![]() ![]() This was Ken’s experience, as two professors did not believe he had long COVID or needed accommodations to finish the academic year. ![]() This idea that brain fog is “fuzziness” and not serious predates the pandemic and makes it harder for people who need short and long-term disability accommodations to get them. Under the current understanding, we both had brain fog, even though our symptoms were radically different. But for Ken, long COVID was more than a year of inconsistent but extreme memory loss, extreme fatigue and immunosuppression that led to several emergency department visits. When the other of us (Emily) was sick, she would forget the occasional word or lose her focus, which are common in mild cases of long COVID. By calling all long COVID-related cognitive or psychological dysfunctions brain fog, it diminishes what people like Ken have experienced. ![]() Yet, when the fatigue remains and memory goes every 10 minutes, it’s also called brain fog. When someone feels hazy, tired and distracted, it’s called brain fog. But the term has become a societal and medical catch-all for the vast and varied neurological, psychological and emotional aspects of long COVID. People associate the term “brain fog” with confusion, trouble concentrating, anxiety, forgetting and sometimes headaches. About 46 percent of people who have it report some type of memory disruption. Its prevalence appears to be between 15 percent and 30 percent, according to numerous studies. Long COVID is a neurological disease that happens after people are no longer infected with SARS-CoV-2. This is what one of us (Ken) wrote in his journal about the periodic memory loss and inability to concentrate that he experienced throughout 2022, when he struggled with symptoms of long COVID. The term brain fog has everyone I meet expecting I’ll be better any day now.” ![]()
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