Katherine was experiencing a wide range of symptoms when she finally went to see her doctor.

Transcript

When we got to around six weeks and I wasn’t feeling any better, I made an appointment with my family doctor. And I went into see her. And I described my symptoms. And at that point, I was still experiencing some severe shortness of breath. The fatigue was remarkable. I had never experienced anything like that before, even if you stay up for 24 hours straight. It was such a full body fatigue. The shortness of breath was so severe at that point that I could barely walk from room to room without feeling winded, and that didn’t seem right to me. The cough had subsided some, so I couldn’t understand why I was still so short of breath. I couldn’t walk up or down stairs at all, which is weird for me, because I do quite a few stairs on a regular basis. The symptoms that I’ve come to identify as brain fog, just cognitive irregularities, I guess, for lack of a better word, I experienced short-term memory malfunction. I think being a woman over 50, it’s normal for me to struggle to find a word now and again. This was something completely different. Where I would be having a conversation and all of the sudden, completely forget what I was about to say. And even when my friends would prompt me, “You were just talking about this”. I would think, “I was?” It was so unusual for me. And initially, I kind of laughed it off, like, “Oh, that’s weird, you know, I must be overly tired”. Or, “That’s strange”. But the more it happened and the longer time that it was going on, the less comfortable I was with it. So I mentioned it to my doctor and that’s where I think I first learned the term brain fog.

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