A long long time since posting anything here. Life has been too busy and my health just doesn't seem to have picked up properly since a slump about a year ago. I have had to stop as much 'screen time' as possible and I am trying a new regime of homeopathic treatment which was recommended by a friend in the USA who I knew from College 40 years ago. She has benefited from this treatment massively and we share a similar medical history in that she also had Epstein Barr Syndrome when she was about 17.
However, in the never ending quest to find that special treatment that will 'fix me', one thing has recently knocked me for six. We are downsizing --- clearing out all sorts of stuff from way, way back. In the past few days I came across my mother's diaries. Some of the entries are indecipherable to me as they are written in shorthand but some are all too clear and what emerges is a record of someone who was probably living with fibromyalgia or M.E.
I have always had a suspicion that M.E. was the cause of my mother's constant ill health but now I have a sort of record in black and white. There are also entries which mention me being ill as far back as the 1970s. One entry from the early 80s, describes how ill I had felt for weeks and how I went to the GP and then felt fobbed off with blood tests which came back with 'normal' results. There are references to the pain I felt in my legs,in my arms, looking tired and thin, having difficulties with perfumes, food, eczema.
I knew all this of course but, whilst living a life with children and the career I once had, details get forgotten. I can't remember any of that last episode with the blood tests.
Reading those diary entries makes me wonder if there's any real hope. Do I have any realistic hope of ever, ever being well -- a state that I cannot remember, a state which is in many ways meaningless to me and not part of my reality. Reading those words makes me doubt the future because it makes me wonder if the story I have been telling myself and others for years --- that I was originally well but had glandular fever when I was 4 and then another bout of the same at 16/17 --- is true. Was I ever really well or is there something in my genetic make-up that means I was bound to become unwell and never have the same energy as other people, always destined to have the aches and pains of fibro, always destined to have more and more sensitivities to chemicals, food and so on and so on and so on ? Is there any hope at all?
However, in the never ending quest to find that special treatment that will 'fix me', one thing has recently knocked me for six. We are downsizing --- clearing out all sorts of stuff from way, way back. In the past few days I came across my mother's diaries. Some of the entries are indecipherable to me as they are written in shorthand but some are all too clear and what emerges is a record of someone who was probably living with fibromyalgia or M.E.
I have always had a suspicion that M.E. was the cause of my mother's constant ill health but now I have a sort of record in black and white. There are also entries which mention me being ill as far back as the 1970s. One entry from the early 80s, describes how ill I had felt for weeks and how I went to the GP and then felt fobbed off with blood tests which came back with 'normal' results. There are references to the pain I felt in my legs,in my arms, looking tired and thin, having difficulties with perfumes, food, eczema.
I knew all this of course but, whilst living a life with children and the career I once had, details get forgotten. I can't remember any of that last episode with the blood tests.
Reading those diary entries makes me wonder if there's any real hope. Do I have any realistic hope of ever, ever being well -- a state that I cannot remember, a state which is in many ways meaningless to me and not part of my reality. Reading those words makes me doubt the future because it makes me wonder if the story I have been telling myself and others for years --- that I was originally well but had glandular fever when I was 4 and then another bout of the same at 16/17 --- is true. Was I ever really well or is there something in my genetic make-up that means I was bound to become unwell and never have the same energy as other people, always destined to have the aches and pains of fibro, always destined to have more and more sensitivities to chemicals, food and so on and so on and so on ? Is there any hope at all?
