‘I think I’m losing my mind’

Bernard Bell is the executive director of the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. His story is part of The Well’s COVID Diaries, an occasional series exploring the physical, mental and emotional toll the pandemic has taken on members of the Carolina community. If you have a story to share, email us at thewell@unc.edu with COVID DIARIES in the subject line.

The first sign that something was wrong was when my sister lost her sense of smell.

This was in July 2020, around four months into the COVID-19 pandemic. My sister lives in Maryland, but due to the virus was home at our dad’s house in Greensboro, the house I grew up in, which is only a few blocks from where my wife and I live now. My sister is a Carolina alumna with a Ph.D. in chemistry and nutrition from Howard University. She’s very much into natural stuff. She had read that sage tea has antiviral properties, so she cut some sage from my mom’s sage bush and had it in the house. I commented on how strong the smell was. She said she didn’t notice.

At the time, we didn’t think anything about it. Like a lot of people, we were being careful to avoid COVID-19. We didn’t let anybody in the house. We didn’t go out. My wife would double-mask. She would clean the doorknobs with Clorox wipes. I would go to the grocery store, masked-up. I’d come back, leave my shoes outside and put my little surgical footies on before entering the house. I washed my hands. We were extremely cautious and thoughtful about it.

One reason is that I have Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune condition. I’ve had it since I was 12. I was already strict about my diet and health. I exercise and am not overweight. I don’t have the typical Black diseases, like high blood pressure or diabetes or high cholesterol. I protect my immune system, but I was not so cavalier that I let my guard down. My wife’s dad is a doctor. I like to think we’re intelligent and informed consumers. We fully anticipated being able to ride this thing out.

Two days later, I lost my sense of smell, too. That’s when I started to worry.

I called my doctor, who suggested I come in for a test. She called back a few days later to say the test was positive. I had COVID-19.

By then, I already had the classic symptoms — chills, body aches and fatigue. Extreme fatigue. I was sleeping 15 hours a day. I felt knocked out, like during a colonoscopy when they give you anesthesia and tell you to count backwards. It was that kind of fatigue.

My sister had similar symptoms. And my 90-year-old father tested positive, too, which really scared us.

My dad graduated from North Carolina A&T State University, a historically Black university, at a time when Black people couldn’t go to white universities. He got his Ph.D. from Penn State in 1964 and was the chair of the NCATSU department of agriculture for 35 years.

All in all, I was doing OK, but then my oxygen levels dropped. My doctor told me to immediately go to the emergency room. They admitted me, and I stayed for two and a half days. Thankfully, I did not have to go on a ventilator.

Bernard Bell, sick with COVID-19, at Greensboro’s Cone Health Wesley Long Hospital. (Courtesy of Bernard Bell)

Back at home, I was still sleeping a lot. My sister was sleeping a lot. My dad was totally lethargic. For a while, he just stared into space. Imagine all of us going through it at the same time. Nobody could really be a caregiver for anybody else.

Eventually, we all basically got through the virus, even my dad. I remember thinking, I’ve been blessed to get COVID and get it out of the way.

Six weeks later, I developed this intense pain in my head. It was like my eyes went dim. I called my doctor, who said I was having COVID migraines.

I’d never had migraines. She treated me with pain relievers and some nutritional supplements. The migraines came and went. I continued to feel exhausted and sank into a depression and into what I discovered later was PTSD. I would start an activity and couldn’t finish it. I would start a thought and couldn’t finish it.

And then the fall semester began. I was teaching two classes a week, 90 minutes each day. I thought, I can do this. I can be on. I treated it like I was a talk show host. I pumped myself up to make it through the hour and a half.

It was hard. I had 77 students and was teaching on Zoom using four different screens. I’ve always worked hard to try to be excellent. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. It’s just what I believe in. But I found being excellent a real struggle. It took me at least twice as long to prepare for class. I wrote down questions and listed which students I’d be calling on to keep them engaged. But it was so hard to stay focused during class.

At first, I didn’t want anybody to know. Besides teaching, I was running the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship. We’d have staff meetings, and I was trying to raise money and talking to ancillary groups like parents, potential donors and alumni. It was a beast. Finally, I had to tell my team what I was going through because keeping up was a real struggle.

Things got worse.

One morning, I woke up, went to the kitchen, took all the plates out of the cabinet and brought them back to my bedroom. I took my clothes out of my drawers, brought them to the kitchen, cracked twelve eggs and started mixing the eggs. I went to into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I went into the library in the house, grabbed some books and got in the shower with my clothes on.

That really scared me. I thought, Oh, my God. This was probably two months after my case of COVID officially ended. My wife was in Atlanta. I went down to my dad’s house, where my sister was cooking dinner.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m losing my mind!”

That was a Wednesday evening. For the next few days, I literally thought I had lost my mind. I couldn’t connect my thoughts. I couldn’t complete an email. I mean, I sat in my kitchen crying. It was unbelievable. I remember thinking — and this is where my vanity comes in — I remember thinking that the headline would be, “Brilliant college professor loses his mind.” I thought that. The brain fog was unbelievable.

I called a buddy of mine and broke into tears. I couldn’t shake it.

The most frightening thing? I didn’t know when it would end. Or if it ever would.

I remember thinking of all the uncompleted projects in my life. There were so many things that I planned to do that required clarity of thought, and I would never be able to do them.

I turned to my sister for help. She is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about nutritional supplements. She said, “Let’s try what’s natural first, and if that doesn’t work, you can always take the clinical approach.”

She made this tea. I don’t really know what was in the tea, but I drank it one Friday night. She wanted me to listen to some binaural frequencies to help synchronize my subconscious mind. She’d been telling me about this for years, and I didn’t believe in it.

“Everything is energy, right?” she said. “This is a different form of energy, so let’s try it.”

For weeks, I’d been waking up with this tightness in my stomach, because I knew something wasn’t right, and I didn’t know how to fix it. But on Saturday morning after the tea and listening to the music, I woke up feeling like myself again. I just broke out in tears — happy tears this time.

I realize this is all very personal, but I made a decision that because so many Black people and people of color were either not taking COVID seriously or were not getting vaccinated, that I wanted to be part of the solution and not the problem. This is a public health issue. I feel like by sharing, I can help.

My family and I live in a historic Black neighborhood in Greensboro. The guy who started the first Black bank in town lived across the street. The house we bought was owned by the first Black OB-GYN. And, man, COVID has wreaked havoc in our community. I didn’t realize until I talked to a friend of mine who owns one of the funeral homes. He said he was doing five to six funerals a week.

There’s so much we don’t know about the coronavirus and how it attacks the brain and heart. My doctor tells me the mental confusion may come back. So far, it has not. The brain fog has gotten better. The migraines have basically gone away. Let’s hope things stay that way.