This study shows links between Long COVID’s neurological effects, including brain fog and cognitive decline, and brain blood vessel integrity, offering hope for new treatments and diagnostic methods.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01576-9 (open access)
So this is actually pretty close to what a lot of people thought was going on: mini strokes.
I’m so grateful that I didn’t manage to catch COVID
Have you had any flu like symptoms since 2020?
Were you vaccinated and boostered?
Lots of people like to pretend they didn’t get it while not actually knowing.
Finally got it for the first time last week, tested positive on my wedding day 😭
Same. I was so (oddly) proud of my streak. Then my spouse brought it home from a meeting with friends : P
I was proud too. I was starting to think either I was an asymptomatic carrier or I was immune unlike the rest of you peasants with weak immune systems. My wife had it and I took care of her the entire time she was sick, and I never got it.
I was in the ICU COVID wing for weeks when my dad got sick (immuno compromised lung transplant situation:( ). I still never got it.
But alas, I guess I had just been lucky. I got it after last thanksgiving. The only one in my family to. My wife and baby never got it from me either. It’s such a weird sickness in that sense.
For what it’s worth I was all vaccinated and up to date. As soon as I was able to get each round I did. I wore a mask for a little longer than most people but haven’t really worn one for a year or so? Honestly don’t remember when I stopped. I wore one again when my baby was born for a few months.
How do you know you didn’t catch it? One of the problems, especially early on, was that some infections were asymptomatic.
Indeed, I’m not sure even testing is sufficient. My family recently got it (my wife and I visiting my parents), but thought nothing of it for a week. My father had a sore throat, my mother had watery eyes and some nasal congestion. My father masked indoors (because I don’t want a regular cold either) and chalked my mother’s symptoms to seasonal allergies (the cars were covered with Pine pollen all week). Then, on the drive home, my wife felt off. 10 hours in the car together. She slept in the guest room that night and, just for grins, tested for Covid the next morning. She was positive. We called and had my parent’s test - both positive. I tested negative so I packed my things and rented a hotel room for the week and worked there alone. I tested every other day and was never positive, but I cancelled all my client meetings.
I still never “got it” but…is it really feasible I didn’t have some low level? This is my second trip in a car for multiple hours with someone who tested positive the next day. Granted, I’m about 4 vaccines in (2xOG, 1 updated, 1 XBB variant), but so is my wife. I have to think that I had some sub-clinical level of viral load, or at least below the antigen test threshold, but I’m thankful I escaped symptoms.
Yet…
The virus is far from extinction and isn’t going anywhere in our lifetimes.
Expecting to never catch Covid over the next few decades is like expecting to never catch the common cold.
After covid I had some regular and unusually strong headaches for a while. Maybe my brain was bleeding?
Unlikely. The most likely answer is that your sinuses never drained and you had a secondary infection.
But it’s possible that leaky blood vessels had some effect. Note that leaky vessels are very different from an actual bleed.
A sinus headache is distinguishable from a regular headache, so I wouldn’t discount the leaky blood vessels possibility.
Good point pointing out the difference between a “leak” and a “bleed,” though: if your brain is bleeding, that’s a full-blown emergency.
I’ve been waiting since 2021 for my sense of smell and taste to come back :(
Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to retrain [edited as my phone autocorrected to ‘restrain’] my olfactory system. After over a year of my food tasting like trash, or like it was off, and a dangerous incident (with a trip to A&E) where my brain fog meant I left an unlit gas oven on all night and couldn’t smell it until I’d already got carbon monoxide poisoning (thankfully mild and temporary), I regained my smell and taste in about a week. Here’s an article about it, it links to a charity that works in the field of loss of smell : https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/health-wellbeing/treatments/smell-training-for-anosmia
Edit: if the down votes are because people think this is alternative medicine or woo, it isn’t, it’s a technique used in conventional medicine clinics. Try reading before you down vote.
Sharon Amos has written about gardening for Saga Magazine and The Guardian, among others. She is the author of Plants for Free and Great Plants for Tough Places.
Sure buddy.
Oh no, someone who writes about gardening!! In a magazine for the elderly!!Look, it was just the first article I could find while I was in the middle of baking, that wasn’t an American health and wellbeing website. I’m not American so I don’t know those websites and I don’t know what they all are. I just wanted to help the person I was replying to. The article links to the charity that has done loads of research into it. Yes I could have found a better link and fucking hell I wish I hadn’t bothered even commenting now.
To educate downvoters: Yes, “essential oil” health advice is a common bullshit indicator! But! They’re the standard pharmaceutical for this task, found in kits like this one used to train food and beverage scientists. Any diverse set of strong familiar smells can work.
I worked in a related field and got my ass kicked by long COVID shortly after the start of the pandemic. This is a good starter on the biology involved, a journal article from Nature, unpaywalled: https://web.archive.org/web/20220623072436/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01628-9
Treating anosmia from brain damage is the same for post-COVID as for a car accident or getting gassed in WWI: you diligently breathe in the olfactory training kit and try to vividly remember those smells.
Pull quote: “Sometimes, the sense of smell recovers spontaneously after injury. The olfactory nerve is the only cranial nerve that can repair itself when damaged, and olfactory sensory neurons — cells in the upper part of the nose that recognize different odorant molecules — renew themselves periodically throughout life.“
edit to add, extreme sympathies to anyone who has found themselves experiencing this!
e2: corrected link
I got COVID twice, and both times I lost my sense of smell. The first time it lasted 3 days, and the second time, the total loss was only for half a day. Both times, one of the first smells I was able to detect was the vinegar in salt&vinegar chips. It’s a strong smell that seemed to “pierce through” the block.
regarding your edit there, I guess most people stopped reading at ‘essential oils’ without knowing where this was going.
this is one (the only?) actual medical use for these things - their main thing is that they smell in a certain way that is consistent, so you use them to retrain your sense of smell. that’s it. no taking internally or applying to skin or whatever. just take the stopper off the wee bottle, sniff and repeat for as many bottles as you can be arsed.
when I had covid-19, I didn’t have so well defined scents on hand, but I did have several colognes I could sniff, and I knew fairly well how they were supposed to smell and could use those to gauge my senses. fun times, they were…
I only realised I’d lost my smell completely when I smelled some perfume and thought it must be off, because it smelled of nothing. Then I realised that my other perfumes were ‘off’, and then went around my home smelling random things and finally realised it was me. I think it was the effect on my taste that was the hardest thing though. Onions and garlic especially made everything taste horrible.
Try reading before you down vote.
Speaking only for myself, what really threw me off was the following:
Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to restrain [emphasis mine] my olfactory system.
I think that if I’d realized that you meant to say “retrain” here instead of “restrain”, I would not have been so quick to initially dismiss it as obviously nonsense.
Yeah that’s my phone autocorrecting. I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well. I’ll edit, thanks for pointing it out.
Anecdotal but several of my friends claimed that psilocybin therapy restored their sense of smell.
That is interesting. Psilocybin has been shown to grow new brain neural pathways. It does seems plausible.
Good god. I had covid twice, once before the vaccines and once after being vaxxed. I had a month of bad brain fog after each. It’s terrifying to think I was going to work and driving while my brain was leaking.
Capitalism’s gotta make sure you earn those profits for shareholders. Strokes be damned.
