The Fog After the Table
Researching the Effects of Anesthesia on the Brain
Datanya sits on the couch, lost. Art by me, Natasha Jacobs
The Fog Rolls In
October 2025, I started figuring out how to be a consultant and dialing in what I wanted to do with DataTabby, my small business. November, 2025, I started coming up with information to share with Facebook small business groups, posting on Substack, Medium and other places. Posting about how people can start using AI to their benefit. December, 2025 I made a month long advent calendar complete with tips.
Then in January, I experienced a lot of pain one night. It started in my esophagus. The pain then grew, expanding to my stomach which felt like it was on fire. My entire body cramped up, I couldn’t take deep breaths, and I ended up in the hospital for 3 days. I didn’t eat for each one of those days, on constant painkillers and woozy from blood being taken.
The surgery came and went, and I was discharged.
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
After that, I wasn’t the same. Nothing was the same. If I didn’t know better, I had jumped into an alternate reality. I couldn’t write anymore. I couldn’t study anymore. Reading anything took effort. The fog had arrived. A dense grey fog that covered every bit of my thought processes, just existing every day was hard.
The very idea of research, writing, even thinking, became a chore. A heavy weight that my brain couldn’t process. Things I used to love, such as playing in Notion, reading about technology, even video games were too much. Binging TV was it, most of the time that was more of sound in the background than it was anything else. It took four months before the break came. Just a small break in the clouds. But it was enough to let the light shine through.
The crack in the fog came on Tuesday, May 19th, 2026. I had an idea to build a Notion database. A journal mixed with a planner, all in one that made a new sheet every day, backed up in a database. Not an original idea, but mine nonetheless. And something about doing it, about that one act of building something just because I wanted to, filled me with so much energy it felt ridiculous. Like I’d had an energy drink. Like something that used to be mine had knocked on the door and I’d actually heard it.
After building the journal, I noticed trickles of thought seeping through the cracks. Every day something else found its way back in. It was around this time I started asking questions and getting answers. My vitamin D level had dropped to 13 ng/mL which is classified as deficient as normal starts at 30 ng/mL. I was also diagnosed with sleep apnea, meaning I could sleep a full 8 to 10 hours and wake up exhausted because my body wasn’t able to get any actual rest. Lastly, one of the main things I didn’t know existed, but now I understand is a real issue: postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD), now often called “delayed neurocognitive recovery.” Each one stacked on top of the other.
Together they became the answer to the question I’d been asking for months. “What’s wrong with me?”
What I found when I started digging into all of the issues I experienced surprised me. Each of these things: the surgery recovery, the POCD, the vitamin D, the sleep apnea, all had its own part to play in my complete reduction of cognitive function. Each one stacked on top of the other at the same time became the answer to the question of “what’s wrong with me?”.
I can’t tell you with certainty which of these caused the fog, or whether it was all of them together. I’m still finding that out. What I can tell you is that for months I wasn’t blocked by failure or fear or lack of discipline. I was blocked by biology.
In Part 2 I am going to walk through what I found, because I can’t let something like this occur and not dig in enough to understand what I went through and why. Not deep enough to be medical research, not super specific so you can diagnose yourself, but because I spent months thinking something was wrong with me, and it turns out something was happening to me.
PS: ☕ If you liked this and want to support the journey, you can buy me a coffee — every little boost helps keep the pawprints moving forward.
