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Traumatic brain injury?
Apr. 11th, 2021 08:51 pmI have been ruminating on something said to me last week. Ruminating with tremendous effort, and it finally digested today. Unfortunately, the revelation comes too late, and was significant enough that I have gotten nearly none of the work done that I very much needed to do today because this took all my energy (doing research in peer reviewed journals to be sure). I posted about it on Twitter as it all came together, but that is hardly a useful means of communication... the post-it notes of the Internet (and I left Faceplant many, many years ago and remain very happy that I did). So I will try to put it here for posterity's sake to mark the moment in the pandemic where something I didn't understand became clear.
Firstly, I am now convinced I came down with COVID-19 symptoms Thursday, January 9, 2020. Yes, 2020. At the time, there was no testing in Canada, and antibody testing was not available for most of the year (even if I'd had the money) to check whether I'd had it or not. However, listening to more people talk about it, the symptoms that they experienced, and their path to recovery, that's exactly what I had. I would have been one of the first cases in Canada. I am reasonably convinced I gave it to my former intimate partner at the time as they had a whack o' symptoms of their own (not going into detail) and took them much of the year to recover from those symptoms (which were atypical for them, and definitely impacted them). I do not appear to have given it to my adult offspring (or if I did, they were entirely asymptomatic despite serious "pre-existing conditions", so I'm pretty sure I didn't). Remember, at that stage, we knew almost nothing about Sars-Cov-2 and had no inkling how big a deal it was.
I had last been in Geneva (at CERN) in November 2019, so I certainly didn't catch it then. However, I worked at Carleton University in the Department of Physics and people were going back and forth to China and Geneva all the time. Geneva is adjacent (physically and population-wise) to the full COVID-19 disaster that happened in Northern Italy (including Milan), and staff and visiting scientists at CERN went back and forth to those regions for family or leisure all the time. COVID-19 took hold and grew exponentially in that region. There is some suggestion that the virus was replicating before the first cases were formally identified, and it's possible it was brought back from there that early to Canada. It's also possible it was transmitted to me directly from someone who traveled to China and back over the 2019 university holidays (there were many faculty and students that did so). Regardless of where I got it, or from whom (I have my suspicions, but no proof... there were a lot of people sick around then), I definitely got it as we all headed back into work after the holiday break.
I have never been so sick, and certainly never that way, before in my life. I started feeling really unwell after work on Thursday, January 9, 2020 and by the next day, I was flat on my back. By Saturday afternoon, I thought my head was going to explode and everything else hurt like I was going to come apart at the seams. I'm incredibly pain tolerant, but I was sobbing uncontrollably and gasping for breath at how bad it was. I was within minutes of calling an ambulance, but my partner called their pharmacist about the symptoms and I think we called Ontario Telehealth (hard to remember) and I took some medications that seemed to pull me back from the brink. It took me a long time to recover, but I did without ever needing to be hospitalized. Once I was back on my feet, I didn't really think about it much, but I continued to not feel so great. I was tired and even more snarly than my usual irascible self, but I pushed through and went to my job and did my best with things at home, which weren't going great. As the pandemic set in proper, I became suspicious that perhaps I'd had and recovered from the virus. The written symptoms lined up, but all we read about were people who were dying or winding up in the ICU with massive damage to their body's systems... or those that were asymptomatic and quietly doing the virus' job. It wasn't until late 2020 that we started hearing rumours about "long COVID" or saw studies about serious harm done by the virus to people who were not necessarily even hospitalized. For most of the year, my thinking had been "well, if I had it, meh, I recovered and I've moved on... maybe I'll be resistant if I'm exposed again, cool".
