The Dreaded Brain Fog…

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This issue, along with the fatigue, and “noise” from the pain and other sensations really causes me ongoing problems.

I do believe some combination of the medications as well as the other symptoms contributes to the fog; but, I firmly believe that the fog exists as a symptom rather than a side-effect of CIDP/GBS.

Other threads have spoken about being “blank” about where they are at a moment — and, also forgetting names, chores, etc. I get blank about what I am supposed to be doing at a given time, and I forget appointments, etc. even with a diary and reminders!

But, the most devastating thing was the degredation of my fast critical and analytical thinking skills. I used to do alot of facilitation of meetings where you have to keep ahead, summarise and feedback at pretty fast speeds over a long period. When I lost my ability to do it (through fatigue, or pain, or medication, or whatever!) I lost one of my fundamental skills. It was horrible. This goes on to this day.

The interesting thing is that I went for a whole battery of cognitive thinking tests — for about 4 hours. I was exhausted at the end of it !! There was numeracy, literacy, patterns, recognition, speech, memory, etc. The report basically said that while my basic skills were unimpaired, i.e. I haven’t forgotten how to do these things!, my memory, and my response time were significantly impaired. My performance degraded towards the end of the test. There were some other interesting things as well – like, the pattern recognition and complex thinking were low, but essentially it was “holding my memory” and response time that were the issues.

Anyway – it gave me some assurance that there were issues that are not related simply to the drugs, as it had been some years since I started taking them — while I was still working.