Brain fog

Brain fog from M.E. can be difficult to describe because it's so many different things. Still, I'll try to explain how I experience it.

People forget things all the time and have trouble concentrating, but my current brain fog is different than how I used to experience those things. At it's best, I lose common words throughout the day and fear I'm developing dementia. My mind goes blank frequently. If I want to ask Daniel something I tend to ask a few times because I forget his answer or if I even asked him in the first place.

At it's worst, thoughts go numb and fall out of my head. Words in my mind disolve before they reach my mouth. Listening to someone becomes impossible, it's like listening to a language I don't understand while I'm under water. It also affects numbers, so forget even simple math as well as my own phone number and address. Medically this is called aphasia, which most commonly happens due to brain injury or stroke. The silver lining is that when my brain fog is at it's worst, I lack the self awareness to realise how abnormal it is for me so I don't feel worried about it. I do tend to get agitated when I can't remember a word though, and tend to flap my arms like a drunk penguin.

For me one of the most annoying aspects is the word loss. I love words, as a kid I was the little wierdo who read through the dictionary for fun. Once upon a time I had a fairly impressive vocabulary. Every once in a while I can still use an uncommon word, but then I forget something like "shirt."

Speaking of reading, that's another thing that brain fog has taken from me. I can only concentrate in short bursts. I used to regularly read books in one sitting, now more than a paragraph becomes difficult for me to follow. Writing these brief posts can take me hours to piece together, and I still feel like I'm not quite making my point.

Brain fog isn't just something that happens to me from time to time throughout the day. It's always there clouding my mind, it's just a matter of how badly at any given time.