Covid Brain Damage

Covid damaged my brain. “Brain fog” is too vague a term. It also implies something on par with jet lag. I have lost some kinds of cognitive ability, but not others. Writing this post is documentation as well as part of the process of figuring it out.

My short-term memory is shot and my medium-term memory isn’t so great either. I’ve always been the classic absent-minded professor, and I’ve developed mechanisms to cope: writing things down, creating alarms for myself, leaving notes around. I have a list of my lists, to make sure I won’t forget they exist. All of this memory management, plus more impaired memory, slows me down a lot more than it used to. 

But words. Words are hard. I have trouble remembering their meanings and I have trouble finding them.

I can’t keep up when people are talking, I guess because my brain is so slow. I get confused, and then I get lost in the conversation. Weirdly, I come up with the first letter of a word, and then stutter while I try to get the rest. Or I find the word, but in the wrong language. So social interactions are exhausting. 

Reading is harder than it used to be. Reading! My mother taught me to read when she was pregnant with my brother so I could occupy myself. I was so young I can’t remember not being able to read. I was the classic bookworm, always with my head in a book. More than that. My mom called me the “reading monster.” 

Word recall makes writing harder. Google is great for finding synonyms and even helpful if I can only describe the concept I am trying to name. But it’s also hard for me to organize ideas, at sentence level as well as in paragraphs and longer texts. All of this is tiring: I’m good for maybe an hour. Writing this post is wearing me out.

(On the other hand, my ability to do KenKen hasn’t changed. I had a lot of fun with the now defunct Digits puzzle, and I’ve gone back to Nerdle, which I’m actually finding easier than before. Arithmetic, logic, strategy. Wherever those things are stored in my brain, it’s unaffected.)

This all matters because I can’t do my job. Any of my jobs. 

There is no way I could teach a class, and manage the interplay of lecture segments, student activities,  discussion, and questions, while keeping track of all the students to make sure no one is lost, distracted, or tuned out. 

And then there’s grading. Why grading is hard when teaching literature, where there are a lot of different “right” answers yet also some wrong answers, is a whole other blog post.

I was on sabbatical when I got Covid, and I had a lot of editing and writing balls in the air, and I almost immediately dropped them all. Some of them have been picked up by other people. I have some very, very patient editors. Even staying on top of email is … well, impossible.

I am doing better than I was during the immediate post-covid weeks. Physical therapy and occupational therapy helped some, medications are helping some, fancy new glasses made a difference (and I am getting fine-tuned ones next week). I have a new list of medical professionals to set up meetings with, based on recommendations from my cousin the psychiatrist and the fancy eye doctor.

But progress has stalled. And I don’t know if or when it might get unstalled. Stay tuned, I guess?