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Fatigue is common after a brain injury, whether mild, moderate or severe. Watch young stroke survivors talk about their experience with fatigue and how they manage it.

Transcript

Lisa: Fatigue. Yes. Like beyond anything you could ever experience.

Letisha: Oh my God. And I still do. The fatigue for the first couple of years was the worst.

Michael: Fatigue demonstrates, and I call it … and it hits you like a wall. It’s a brain fog. People call it fatigue. People around you don’t understand it. But but it’s just like, my brain just shuts down.

Lisa: I would sleep in until 9 o’clock in the morning. I’d work for a few hours, and by 12 o’clock I just could not function. It was like my brain just went “You know what, that’s enough.”

Kristie: Yeah, I still get fatigue. I even just had a job interview. And it was an hour. And I was just like … I had a headache. And I was just, like, so tired after. I was, like, “oh my god”. It’s your brain, like, constantly trying to form sentences and not getting brain fog.

Letisha: I would spend most of my days in tears because I was just so tired. It was so depressing to be tired at doing nothing. I’d be lying on the lounge doing nothing and crying because I was doing nothing and I was tired. Yeah. That was tough.

Paul: The feedback cycle for boom and bust, for fatigue management, for me anyway, is long. It’s a day or two. So I mean if you go to the gym for example, and you overdo it, you know that pretty immediately if you’ve done something stupid. Whereas for me, I don’t know until the next day, sometimes the day.

Bethany: I found that if I was trying to fit too much in, like trying to do shopping, appointments and cleaning. And then also if I was trying to concentrate a lot on doing something, it’s just, my brain is like “Nah”. It took me about 3 days to recover before I got back to where I could actually do stuff.

Sue: I just managed my fatigue levels. I paid attention to what mattered to me the most. And what mattered to me the most was my young family.

Lisa: The things that I used to do, I can still do them they just make me more tired. And so I’ve got to really be conscious of managing my energy. Your energy management is really important. And it’s worth focusing in and understanding what gives you energy and what takes your energy away. And be really diligent about doing the former and not the latter.