to what I said to determine what I meant and see how far off I was. It can be embarrassing, but hopefully it pays off in the long run.

Social Situations

Social situations are always hard in depressive states. The NVLD side of me kicks in then and it is very hard to read what others are non-verbalizing, so it can be hard to initiate conversations, and even harder to be a contributing member of a group conversation. But the social difficulties I got from long-haul covid were something else entirely. It was like a part of my brain was simply inaccessible. I could think of trying to contact someone, but I had no words or idea what to say. The thought of entering a free-flowing conversation was almost scary. I know we were supposed to stay home and avoid gathering, but I wonder if I overdid it and used it as an excuse to not talk to people.

Learning and Producing

You may have noticed that I like to write and read. I did very little of either in my year and a bit of having bad long-haul covid. I am working on expanding my Master’s thesis into a book, and I got almost nothing done in 2020. I love my research and I love writing, but I could not get my brain to cooperate. Same thing will learning French, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the words and grammar to stay in my memory. Even in the deepest bipolar depressions I could learn and produce.

The near-total loss of my ability to write and produce was scary. I think most people would choose normal energy or social skills over research and writing, I’m not sure I’d do that. When I sit at my computer and write, or read books or do research, I am at peace. It’s where I am meant to be.

Next:

My next post will be about getting my brain back after the covid vaccine. A lot of long-haulers have experienced major improvements from getting the vaccine, and I am fortunately one of them. That was originally going to be today’s topic, but I thought I should first do a deep dive into what I experienced before talking about being partially healed.