Symptoms
My symptoms come from having conversations, looking/playing/scrolling at screens, too much mental and/or physical activity, bright lights or loud noise. The symptoms are:
- Nausea
- Lightheadedness
- Sensitivity to light
- Sensitivity to sound
- Fatigue
- Brain fog
- Feeling like my head is “stuffed” or “full”
Short summary
- Fainted and hit my head in April 2018
- Spent two years on sick leave, ranging from being off 100% to 25%
- Struggled mentally with the slow progress and guilt of being away from work
- Tried to find expertise to help me but turns out there is little to none for a mild traumatic brain injury in Sweden
- Found out about Cognitive FX and went there in October 2021
- Cognitive FX was everything I could have dreamed of. Currently still doing my homework from them and feeling the best I’ve felt in 4 years!
Longer summary
April 2018. Woke up in the middle of the night feeling nauseous, went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and fainted. Woke up on the floor outside the bathroom with the world spinning like crazy.
Emergency doctor said that everything looked fine and to go home and rest and come back if I’d faint again.
Kept working the coming week. Saw two different doctors during the week. Each said to just wait it out and take it easy, nothing is wrong. Felt worse and worse each day, but couldn’t motivate why. Doctors didn’t tell me anything was wrong with me.
Friday of that week, house doctor number three was the first person to say that I had a concussion, and to go home and rest. She said that it can take six weeks to recover. I was then off from work on sick leave, for one week to begin with.
I rested and waited for about three months with very slow improvement. My doctor said that she had seen cases where it takes 6 months. This time was very mentally challenging. I felt a lot of guilt towards my work for being gone for so long and not being able to say when I’d be better.
In June I went back to work at 25% and could last for 1-2 hours at a lower intensity.
Summer holiday, had some improvement.
In August I was back to work, still at 25%. I felt better than before the summer. So happy to feel improvement, I thought that finally I will start getting back to normal. I kept using up all my energy and more – which was a very bad idea.
I started feeling more and more tired again, but didn’t want to believe it and didn’t really listen to my body. One day at work I felt that I could no longer do the work. Just looking at the screen made me nauseous. The underground and the walk to the office became more challenging.
I crashed back to square 1. Or even square 0. I felt worse than ever at this point. It was hard to walk right outside my apartment for 50 meters. The impressions of the world were overwhelming.
October/November of 2018 was my absolute lowest point. Feeling no improvement from day to day, not being able to do anything other than listen to audio books and not seeing an end to it led to very dark thoughts and depression.
Late November I decided to try working again even though it felt bad. I felt I had gotten stuck and afraid of the world. The thought of using public transport, the walk to the office, seeing people and having to try to explain things to them seemed scary.
Met with my boss before coming back to the office, telling him about the situation and to brief my colleagues.
This time, being at work was very mentally challenging. I felt very fragile and scared. My mind was working against me. I was scared that someone would start talking to me, because conversations with all that they entail were very tiring. So many things happen in a persons face and with their body when they speak. There is a lot of effort in keeping eye contact and not get dizzy by the movements of the person. My colleagues knew me as someone else, but l still looked exactly the same and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to be the person they knew.
I spent months hiding in a small closet-like room at the office trying to do something resembling my old work tasks on a laptop.