So, long story short. A few years ago, around 2020, I got brain damage after I caught covid. Yes I have sought professionals and no, it didnt help at all. I’m not here to discuss the best treatment options.
With that out of the way, I would like to leave this anecdote here because you guys are interested in this sort of stuff.
Fist, to start I caught covid around 2020, and althought it was pretty bad, I thought my survival chances would be better if I stayed home because hospitals were at their limit.
So I just pushed through it. it lasted two weeks and my breathing was incredibly laboured, at the end, I was mustering all my willpower and pushing through the pain to pull in air through my almost closed airways, it was so bad I coudnt sleep for 5 days because how much strain it was to just to breathe.
Well, anyways, good news, I survived and I feel my diaphragm got way stronger ever since. The bad news is that my heart seems slightly bigger now and I got brain damage.
after my recovery I noticed that every once in a while I would see a flash in my visual field, it only affected my left eye. at first I thought it was some issue in my retina until I started to notice this visual flash kinda syncs to my thoughts.
The weird thing is how utterly unconcerned I was, I could tell the damage was there and yet coudnt care less, I was like “huh, looks like some neurons died, welp who cares I can still see, wait why am I not concerned right now?”.
Its not like I lost my ability to worry about stuff, in fact I still worry about pretty much everything. Except the damage and I can acknowledge how weird that is.
Now if you wonder what this visual flash looks like, imagine a screen that represents my visual field with a dot in the center marking my fovea, now take a bit of ink with your hands and smear it on the screen with a swiping motion, starting from the lower left corner, through the center and tapering off towards the upper right middle portion. Thats the shape of the flash. And the color of the flash is often white but sometimes pinkish-green, for as outrageous as that color sounds.
The flash only lasts around 100ms and has several triggers, which include attempting to remember something I’m unsure about, startle response, some object unexpectedly hitting my face or eyes, the end of a daydream and attempting to mentaly visualize very complex objects for too long.
when I go to sleep and close my eyes in pich darkness, I used to still be able to see some faint light in that region that would build up and get brighter over time until almost with a “pop” it would either disappear or trigger a new flash.
This makes me suspect that this flash comes from a normal process or circuit that is normally filtered out of perception but the damaged area lost the ability to filter it, thats honestly my only guess.
Now something interesting is how its healing. Boy its damn slow to heal which is annoying, still, its slowly but surely healing.
At first, the flash was vivid and the edges were well defined, it really looked like a lesion on my visual field, the first thing that happened is that the edges got fuzzy and imaterial, almost as If I coudnt pinpont well the shape, this took a few months.
In around a year, after the flash, I would see a dark shadow afterimage, maybe it was the work of inhibitory neurons tuning up their sensitivity.
In two years the shadow would sometimes come before the flash almost as it it was preddicting that this flash would come.
Three years and both flash and shadow would sometimes overlap in time and almost cancel out, leaving only some very trippy looking vein-like distortions in my visual field.
now after a very long time, its finally completelly disappearing. I can still see some faint light flashes during the night but only if I try really hard to pay attention to it which is great.