foggy brain Archives - Jumbledbrain

Living with brain fog caused by brain injury

Michelle #jumbledbrain — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:16:33 +0000

Many people will have experienced a type of brain fog even if its just forgetting where in the car park they left the car. Stressful when that happens. But when you have a brain injury it’s on another level, believe me. I can only describe my experience of it as for every person its different.

Firstly the inside of my head doesn’t feel normal. It feels like its full of stuffing and its bursting at the seams. It’s not painful like a headache, but its uncomfortable and distracting.

Imagine you need an important file. But the room the cabinet holding the file lives in has been completely filled with stuffing from floor to ceiling. You would be very frustrated, and maybe vocalising how stupid the person who left it like this is. Plus it would take you so much longer to get that file, making you get behind with what you had planned to do. By the time you had the file you would be tired from all the effort and still have to work out what to do with all the stuffing that you don’t know where it came from in the first place.

When I have brain fog I can find it difficult to follow what anyone is saying to me. I hear the words and I can understand what they mean on their own, but I can’t put the sentence together. So I might know what the subject might be but that’s it. For me this is more frustrating than someone trying to speak to me in a foreign language. At least then I know it’s because I’ve never learnt it. But brain fog, I should be able to follow at least, even if I don’t have the right answer.

There are some things that might help, or are at least worth a try when experiencing brain fog.

Meditation – Stress can make the brain release the stress hormone cortisol. It’s job is the temporarily shut down some “unnecessary” functions so your body can focus on the cause of the stress. But meditation can help by reduces the stress levels, and therefore lowering the cortisol. This can help increase focus and concentration.
Exercise – As our brains use 20% of all the energy and oxygen in our blood, raising your heart rate can help your brain by increasing the blood flow. This makes sure your brain gets more of what it needs.
Sleep – If we have a lack of sleep it’s our brains that suffer the most. Sleep helps us to consolidate memories from the previous day and therefore aids the learning process. Having a nap will help in the short term, and you should try to ensure you get enough sleep every day.
Stay hydrated – we all know that drinking enough fluids is important but still many of us don’t drink enough. Our brains are made up of 75% water so it’s not difficult to imagine how dehydration would cause a problem for the brain. Just 2% dehydration affects your attention, memory and other cognitive skills.
Go outside – We get vitamin D from the sun. It’s estimated 1 billion people around the world are deficient in vitamin D. As well as helping ease brain fog, it improves your mood. Therefore it assists depression, improves memory, and increases problem solving ability.

Small changes in your diet might also assist your brain.

Omega-3 Essential Fatty Acids – found in fish such as salmon and sardines it’s essential to the brains health and aid memory. But if you can’t eat fish there are Omega-3 supplements that you can easily pick up.
Arctic root – A herb used in Chinese medicine to be more resilient to stress, it can help reduce the amount of cortisol released.
Citicoline – Available over the counter and increases blood flow to the brain. It is recommended for patients of brain injury and dementia as it raises levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter which aids memory and learning.
Magnesium – Available in many forms , but the best for brain fog is magnesium threonate. It easily crosses into the brain, where as many others don’t. Don’t go for magnesium sulphate, the kind found in Epsom salts. Fine for soaking your feet but should not be ingested. It has been known to cause brain fog!

Read another common cause for confusion you might experience in Confabulation is not lying. False memories due to brain injury.

What is brain fog like for you? Is there anything that you have found helps you avoid it or deal with it when it happens?

The post Living with brain fog caused by brain injury appeared first on Jumbledbrain.

Added confusion – why my brain injury was hard to diagnose

Michelle #jumbledbrain — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 13:47:15 +0000

I’m sure many other brain injury survivors like me go through a stage where they have other health issues affecting them at the same time. This can create some confusion about which is responsible for the symptoms.

In my case I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. For years, since being a teenager I had been borderline. But suddenly that changed after my accident.

I don’t know if that happened because of the radiation from the CT scan’s or just because everything in my body was struggling because my brain wasn’t running a tight ship any more. But as many of the symptoms can be similar to a brain injury it was difficult to know which was causing what.

First my GP found I was anaemic, the iron in my blood stores had all but been used up. Perhaps that was because of the blood I’d lost in the accident. So she put me on a high dose of iron tablets, which did help a bit with the tiredness. As iron transports oxygen in the blood its vital that everybody has enough iron.

Given that the brain uses 20% of your body’s oxygen and energy it becomes clear why a lack of iron in your blood can cause such problems.

But still I would have a foggy brain, so she ran more tests, and low and behold my thyroid just wasn’t pulling it’s weight. Hypothyroidism covered a lot of the symptoms I had:

slow movements and speech
confusion
pins and needles
breathlessness
dizziness
palpitations
difficulty swallowing
dry skin
slow metabolism
constipation

…just to name a few.

Given that this was still before anyone had explained I had a brain injury, I started taking the prescribed Levothyroxine and expected miracles to happen. She did explain it takes time for your body to readjust so she advised caution with my expectations.

So in time I did feel a difference, a slight improvement. I felt was on my way back to being normal.

Wrong.

I had a brain injury so whilst treating the hypothyroidism helped, it wasn’t able to resolve the fact that my brain was still having to find new ways to process things.

I do not blame my GP, she did the best she could with the information she had. Dutifully she bowed to the expertise of the specialists. But actually she didn’t have much information sent to her from the hospital anyway. Before this happened I had only met her once about 4 years earlier so we were having to start from scratch. She didn’t know me and so where often your regular GP might be able to spot something different about you she had nothing to go on. Therefore I can understand where her confusion came from.

I’d never been one to go see the doctor each time I was ill. Usually my answer to everything was hot honey and lemon. But this time it wasn’t going to cut the mustard.

It wasn’t until I started attending the group sessions with Headway that I started to make my way through the confusion. Until then I didn’t really understand even how serious a concussion is. But as Annette started to go through the basics I began to realise.

As I’m only in my early thirties it’s hoped that in time I will make a “full recovery”. It used to be thought the brain would be fully mature by your late 20’s but in more resent years this has been revised.

New research shows the brain continues to develop after childhood and puberty, and is not fully developed until people are well into their 30’s and 40’s. The findings contradict current theories that the brain matures much earlier.

The prefrontal cortex is the region at the front of the brain just behind the forehead, and is an area of the brain that undergoes the longest period of development. It is an important area of the brain for high cognitive functions such as planning and decision-making, and it is also a key area for social behaviour, social awareness, for empathy and understanding and interacting with other people, and various personality traits.

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a Neuroscientist with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said the prefrontal cortex “is the part of the brain that makes us human,” since there is such a strong link between this area of the brain and a person’s personality.

So whilst I’ve still got to be patient, excuse the pun, I’m still hopeful for the future.

But what about when you think everything is the fault of your brain injury? Don’t always assume you know what it is. Read how I made this mistake in Overlook other problems & wrongly blame brain injury.

Have you had other medical conditions which have made it a challenge to identify the effects of your brain injury?

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