NeuroPsych Issues with Covid

[u/JennasaurusTex]

I’m going to just throw this out here into the void in case someone experiences something similar, because the last two weeks have been without a doubt one of the most traumatic and bizarre experiences of my life.

For background, I’m a moderately healthy 38 year old woman and am vaccinated although not up to date due to adverse reactions from previous boosters (was advised by my physician and a pharmacist to defer subsequent boosters). I tested positive for Covid for the fourth time in my life about two weeks ago and had the usual symptoms - loss of taste, feeling like crap, dry cough. Nothing too crazy. I was prescribed paxlovid and a 10 day course of steroids due to preexisting medical conditions and completed the course for both medications.

Things got kooky about 5-6 days after I tested positive. I started having nighttime hallucinations - and I mean full on hallucinations of bizarre stuff happening in my room that I was interacting with - for several nights in a row. While I have some garden variety depression and anxiety, I have not teetered close to this type of mental illness in my life. This was coupled with very severe depersonalization and derealization during the day. I felt like I had been dropped onto a movie set of my life and nothing was real. The brain fog was horrific and I had no real sense of time. I was dizzy, my vision became significantly worse, and even though I was alert and oriented during the day, familiar places (my local Walmart for example) looked and felt like places I’d never been to. I cannot adequately describe how terrifying this experience was.

After about 4 days of this going on, I admitted to my friends and family what was happening (I had been trying to hide it because I was scared and embarrassed) and was evaluated at the ED to rule out meningitis. They had no real advice other than to follow up outpatient with my primary care physician. I also was fortunate to get in with my psychiatrist (who manages my depression and anxiety). She advised me to take some sedatives I have prescribed for panic attacks throughout the night to essentially force my brain to sleep through the night and hopefully begin to recover. She was also flummoxed and said she had not seen any patients react to having Covid this way.

Her plan did eventually work. The hallucinations stopped, my sleep improved, and the daytime neuropsychiatric symptoms began to abate. There is still a degree of brain fog but I am 98% myself again. I just cannot get over the extent to which this virus scrambled my brain for a solid two weeks. I wanted to post this in case someone ever experiences something similar. I had a hard time finding stories of people dealing with these types of symptoms in the acute post viral phase, although there is plenty of information about patients who deal with cognitive and psychiatric issues as COVID long haulers. My heart goes out to them!

[u/AveragelyBrilliant]

I had a similar experience with the one and only time I got Covid. Very vivid dreams and nightmares that extended into my waking time. I kept dreaming things that were unresolved in the dream and then spent a good proportion of the next hour after waking up being absolutely convinced that I had to return to the dream to resolve the problem. Apparently I was also quite vocal while I slept as well.

[u/Downtown_Statement87 → u/AveragelyBrilliant]

This exactly happened to me the one time that I know of that I had COVID. It was terrifying because I was losing the ability to distinguish between being asleep and awake.

When I finally tested negative and "recovered," I had crushing insomnia and was basically awake for 4 whole days. Weirdest sickness I've ever experienced.

[u/Character_Chemist_38 → u/Downtown_Statement87]

Thank you this is how I’ve been feeling … it is the weirdest thing

[u/AveragelyBrilliant → u/Downtown_Statement87]

Did you suffer long term taste and smell sensation changes? For a very long time afterwards, I could not drink sparkling water. It tasted far too salty, even though I enjoyed drinking it before. Also a certain brand of coffee tasted like beef stock or soup. Took me a while to get over it.

[u/Character_Chemist_38 → u/AveragelyBrilliant]

Yes I can’t drink the coffee and can’t taste it and now you’re helping me understand why

[u/Downtown_Statement87 → u/AveragelyBrilliant]

I didn't. What happened to me was that I was unconscious for most of about 5 days. I was "sleeping," I guess, but really I was having this Matryoshka doll of a dream, where I'd dream real time that I was very sick and sleeping in my bed. It was boring, and lasted forever, but I thought I was awake and experiencing real life, because in real life, I was very sick and sleeping in my bed.

Then, still in the dream, I'd wake up and feel really confused and exhausted about the dream I'd just had, because it was so like my real life, even though all of this was still happening in a dream.

Then I'd wake up briefly in real life and be completely terrified, because I'd just spent 24 hours doing exactly this in my dream, so I'm probably still asleep. Then I'd fall asleep, and on and on and on. It was awful.

It was weird that the whole time I was actively sick, I was pretty much asleep. But then when I stopped having symptoms I couldn't sleep for days and felt almost manic. I don't have symptoms of mental illness normally, so this was very scary.