Age: 44.0
Sex: F
Vaccine: COVID19
Symptoms: Insomnia, Loss of personal independence in daily activities, Magnetic resonance imaging head, Malaise, Massage
Clinical narrative: Many symptoms began the same morning as the vaccination and persist to this day, 11 months later, causing disability. No treatment has resolved them.  - Debilitating fatigue, regardless of the amount and quality of sleep. Sleep never is refreshing. Fatigue impacts my ability to work, maintain my household, and take care of my basic needs. My quality of life is low, as I am unable to do most of what I could do prior to 4/30/21 (e.g., exercise, leisure activities, volunteer activities). Fatigue seems to increase with exertion, causing "crashes."  - Chronic physical pain, which has not been alleviated by medication, dietary supplements, professional massage, physical therapy, stretching, or stretching exercises. Worst and most persistent pain has been in my lower back, hip flexors, psoas, and right leg.  - Cognitive difficulties, including difficulties with short-term memory, word-finding, speaking, handwriting, typing, spatial understanding, concentration, and thinking. I confuse words that look or sound the same (e.g., "placate" and "complacent," "glucose" and "gluten"). I confuse opposites (e.g., horizontal and vertical). I have physical difficulties forming letters when handwriting; my normally neat, consistent handwriting becomes messy, irregular, and unclear. When handwriting, I commonly skip letters, write a different word/letter/number than what I was thinking, skip entire words, and misspell easy words.  - Insomnia, including both trouble falling asleep and waking in the middle of the night and being unable to fall back asleep for hours. Melatonin and other natural sleep aids have helped a lot but not entirely resolved this issue.  - Persistent sore throat (daily for much of the past 11 months).  - Periods of elevated temperature, not to the level of a fever but rather 1 to 1.5 degrees above normal, usually when other symptoms are worse (not correlated with menstrual periods).  - Various skin issues that never were present before (e.g., rashes, bumps).   - Sudden extreme sensitivity to clothing tags around my lower back (an area of chronic pain--see above), causing me to cut tags out of clothing I have had for many years without any prior issues of sensitivity.  - Sensation of electric shocks underneath my left shoulder blade (by "underneath," I mean more internal to my body than the bone).  - Irregular heart beat: Occasional pounding and skipped beats, most often noticed at night.  - Tingling in hands.  - Tinnitus: Mild, rising and falling in short episodes.   Approaches/treatments tried at the direction of health care professionals (most discontinued due to lack of effectiveness): - Dietary changes meant to reduce inflammation (discontinued) - Amitriptyline (discontinued) - Two-day water-only fast, followed by one-month elimination diet (discontinued) - Dietary supplements meant to reduce inflammation (boswellia and curcumin), "temper immune response" (quercetin), and help with nerve pain (alpha-lipoic acid) (discontinued) - Vitamin B12 shot (one) - Other dietary supplements: multivitamins, probiotics, fish oils, curcumin, NAC, and Co-Q10 (discontinued) - Natural sleep aids (still use some) - Professional massage (discontinued) - Active Release Techniques (by chiropractor) (discontinued) - Reduction in exercise / keep heart rate down (continued by necessity due to fatigue) - Ibuprofen (discontinued) - Prednisone (discontinued after 2 days due to 5-hour episode of heart palpitations) - Acupuncture and cupping (treatment continues)