I love sharing my thoughts with you on beauty and fashion but a massive, and rather overwhelming, part of my life is living with an illness called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis which is more commonly known as M.E. or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). I often feel uncomfortable telling people that I have M.E. because it's an illness which people often have a lot of misconceptions about due to the
way it's been reported in the past. It used to be referred to as 'Yuppie Flu', some people say 'it's just in your head' and perhaps the harshest misconception is that it's just laziness which I can assure you it most certainly is not. A factor which probably doesn't help this is that medical professionals still don't really know for sure what is going on within our bodies to cause the illness, nor is there any cure as such. It is almost definite now that it's caused by a virus and it is widely believed that this goes on to affect the immune system as well as the neurological system but what is exactly going on inside us is proving very hard to pin down.
I became ill six years ago when I caught Swine Flu. I was given the drug 'Tamiflu' and thought that after a couple of weeks of rest I'd be back to normal again, this unfortunately was not the case and on my first day back at work I had to go home after just an hour. I thought that I'd probably just gone back to work to soon but as the weeks went on, I soon realised that something obviously wasn't right but neither myself nor my doctor knew what was wrong. Based on my symptoms, which I'll tell you about in a moment, I had numerous tests and scans which didn't point to anything being wrong and it was only when my auntie suggested it that we started investigating the possibility that I might have M.E.
My auntie had a lot of knowledge and experience with M.E. as her daughter, my lovely cousin, had extremely severe M.E. back in her teens which left her hospitalised for years and having to be fed through a tube. She had noticed a lot of similar symptoms in how I seemed to be feeling, so she came with me to the doctors and after a few more months I was eventually diagnosed with M.E. which was in a way a relief because it was nice to finally know what was wrong with me but was equally terrifying because I knew a lot about the condition and how hard it is to recover.
So how does M.E. affect me? Well in my case it has gradually got worse over the years, some people have the same experience and some literally just wake up one morning feeling like they've been hit by a bus. My symptoms have remained the same but have got a lot worse over the years and on a day to day basis they include extreme fatigue, ridiculously bad headaches, nausea, extreme temperature changes, aching limbs, weakness, dizziness, sore throat, lack of concentration, brain fog, sensitivity to light and sound, problems with sleep, along with emotional issues such as depression and anxiety that I'm sure come along with any long term illness, it literally affects every part of your body and it is definitely no picnic!
As to the hope of recovery, it's hard sometimes to picture myself being well again because after this amount of time you get used to feeling so unwell and can't imagine being able to do 'normal' things again but I do remain hopeful that I will recover because I've seen it happen. My plan is to continue following the 'pacing' guidelines in which I find my baseline in all activities and very slowly increase the amount of time I can do those things without my symptoms worsening while having routine rests throughout the day. I find this so hard to figure out and to stick to but I've just got to keep trying and hopefully I will start to see some improvement soon. I am also going down the nutritional approach because I really believe that what you put in your body affects it greatly, I'm definitely a green juice convert (read more about that in a previous post here) and I'm embarking on a new approach as of next Monday which I will tell you all about soon.
There is probably so much more I could go into in this post but I will be doing more blog posts on M.E. in the future and I'm going to set up a YouTube channel in conjunction with this blog where I will probably do a few Q&A sessions.
If you want to learn more about CFS/M.E. a great resource is the ME Association where you will find endless information as well as the Phoenix Rising forum where people with the condition chat about and explore everything related to the subject. Just a quick word of warning though, M.E. forums can be great but they can also get very negative so if you have M.E. try and take everything with a pinch of salt and never give up hope that you will recover.
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