I quit my job in August (this had been planned for a while) and started a master's degree in engineering (I'd wanted to do one in the social sciences, but was not accepted despite having graduated "With High Distinction" in that program, but that's another story... and I'd had enough of the physics department for a while, but still planned and plan to get a PhD in physics). Things blew up in my life in the May through July 2020 timeframe, and didn't really ease up at all until mid-October or so. I started classes in September though and was getting straight As in all my coursework, but things started crumbling and by mid-November, I had completely burned out and collapsed (metaphorically). I couldn't do any work and, as might be imagined, things didn't go very well for me. I won't go into details, but I'm still struggling to salvage any of that period of time (or at least not let it completely ruin my academic future). I went down to one class for this semester in hopes I could manage that, but I remained unable to focus clearly and was suffering serious anxiety any time I tried to sit and find the focus required to do school work. It made no sense to me, I love that kind of work, and I'm extremely competent at it (and the courses weren't that hard). It actually makes me feel good to do that exact sort of thing.
Last week I was talking with a counselor about my academic struggles, and mentioned in passing I'd likely had COVID in 2020. I did suffer emotional trauma last year and had put the blame on that for much in the way of the problems I was having. I've made it through much worse trauma before, and I'd always managed to find a path through to recovery, all the while continuing to function at a sufficient level to be able to muddle my way through the things I was trying to accomplish — or at least those things I needed to do to keep it all from falling apart. I'm a pro at muddling through. I'm a fucking star at finding a way no matter what. I'm smart and resourceful and resilient. Except. Except this time, it wasn't working. No matter how hard I tried, or what I did, I couldn't find a muddling strategy, I couldn't work through my trauma, I couldn't find a path, and I was functioning at the barest minimum level to make it day to day. This was not like me. This was not like any experience I've had before. I've thrived in much worse situations than this... I'm sufficiently full of piss and vinegar that I'll use a shitty situation as motivation rather than let it defeat me. But there I was, struggling for the barest minimum of operationality and stressed out of my gourd that nothing I tried made any difference in moving past it.
And that conversation I'd had with my academic counselor sat in my mind, and my subconscious chewed on it until it was finally digestible today. The counselor put two plus two together and got four, when I kept getting 3 or 27 or something. I wasn't thinking right. They said (to paraphrase): "if functionality you once had is gone, perhaps it was really lost, and perhaps there is a reason... there are studies that have shown that people who have had COVID sometimes have neurological issues that last long after the virus has been defeated, and those symptoms are often similar to those experienced by people who have suffered concussions." It didn't make much of an impression on me at the time (I agreed, and moved on), but holy shit it made an impression on me today. It explains so much of the past year, and everything I've gone through since! If my head feeling like it was going to explode was the brain swelling that has been observed in so many people who came down with COVID, and my head literally was exploding, then I very possibly suffered a traumatic brain injury right there and then on that day (with the day before leading up to it... it started before Saturday). I may have had the equivalent of a severe concussion due to COVID-induced encephalitis, and I've been recovering from it ever since (it takes about two years to fully recover from a concussion if it's not re-concussed, for example). I am doing much better now than even a couple of weeks ago, but I've remained crippled by having to come to grips with all of the unexplainable failures I'd experienced in so many areas (and a fear that I'd lost the ability to recover from any of it). The brain fog was lifting, but I didn't much like the landscape that was coming into view.
Things were going to shit last year (with or without COVID), and I was going to have a rough time of it no matter what; but if I had suffered a brain injury, it goes a long way to explain why things went worse than they probably should have. Bad and stressful things happened, but my reaction to them seems to have been amplified, and my coping skills were nonexistent, and all of that resulted in my reacting more negatively than I should have, or would have before. The impact of the emotional and mental stress I was put under was outsized, and it utterly disabled me rather than just kicking my 'nads up around my ears like such things usually did (which hurt, but could be recovered from once they were lowered back down and applied with a bag of frozen peas... all metaphorically speaking, of course). None of the issues got resolved (nor apparently could they have been under the circumstances with the physical impairment I seem to have been up against), and everything just kept building and building and I had no coping skills to bring to bear (because they had been hobbled), and eventually everything blew up. My reactions continued to me mired in a fog of incohesion but still amplified in misdirected ways through the lens of the injury I had suffered. Again, the symptoms I had (and to a lesser extent still have somewhat, but it's getting better) align completely with having had a damned brain injury.
