i’m a PT. was a PT. eighteen months in and I still don’t know which tense to use. when I got sick I assumed fatigue would be the problem.
I know energy conservation cold - it’s literally what I taught patients. I figured I’d pace my schedule, drop to part-time, modify my caseload. I’d watched people adapt around physical limitations for twenty years. I had a plan.
what I didn’t plan for was forgetting patient names mid-session. not just blanking - losing the thread of what I was treating them for, mid-sentence, while looking at them. happened three times in six weeks. the third time I drove home and sat in my car for forty minutes.
I could have built workarounds for the fatigue. I could have modified for the orthostatic stuff - I know how to do that. the cognitive dysfunction I could not route around. you cannot treat patients when your brain checks out mid-evaluation.
the grief from losing my career is a different texture than the grief of not being able to stand in a grocery store or hike. the physical losses feel like subtraction. the cognitive losses feel like replacement - like the thing that made me competent at my job is now the exact thing that fails me when I try to explain my own symptoms to a new doctor. I lose the sentence halfway through.
I know what I want to say and it just doesn’t come. anyone else find the cognitive losses sit differently than the physical ones? like the identity piece compounds on top of the illness piece separately?