I’ve been playing Dota 2 on and off for the past 10 years or so and gotten fairly decent at it. Around the early months of 2020 I had reached 5k and was about 2-3 games away from that shiny nice immortal badge… but then it happened. In February I got a very nasty and several week long cough. When I was younger I used to get bronchitis several times really badly as well, but this time it felt like it just hit harder than I could remember. I was basically stuck in bed or my chair for over a month… at a very bad time. It was close to the end of my masters degree and I had to cancel several exams. Also I was working with a prof of mine to get my master thesis approved.

Obviously Covid was a thing and everyone was talking about it. Unfortunately I couldn’t get tested back then because they would only test you if you had a contact to a confirmed positive person… which I didn’t have (though I met someone who had a contact to a confirmed positive case, but they still wouldn’t test me).

As soon as I was healthy again I wanted to get back to my studies and master thesis… as well as Dota. But but damn was I dropping in mmr fast. I lost 1000 mmr in a few weeks with something like a 70-80% loss rate. I didn’t understand why. It didn’t feel like I was playing worse but I was loosing so damn much. I lost another 800 mmr during the summer and took a break.

Dota wasn’t the only thing that had a steep downturn during that time for me. I tried to read papers, books… anything really, but as soon as I reached the end of a paragraph I couldn’t remember it’s beginning. I could read the words but wouldn’t understand the sentence. It was very hard for me to focus on anything.

Ultimately I had to get myself exmatriculated. I couldn’t possibly hope to study anymore. That was one of the hardest decisions I had to make in a long time but it had to be made.

Another year later I picked up dota 2 again, gained some 1000 mmr with ease. I can read longer texts again… I’m mostly back to normal. This is when I realized that my dip in dota 2 and my inability to concentrate all started with that stupid cough. I read up on long covid and that some people experienced “brain fog”.

Though I can say that I’m fine now, covid has fucked my life up quite a bit and dota 2 helped me figure that out. Gave me at least some closure.

These thoughts occupied my mind for a long time and I really wanted to get them out here.

TLDR: Was good at dota, got covid, sucked at dota, sucked a life, realized that I had long covid thanks to (but not limited to) dota.

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