My school (I am still trying to save it) and my relationship of ten years (they moved to the other side of the continent in July 2020, and we continued to keep in touch until things blew up in early March, so that's kaput) didn't survive the ordeal, and I feel like complete crap, but being able to put it all in context starting today is probably the piece I needed to understand what had happened, and what I need to do to heal physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. There's a definitely long path ahead of me, but I can at least start to re-assess everything that's gone on, and maybe now can finally plot an effective and at least partially optimized path back to full functionality (and maybe a little more contentment).
Firstly, I am now convinced I came down with COVID-19 symptoms Thursday, January 9, 2020. Yes, 2020. At the time, there was no testing in Canada, and antibody testing was not available for most of the year (even if I'd had the money) to check whether I'd had it or not. However, listening to more people talk about it, the symptoms that they experienced, and their path to recovery, that's exactly what I had. I would have been one of the first cases in Canada. I am reasonably convinced I gave it to my former intimate partner at the time as they had a whack o' symptoms of their own (not going into detail) and took them much of the year to recover from those symptoms (which were atypical for them, and definitely impacted them). I do not appear to have given it to my adult offspring (or if I did, they were entirely asymptomatic despite serious "pre-existing conditions", so I'm pretty sure I didn't). Remember, at that stage, we knew almost nothing about Sars-Cov-2 and had no inkling how big a deal it was.
I had last been in Geneva (at CERN) in November 2019, so I certainly didn't catch it then. However, I worked at Carleton University in the Department of Physics and people were going back and forth to China and Geneva all the time. Geneva is adjacent (physically and population-wise) to the full COVID-19 disaster that happened in Northern Italy (including Milan), and staff and visiting scientists at CERN went back and forth to those regions for family or leisure all the time. COVID-19 took hold and grew exponentially in that region. There is some suggestion that the virus was replicating before the first cases were formally identified, and it's possible it was brought back from there that early to Canada. It's also possible it was transmitted to me directly from someone who traveled to China and back over the 2019 university holidays (there were many faculty and students that did so). Regardless of where I got it, or from whom (I have my suspicions, but no proof... there were a lot of people sick around then), I definitely got it as we all headed back into work after the holiday break.
I have never been so sick, and certainly never that way, before in my life. I started feeling really unwell after work on Thursday, January 9, 2020 and by the next day, I was flat on my back. By Saturday afternoon, I thought my head was going to explode and everything else hurt like I was going to come apart at the seams. I'm incredibly pain tolerant, but I was sobbing uncontrollably and gasping for breath at how bad it was. I was within minutes of calling an ambulance, but my partner called their pharmacist about the symptoms and I think we called Ontario Telehealth (hard to remember) and I took some medications that seemed to pull me back from the brink. It took me a long time to recover, but I did without ever needing to be hospitalized. Once I was back on my feet, I didn't really think about it much, but I continued to not feel so great. I was tired and even more snarly than my usual irascible self, but I pushed through and went to my job and did my best with things at home, which weren't going great. As the pandemic set in proper, I became suspicious that perhaps I'd had and recovered from the virus. The written symptoms lined up, but all we read about were people who were dying or winding up in the ICU with massive damage to their body's systems... or those that were asymptomatic and quietly doing the virus' job. It wasn't until late 2020 that we started hearing rumours about "long COVID" or saw studies about serious harm done by the virus to people who were not necessarily even hospitalized. For most of the year, my thinking had been "well, if I had it, meh, I recovered and I've moved on... maybe I'll be resistant if I'm exposed again, cool".
I quit my job in August (this had been planned for a while) and started a master's degree in engineering (I'd wanted to do one in the social sciences, but was not accepted despite having graduated "With High Distinction" in that program, but that's another story... and I'd had enough of the physics department for a while, but still planned and plan to get a PhD in physics). Things blew up in my life in the May through July 2020 timeframe, and didn't really ease up at all until mid-October or so. I started classes in September though and was getting straight As in all my coursework, but things started crumbling and by mid-November, I had completely burned out and collapsed (metaphorically). I couldn't do any work and, as might be imagined, things didn't go very well for me. I won't go into details, but I'm still struggling to salvage any of that period of time (or at least not let it completely ruin my academic future). I went down to one class for this semester in hopes I could manage that, but I remained unable to focus clearly and was suffering serious anxiety any time I tried to sit and find the focus required to do school work. It made no sense to me, I love that kind of work, and I'm extremely competent at it (and the courses weren't that hard). It actually makes me feel good to do that exact sort of thing.
