~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A while ago I quit Facebook, but then re-upped in order to join a couple of groups related to Long Covid and ME/CFS. There have been some very helpful, to me, discussions there about these disease syndromes, their symptoms, and the various drugs, supplements and remedies people have tried. Also a lot of comments on how helpful or unhelpful various healthcare professionals have been.
Recently there was a discussion of "brain fog", a symptom of both LC and ME/CFS. If you consult Dr. Google it is generally described as mental confusion, cognitive and memory deficits. These are all true, but that doesn't nearly describe what it actually feels like. So in this discussion, one fellow described it as like a concussion on a bad day and a hangover on a good day. A woman described it as like having a concrete block in her head and another like someone has poured concrete into her skull and it has set solid. I especially like that last description but they are all pretty good. I often have to lie down just because my head feels so heavy… like a concrete block. I have never heard a healthcare professional describe it as anything other than cognitive and memory deficits (in other words, dementia).
I have had no luck getting anyone to understand what I mean when I say I feel dizzy, and I am thinking maybe I should use the concrete metaphor instead. More and more I agree with Michael J Fox when he says that the true experts are those with the condition themselves.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I set off a bit of a firestorm in town this week. Over the weekend I had a rather unpleasant encounter with a local landlord who accused me of driving away all his tenants by my constant complaining about noise. Funnily enough, I had given up complaining and his tenants were going elsewhere to party after 10pm which suited me fine. Anyway the encounter was very upsetting, so I wrote an email to the Town Council about it and I told a friend who writes a weekly newsletter for the Good Neighbours Association (a group of residents living in the student part of town who are having to put up with a lot of student and landlord bad behaviour).
A whole lot of people are horrified by my experience, including the Mayor. I am going to be interviewed this afternoon by a town employee looking into town/gown issues. A lawyer in the Association wants to know who the landlord is. He is not above pursuing such matters within legal limits.
I am not interested in going after this guy, he's unlikely to change his opinion and not being friends with him is not a huge loss. He is just an ignorant bully with no power. What I do want is for the Town to wake up to the bad behaviours of landlords, not only in how they treat the neighbours but also in how they treat their tenants (some student houses are very badly maintained and packed to the gills with young people who don't know any better).
What the Good Neighbours Association wants (among other things) is for the town to keep a registry of all landlords and require them to have business licences. I would hope that being registered would hold them accountable for complaints about how they run their businesses.
4 comments:
Interesting to learn about what you've shared re your Covid long haul "fog" experience. Certainly doesn't sound very pleasant. You're probably right that the real experts are the ones experiencing long haul effects.
Glad there's some town and gown dialogue going on and some action may be taken. Sounds like that landlord is really bad news. My first awareness of town and gown issues was in a small Univ. town in the midwest where my husband was in Univ. administration. Now, in Calif. our Univ. town, though not the one where he worked, I don't hear much about problems you've described experiencing. (We have several different state to private Universities in closeby communities.)
Hi Joared, I live in a small university town, when the students return in the fall the population doubles. In the past few years the university has been shutting down student residences and the local landlord have been picking up the slack. The town made the unfortunate decision to create multiple residential zones, to keep rental properties out of the best neighbourhoods. My neighbourhood is close to the university and most definitely not one of the best, so it is rapidly turning into a student ghetto. I am opposed to this and hope my experience will spur Town Council to take our complaints more seriously. Coincidentally all of the councillors live in the R1 (“best”) zone. There’s a town/gown aspect to all this as well, so it’s complicated and if at all possible I try to stay out of it.
Brain fog doesn’t sound so terrible, but it really is.
I am glad you found support Annie, brain fog sounds just terrible and I do hope the site is helping you and giving you fresh insight into the effects. It seems challenging to be robbed of what we thought would be a relaxing and meaningful old age. But I suppose we're doing our best to stay vertical and above the daisies, challenging as it all can be. But that landlord sounds appalling. I hope he is brought to account.
XO
WWW
Hi WWW, yes well, "I never promised you a rose garden" seems to apply. I remember Ronnie talking about that, how we're all held to an impossible standard of healthy active aging, and really, a lot of us are just barely holding on. A lesson I learned from my mother, you can be vigorous and active one day, and dying of cancer the next. It's just hard to accept that I drew the short straw. However, my younger brother has liver cancer, so I guess he got an even shorter one. Silly boy is way healthier than me though. We play the hands we're dealt, don't we.
Post a Comment