Author has the thing: Ep 2

Day 3 of not-quite recovery.

Reminder: The Unglossed January Donation Drive ends tonight, at 1:25 Antarctica time!

Night 3 and Day 4, post symptom onset, brought a new wrinkle: A sore throat. I hate sore throats. I’d probably rather re-experience the worst pain of my life (post cheekbone reconstruction surgery) than a sore throat, but biology cannot always be a choose-your-own-adventure book. Eventually I gave up and started downing Vick drops like candy.¹

Day 5 marked the apparent beginning of recovery, though I still took things easy, especially since I hadn’t really slept the night before, and still didn’t have an appetite. Day 6 - yesterday - followed the return of a full night of sleep and featured the return of my appetite, and a normal days’ schedule of exercise (though I obviously would not finish making up lost ground here in one day). It also featured the sudden onset of…

…

Brain fog!

That’s right: This treatment-eschewing idiot got himself brain fog from Omicron.

It kicked in as I was working on yesterday’s post. One minute fine; the next minute not. All at once, my music sounded like it was playing from inside my head. Sorting visual information required focused effort. And outside of that tiny window of focus, there was nothing; the buzzing backdrop of half-finished thoughts, active from sunup to sundown, that normally leads to the next moment’s distraction, had gone silent.

By the end of the day I would find that more exercise, or standing up for a while, or even breathing deeply several times in a row, could temporarily restore clarity. I wondered if the issue was with my brain’s respiratory chemoreflex - the system responsible for regulating breath rate in accordance with how much CO2 is in the blood - leading to respiratory depression.

Either way, by the time I was finishing yesterday’s post it was so bad that I could barely tell what I was writing. Just before publishing I accidentally edited the sub-head in the post settings window (changes here do not go into the subhead in the document itself), and wrote “But it is an illusion” instead of “But is it an illusion.”

Another thought I had was that the brain fog was a delayed-onset result of four days of REM sleep deprivation. I had barely dreamed any of the nights of my symptoms, and may not really have slept at all; the insomnia was especially bad on Night 4. In the end the sleep deprivation was the most “severe” symptom of the entire illness, and maybe Night 5’s sound sleep wasn’t enough to make up for it.

Night 6 brought another sound sleep; and today, more brain fog.

Still, it’s mostly better than yesterday. Once again I was able to complete a normal schedule of exercise. But my hopes for dispelling the fog with one more round of catch-up dreamtime are not high. That doesn’t seem to be what the issue was.

Is it a pinched nerve, activated when I am sitting upright?

L’autoimmunity? Day 6 post symptom onset is still a bit early for antibodies.

Spike in the brain? In which case, will I have to wait years for my neural network to rewire itself around the obstruction? (This seems unlikely, given how easily it is temporarily cleared by activity.)

Or maybe a more casual rewiring - a sort of system reboot, as after a psychedelic episode. Severe illness can often turn off long-running emotional and stress-related pathways, leaving a blank slate afterward. Perhaps the same can happen for consciousness itself - though here, again, the illness was not actually anything like “severe” except in its disruption of my sleep.

Tomorrow, I may pop one of my ivermectin pills - I didn’t end up using any during my illness. I could also head to the pharmacy to pick up Fluvoxamine, though the stuff is pricey even down here in Baja (no prescription required, however).

Other than that, I do not think I will worry about the issue that much. The fog goes away a bit if I turn off my music. I can get up and walk around as many times as I need to, until the problem fixes itself. (Though, this experience will certainly moderate my approach in my potentially upcoming “are we overtreating the virus” post. I still think the question should be asked; if we don’t know that treating the infection with chemicals doesn’t lead to a lowered memory immune response, we should at least look into it. On the other hand, “Drbeen’s” light symptom list - accompanied by his crowded countertop of supplements - can’t help but spark a bit of envy.²)

My only true fear is the obvious: That this new mode of life, by forcing a narrow-focused writing style, will prompt a schism among my readership - with those who approve of the new style disagreeing bitterly with those who preferred the freewheeling status quo.

1. I stopped the Vicodin for the reconstructed cheekbone on day 2, I think - at all events while the pain was far from over. This was in 2012, when they still gave it to everyone. I had been looking forward; but as it could only blunt the pain radiating throughout my face, I found the experience of half-pain plus Vicodin cloudiness more unpleasant than the pain in pure form.

2. See “My COVID Status.” Drbeen Medical Lectures (youtube.com).