Last week I was talking with a counselor about my academic struggles, and mentioned in passing I'd likely had COVID in 2020. I did suffer emotional trauma last year and had put the blame on that for much in the way of the problems I was having. I've made it through much worse trauma before, and I'd always managed to find a path through to recovery, all the while continuing to function at a sufficient level to be able to muddle my way through the things I was trying to accomplish — or at least those things I needed to do to keep it all from falling apart. I'm a pro at muddling through. I'm a fucking star at finding a way no matter what. I'm smart and resourceful and resilient. Except. Except this time, it wasn't working. No matter how hard I tried, or what I did, I couldn't find a muddling strategy, I couldn't work through my trauma, I couldn't find a path, and I was functioning at the barest minimum level to make it day to day. This was not like me. This was not like any experience I've had before. I've thrived in much worse situations than this... I'm sufficiently full of piss and vinegar that I'll use a shitty situation as motivation rather than let it defeat me. But there I was, struggling for the barest minimum of operationality and stressed out of my gourd that nothing I tried made any difference in moving past it.
And that conversation I'd had with my academic counselor sat in my mind, and my subconscious chewed on it until it was finally digestible today. The counselor put two plus two together and got four, when I kept getting 3 or 27 or something. I wasn't thinking right. They said (to paraphrase): "if functionality you once had is gone, perhaps it was really lost, and perhaps there is a reason... there are studies that have shown that people who have had COVID sometimes have neurological issues that last long after the virus has been defeated, and those symptoms are often similar to those experienced by people who have suffered concussions." It didn't make much of an impression on me at the time (I agreed, and moved on), but holy shit it made an impression on me today. It explains so much of the past year, and everything I've gone through since! If my head feeling like it was going to explode was the brain swelling that has been observed in so many people who came down with COVID, and my head literally was exploding, then I very possibly suffered a traumatic brain injury right there and then on that day (with the day before leading up to it... it started before Saturday). I may have had the equivalent of a severe concussion due to COVID-induced encephalitis, and I've been recovering from it ever since (it takes about two years to fully recover from a concussion if it's not re-concussed, for example). I am doing much better now than even a couple of weeks ago, but I've remained crippled by having to come to grips with all of the unexplainable failures I'd experienced in so many areas (and a fear that I'd lost the ability to recover from any of it). The brain fog was lifting, but I didn't much like the landscape that was coming into view.
Things were going to shit last year (with or without COVID), and I was going to have a rough time of it no matter what; but if I had suffered a brain injury, it goes a long way to explain why things went worse than they probably should have. Bad and stressful things happened, but my reaction to them seems to have been amplified, and my coping skills were nonexistent, and all of that resulted in my reacting more negatively than I should have, or would have before. The impact of the emotional and mental stress I was put under was outsized, and it utterly disabled me rather than just kicking my 'nads up around my ears like such things usually did (which hurt, but could be recovered from once they were lowered back down and applied with a bag of frozen peas... all metaphorically speaking, of course). None of the issues got resolved (nor apparently could they have been under the circumstances with the physical impairment I seem to have been up against), and everything just kept building and building and I had no coping skills to bring to bear (because they had been hobbled), and eventually everything blew up. My reactions continued to me mired in a fog of incohesion but still amplified in misdirected ways through the lens of the injury I had suffered. Again, the symptoms I had (and to a lesser extent still have somewhat, but it's getting better) align completely with having had a damned brain injury.
My school (I am still trying to save it) and my relationship of ten years (they moved to the other side of the continent in July 2020, and we continued to keep in touch until things blew up in early March, so that's kaput) didn't survive the ordeal, and I feel like complete crap, but being able to put it all in context starting today is probably the piece I needed to understand what had happened, and what I need to do to heal physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. There's a definitely long path ahead of me, but I can at least start to re-assess everything that's gone on, and maybe now can finally plot an effective and at least partially optimized path back to full functionality (and maybe a little more contentment).
