Can I borrow a spoon?

 I get tired. Like, really tired. I mean, more than normal, tired. 

Imagine you have the flu. It could be a mild flu, or a heavy duty flu. Your head is foggy, your eyes hurt. Your body feels really heavy. Your limbs feel like they don't want to move. Nothing anyone says makes sense anymore. You can't think.

That's neurofatigue. It's what people with PCS live with on a regular basis. When we say we're tired, this is what we mean. We mean our brains aren't working anymore, our bodies won't move and we need to shut down. Miraculously, somehow, we often will keep going. Just a little more. Doing one more thing. But the cost is high. Tomorrow we will have even less energy to start with.

Let's do another imagination game. We each start the day with a cup of spoons. You have 40 spoons. I have 15 spoons. Let's see how many spoons we each have at the end of the day.

First we need to get dressed. Then we need to make breakfast and eat it. After breakfast we brush our teeth.

It's laundry day and that means carrying the basket down a flight of stairs, and up another flight of stairs to the laundry room (this is real). To move the laundry from the washer to the dryer, we have to go back up the stairs to the laundry room again. Then once the laundry is finished, we have to go back to the laundry room yet again and  bring back the laundry up to the bedroom. A normal person would then put the laundry away, right? I'll just leave mine stacked in the basket... shhhhhh....

That's the morning done. Do you want to guess how spoons we've used so far? Let's keep going.

It's lunchtime. Luckily, there are leftovers from last night. All we have to do is put some on a plate and eat. Just as we're finishing lunch, the phone rings. We have a phone conversation for an hour.

In the afternoon, we need to take a walk. It helps get the oxygen flowing to the brain. But it still has a price.

I'll go easy on you after the walk. Maybe you'd like to read a book. I'll watch some television. After spending some time with a book, you decide to go out for a bike ride for a couple of hours. I'll stay home and take a nap. I have no balance on a bike anyway. You get home sweaty and need a shower.

If we're lucky, someone else will make dinner and it won't cost any spoons. But we have to clean up after and that will.

We end the day with a little more television before bed. I'm beyond exhausted. You decide to read a little more before bed because you're not sleepy yet. Must be all those spoons left in your cup. Lucky you. So you spend another spoon while I just go to sleep.

Let's add up the spoons. Everything we do comes at a cost, and the more energy we have to expend, the more spoons the activity will use. Ready? You used a grand total of 31 spoons. Where I cut out some of the extra activities, I brought it down to 21.

Your activities for the day doubled my daily spoon count. Just to do the necessary activities of the day without the extras, I already have to borrow from the next day, taking spoons out of the next cup. This is called Spoon Theory.

People who experience neurofatigue have to watch how they use their spoons every day. We make choices about when and how many to go over, depleting future resources for special occasions, knowing we will have to cut down our to-do list to recover.

The next time a person with a brain injury tells you they're tired, whatever else you do, don't say "me too."

Have you got any extra spoons I can use? My cup seems to be empty.