Jennifer has had a recurring sequence of symptoms.

Transcript

At first it was my chest tight – pressure on the chest and shortness of breath, I really had trouble even moving inside the house. But then over the next months, that sort of got better and I started to feel some hope. But then I started getting severe gastrointestinal symptoms but really severe and that lasted a while too. Long enough for my doctor to send me to a gastroenterologist who immediately said, “Oh, that doesn’t sound good.” … Then after, you know, a while that seemed to subside a little bit again, but then this incredible pain like everywhere, just pain, pain, pain and then the pain just never left. But then I started getting the whole – the cycle of, you know, chest and shortness of breath for a number of months and then the gastrointestinal symptoms while the pain, extreme fatigue, brain fog, those things just remain constant … So I went back to work gradually. And what I found is that I used to be really, really good at multitasking, I was also very, very good at reading a file with a complex set of facts, I think my strength was being able to read something and immediately say, “OK, here’s the problem.” But what I started doing is I started – I would read, and I could not grasp the facts and I had to actually start taking notes and say, “OK, one, Mr. Smith did this. Number two, Mrs. Smith did this. Number three” – I had to put the chronology in writing because I could not follow it. And I realized that when I was watching a movie, for example, you know, when they have flashbacks, they go back and forth, I couldn’t follow it. I could only follow when things were like kids’ cartoons for example which just follows this chronological sequence, if not I couldn’t get it. So that was in May when I had come back to work and I was experiencing all this. I had never tested I guess the extent of my brain fog up to that point.

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