The Return of Breakfast Bytes

If you are an avid follower of Breakfast Bytes, and of course, you should be, you'll have noticed it hasn't appeared for a couple of weeks. I got Covid (despite being triple vaxxed). After a couple of days with a fever and a cough, it seemed to be over. But then I had a lot of long-covid symptoms which are pretty debilitating: fatigue, brain fog, and total loss of appetite.

When I was a kid, I used to get bad migraines every few weeks. If you've never had migraines, you might just think they are a bad headache. But there are lots of other symptoms. Some people get visual disturbance, which I never did until the last ten years. I was very sensitive to light and sound, so the only thing to do was to go and lie down in a quiet dark room until it all went away many hours later. My mother told me that sometimes I'd just get under the covers of my bed, the best way to find darkness and peace.

The fatigue I have been having is similar, and I've spent a lot of the last couple of weeks lying down in a quiet dark room. At least I don't have the splitting headache. I'm amazed at how much I have been asleep, sometimes for as long as 14 hours at a stretch.

The other major symptom I had was a total loss of appetite. I have read about people losing their sense of smell, but that didn't happen to me. But I didn't eat for days and wasn't hungry at all. When I forced myself to eat, I could barely eat more than a few mouthfuls before my body seemed to think I was full.

Brain Fog

The brain fog is weird, too. It reminds me of when I get a song stuck in my head (an earworm) and I can't get rid of it. But with brain fog, it was a thought I couldn't get rid of or often just a partial thought. I'd try and come up with something for a blog post but my brain would just get stuck on the first few words and never advance to the next thought. It is most odd to suddenly have your brain stop working.

You may know that I like to do the (London) Times cryptic crossword each evening. See my post Aren't All Crosswords Cryptic? As a result, I have a quantifiable measure of brain fog. I can usually do the smaller of the two puzzles In about ten minutes, and the larger in about half an hour. When the brain fog started, I couldn't even finish the small one, and only put a few clues in the big one. Gradually things improved slowly until last weekend I managed to do the big crossword.

Plus, I managed to write a blog post (this one), which I was incapable of for most of the last two weeks. Let's hope I'm fully back.

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