“It never occurred to me that it would mess with my brain,” said Chet Faker during a chat on air with triple j‘s Richard Kingsmill.
Faker AKA Nick Murphy, spoke with Kingsmill about the resurrection of his Chet Faker moniker, as well as his new record Hotel Surrender. During their conversation, he also revealed his Long COVID diagnosis and the challenges that came with that.
“I didn’t know it was COVID, I just knew there was something very wrong with me,” he said.
The 33-year old has been living in New York City since 2014, which would in 2020, become the epicentre of the unfolding Coronavirus crisis in the United States.
He said he was initially cooped up in bed for “three days”. “‘I’m pretty sure this is COVID because this is nothing like the flu or anything I’ve had before.’ But then I was all good,” he said.
He said he was “pretty confident” about his chances of beating the illness, however three months later, he began to experience symptoms of what health professionals are calling “long COVID”.
Long COVID is the term to describe a number of COVID patients who may experience symptoms months after contracting the virus. The symptoms vary from patient to patient, however some of the common ones to emerge have included breathlessness, mental health issues and brain fog.
Faker said he experienced a range of symptoms, including depleted B12 levels and the inability to digest food, but he said the worst part of the diagnosis was the brain fog.
“I thought brain fog was when you wake up in the morning, ‘oh, I need my coffee’. It’s not like that at all… It’s more like you know you’re awake but every time you try to think something smacks the thought out of the way,” he explained.
“I remember standing in my kitchen for like 15 minutes, trying to figure out if I was going to sit down or what I was doing. It was really hectic. I wasn’t scared by the physical sickness… But it never occurred to me that it would mess with my brain.”
He attributed his recovery to getting vaccinated.
“An article said something like 40 percent of people with long COVID had said that the vaccine had helped with their symptoms,” he said.
“By that point I was so fucking messed up; I hadn’t done anything in three months, I went and sat in the park every single day. I was so not good. So once I read that, I’m like, ‘Alright! I’m going to get the vaccine.”
With the new record out now, he’s grateful for his recovery.
“I could not have played music. I had a hard time choosing what to eat.”
Chat Faker’s Hotel Surrender is out now.
