I have been narcoleptic since high school. I was only diagnosed with it 8 years ago (I am ~40), so I actually lived with it for around ~15 years undiagnosed. In that time, I graduated high school, college, and went into a career.
So, with the preliminaries out of the way, and in a effort to contribute to the AMA comm:
Yeah, driving is pretty essential where I live. It sounds like you have coping mechanisms too. So what causes syncope?
“Dysautonomia.” Which my doctor hasn’t stuck his neck out so far as to say was from COVID, but it was. Heh.
I was an “early adopter” of COVID, so there weren’t tests yet when I started having symptoms, so I guess take it with a grain of salt because I don’t have a positive test result. But all the weird symptoms I had match up with COVID – though to be fair it’s really wild the range of different things COVID can do to you – and there were visitors from the London office at my workplace just a few weeks before I had that syncope and subsequently got long-term sick. (I’m in the U.S.)
My mom still has problems with brain fog and her sense of taste after having COVID.
Wow, that sounds like the disease you have when something’s wrong with your brain and they don’t know what.