Punisher wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 3:04 am
Blackhawk wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 1:53 am
Punisher wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 1:05 am
Blackhawk wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2023 2:26 am
It's my memory. These days I can't follow conversations if there's a gap of more than 11 or 12 years.
Lucky you,! I have trouble following conversations if there is a gap of 11 or 12 minutes...
I don't have the same issues that you do, but the chemotherapy ten years ago had done a moderate amount of damage to my brain.
Curious if you dont mind. Realizing that there are differences in our causes did you ever get bavk to your normal or eben very close to it?
I don't mind, but I don't think I'll be of much help.
The chemo was almost 10 years ago, and (cognitively at least) didn't cause any issues right away. It wasn't until about five years ago that I started noticing problems. It was tabletop D&D that tipped me off first - I went from being able to run 10-12 hour games to getting severe mental fatigue after about five or six hours. Over the next few years that effect worsened to the point where activities with a heavy cognitive load (keeping track of complex process, keeping track of a bunch of different things at once, etc.) started giving me problems after only an hour or two. At the same time, it began to affect my memory. Sometimes I'd forget what I was talking about in the middle of a sentence, or be completely unable to remember a common word. You know the thing that happens to everyone where you walk into a room and forget what you went in there for? That sort of thing became common for me. It's significant enough that several activities that used to be favorites are pretty much out of my reach now.
Unlike yours where things got bad and then you began recovery, I was fine for years, and then it set in gradually. It seems to have stabilized and hasn't gotten any worse over the last couple of years (which is good, and normal for what seems to be causing it.)
I have taken steps to try and improve my cognitive function (paying better attention to my sleep, diet, exercise, etc.) It helps, but those are things that benefit anyone's mind, so they're not so much improvements in the condition so much as they're just general mental boosts.
Here's the disclaimer: I still haven't been formally diagnosed. I am still working on it, but I've been getting the runaround due to one quack giving me an obviously wrong diagnosis (blaming it on something that simply does not cause theses symptoms, and that said quack made some other absurdly incorrect statements about.) There is absolutely every reason, though, to believe that it's 'chemo brain', which is something that some people experience during chemo, and others experience years later. For some it disappears within a year of the treatment, for others its permanent. Every symptom matches, and similar problems from other causes (dementia, etc) have been medically ruled out by MRI (which does not detect chemo brain.) It's close enough, however, that had the onset been a year and a half later, I'd probably be wondering if I'd had COVID.
