[hdndjsbbs]

Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now

Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.

[snarf21]

If you think you have long Covid, you should do some research about CIRS (Chronic Inflammation Response Syndrome). It is a condition caused by exposure to toxic mold from water damaged (inside or out) buildings. There is growing evidence that there isn't actually a separate condition for long Covid, but rather it is Covid-triggered CIRS. (Lyme can trigger it too). (Note: only about 25% of people are genetically susceptible to suffering from CIRS)

CIRS causes your body's call-and-response immune system to short circuit; meaning one part detects the problem and the part is supposed to fix it but the part that is supposed to fix it (remove the mycotoxins) doesn't see the problem and does nothing. CIRS causes a lot of side effects, including all the ones mentioned by the GP and many more. If you want to test for toxic mold, you need to test the dust in your space. Some amount of mold is naturally in the air at all times. The dust will show and accumulation of mold over time and show if there is a real problem.

Source: I thought I had long Covid for a long time, until I realized the real problem which was toxic white mold in my house. I threw everything in a dumpster and sold my house and am now on the long slow multi-year process of recovery. If you think you may have it, try pushing Mg, Zinc and Potassium really hard for a few weeks. Take things that naturally bind the bile in your gut (the mycotoxins attach to the bile which is recycled). There are heavier binders that bind everything but I wouldn't start there.

[IX-103]

It doesn't necessarily have to be white mold either. Anything that generates a persistent immune response can keep it going once it triggered. Like really bad allergies.

[mattgreenrocks]

Thanks for writing this up. How did you figure out it was toxic white mold, or rather, what tests helped you get there?

[snarf21]

Largely it was a multi-year process trying to find the source of all my symptoms. Eventually, I found someone posting on a Reddit forum about long Covid and they suggested to someone that they have problems with mold exposure instead. I collected dust from my house and sent it off to be tested. The test came back with an UNINHABITABLE result for Aspergillus versicolor (a highly resilient and ubiquitous indoor mold frequently found in water-damaged building materials like drywall, carpet, and ceiling tiles)

You can't really test for it in blood or urine unless you are currently under super high exposure. Unfortunately, most doctors have never heard of it and have no idea what to do. Some don't believe you because all your bloodwork is fine. It finally clicked for me when I realized that I had 20 of the 21 most common symptoms and had had a roof leak a few years before (since fixed).

I have an extreme heat intolerance now too so I only feel okay when cold and overly hydrated. I started pushing the vitamins above after eating peas one night and magically feeling human again 30 minutes later. Even though your levels may be "normal", the mycotoxins prevent uptake so you have to flood your system and hope enough gets through. I also make sure I'm getting enough vit C, B and D in my diet. I even do things like buying a specific coffee that is tested for mold. A lot of foods sit around collecting mold before they get processed into food. These mycotoxins (not live mold) will get bound to the bile in your gut naturally. Bile is energy expensive for your liver to make so it is highly recycled as it helps you break down fats in your guts. You can do a lot more reading in the ToxicMoldExposure Reddit.

[chipsrafferty]

Throwing all your stuff away seems wasteful.

[snarf21]

How kind of you to say.... If you do much research on the topic, you will find that this is the standard advice. It is almost impossible to remove (especially for any porous surface). People with CIRS can by symptomatic even from dead mold spores.

[spprashant]

I am just offering a different point of view, not disagreeing with the other experiences on this thread.

I d like to think I have fully recovered from confirmed Lyme diagnosis with Doxycycline for 14 days. I had fever and weakness for a week and lowest HRV reading my Fitbit ever recorded (7ms v 50ms avg).

Interestingly, I have a lot of symptoms like anxiety, sleeplessness, and brain fog even today, but I know for a fact I had it even before Lyme. It had peaked during the COVID times when I sat at my desk working over 10 hours on the regular because there was literally nothing else to do.

So at-least in my case it seems COVID was the trigger and Lyme didn't seem to move the needle much either way.

[javier2]

I think I may have had long covid or something like that as well. for something like 12-18 months in 2023-2024 I would only go to work, come home sleep 2 hours and that was all I could manage. I felt so fatigued and tired. I started doing better at the beginning of 2025, and am doing better now. I think it may have been caused by partly illness, and partly the psychological shift to doing nothing social at all for most of covid pandemic.

[inigyou]

I had this starting around the beginning of COVID. Was it COVID? Did I get COVID at all? Plausibly, but not definitively. Did I get it at that time? Almost certainly not as I stayed isolated and got tested whenever I wasn't. It could be aging but I think a lot of people chalk things up to aging that are actually due to non-aging-related causes - you just accumulate more past as you age so you're more likely to have encountered whatever the cause is. I did go camping several times, once in a region known to have Lyme, without being vaccinated, but that was years after I started noticing chronic fatigue. Conclusion: I really don't know.

At least some of my cognitive decline is surely related to my attention span, which is not aging-related at all but more to do with the modern information-flood environment. A few minutes ago I misread "scripted" as "sculpted" in an HN comment and then stopped to reflect why I did that. It wasn't because I can't read, but rather because I was skimming over that comment really, really fast, because that way I can view more comments.