TL;DR – COVID is not the flu. It can have persisting and debilitating effects on your mental abilities and completely derail your life, even for the young, healthy, and vaccinated. Do everything you can to avoid it, and do not assume “mild symptoms” means a mild effect on your health, well-being, and career. TC:280k YOE: 5 ++++ No judgment about vaccinations in this post - just relaying my depressing experience with COVID-19 over the past month as a warning to anyone who thinks contracting COVID is similar to getting the flu. My background - healthy adult, early-30s. Exercise daily and have no preexisting health conditions other than occasional allergies. I was vaccinated with the Moderna shots in late March, followed mask guidance, and generally avoided large groups and indoor gatherings. About two months ago, I was interviewing with five different companies, including Netflix, Snap, and Google (all non-technical roles). During an interview with a hiring manager in late July, I found myself struggling to find the right words while speaking and losing my train of thought. It was a poor interview, but I chalked it up to nerves and brushed it off. The following day, I woke up feeling slightly fatigued, nauseated, and had a stuffed and runny nose. Out of caution, I went to get a COVID test. The test came back positive. I was shocked - I had been fully vaccinated, no one I had been in contact with had tested positive (to my knowledge), and I hadn’t traveled or been in a setting with increased risk exposure. But my symptoms were seemingly mild, so I informed my manager and planned to keep working. The following week, my symptoms became worse. The fatigue and headaches became debilitating, and I lost my sense of smell. I also began to have troubling mental issues – I couldn’t remember things I had just read, and I took longer and longer to complete basic tasks. It became impossible to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. Realizing I couldn’t possibly give my best performance in an interview (and a little shaken after my last performance), I informed my recruiters that I would have to reschedule interviews set for that week. Later in the week, I was informed by a recruiter that they could not reschedule one of my interviews due to alternative candidates with exploding offers and that if I couldn’t interview at the initially scheduled time, they could no longer consider me for the position. I didn’t want to give another poor interview performance that could affect future opportunities, so I declined to interview. Another recruiter reached out with the same dilemma - again, I declined the interview. Toward the end of the week, I started to feel slightly better. One of the recruiters for my remaining applications reached out regarding a separate hiring manager who wanted to interview me. Fearful of losing another opportunity, I agreed to an interview slot for the following week. I thought a week would be more than enough time to recover. Over the weekend, my fatigue symptoms did start to subside, but headaches and mental sluggishness persisted. I tested negative with my take-home test and convinced myself that I was on the mend. I had been taking maximum doses of Tylenol to deal with the headaches, and by the start of the week, I genuinely thought I had turned a corner. But the interview was a disaster – I fumbled through substantive questions that I should have been able to answer in my sleep, lost my train of thought when I tried to respond to open-ended questions, and failed to recall simple concepts within the scope of my daily responsibilities and experience. The hiring manager abruptly ended the interview early with no talk of next steps or even the cursory “I enjoyed the conversation, thank you for your time.” I didn’t blame them – it was a painful performance. At this point, I began to panic. Five promising opportunities were down to two, and, more frighteningly, I didn’t feel like myself and had lost confidence. I tried to delay, but my recruiters told me for the remaining opportunities that I would have to interview within a few weeks because candidate pools were closing. I did more interviews over the next few weeks – none went particularly well, and I did not receive a single offer. Now, it has been nearly three months since my first symptoms, and my mental symptoms have not drastically improved. I rarely had headaches before, and now I have severe and debilitating headaches multiple times a day. Tylenol seems to be losing its effect. While my energy levels are somewhat improved, I still feel general fatigue that makes it difficult to exercise or engage in activities that I used to enjoy. Worst of all, my mental sluggishness has shown no signs of improving, and if anything, it seems to have gotten worse. In particular, I struggle to maintain my train of thought in complex conversations and have difficulty thinking of the correct words while speaking - issues that I didn’t have before. A lot of my work also involves reading comprehension and analysis of dense text, and now I can’t seem to recall details of passages after I read them, even after multiple attempts. Deep thinking feels effortful in a way that it never did before. Doctors have not been able to provide any helpful guidance, and I am terrified for my future. PLEASE take precautions – do whatever you can to protect yourself and to protect others. I had heard stories about long-haul COVID and vague symptoms involving brain fog, but I never truly appreciated that it could happen to me and on such a severe level. I wake up each morning hoping that the nightmare will be over and that I will feel like my old self. But it hasn’t happened after months of waiting, and I’m beginning to lose faith that it ever will. In a few months’ time, I went from feeling excited that I was close to taking the next step in my career and cautiously optimistic that the pandemic was winding down to feeling generally depleted, mentally drained, depressed, and fearful that my mental abilities are permanently compromised. Update 10/21/21: Thanks for all the well wishes - truly appreciated. I am not going to monitor or actively respond to this post, but I will provide an update in a few months. Hopefully, things will have improved. As someone suggested below, if you do test positive, please try to take a few weeks to truly rest and recover. I don't know whether it would have led to a different outcome in my case, but at the very least it would have given me a chance to better appreciate the symptoms before making decisions about workload, interviews, etc. My hope is that cases like mine are truly rare and that developments in antivirals and other remedies significantly reduce the risk of serious symptoms for everyone going forward. Wishing good health and fortune to all of you.
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It’s unfortunate that people will loudly put themselves and others at risk for the name of politics and anti vaxx. Hope you recover soon.
Test for mononucleosis. A lot of people who are having extreme fatigue and brain fog from covid have mono. I had mono in 2020 and whatever you're describing sounds like what I had.
If only I could read
When you are diagnosed with illness you take complete rest for atleast 15 days. You tend to overdo things thinking it'd just merely flu. That's what happen. I believe if you had taken 2-3 weeks off and completely took rest and be attentive of your health, things would have been better.
When I caught covid, it gave me a setback of two months. But I only thought about my health. Maybe one should take a step back. Relax and rejuvenate for a while and then start your journey again. And covid does take toll on your mental health, so do eat proteins, drink a lot of water and sleep atleast 8 hours a day.
Were you vaccinated?
Op mentioned fully vaccinated
Yes the person says with moderna
So healthy and vaccinated and still this? That’s concerning as fuck
Thanks for the info and warning OP. Take care!
Wow hope you recover from this OP. NOTHING worse than knowing you aren’t at 100%
Hope you feel better OP. You should consult an old, reputable homeopath. They have good strategies to claw back health from the long term effects you describe
Homeopathy is a scam.
Homeopathy is not a scam, it's proven to yield results through a method called placebo.