You wake up from a full night’s sleep. You begin your daily routine:
- Get dressed,
- brush your teeth,
- comb your hair…
and suddenly you have no more energy to do anything else.
You sit, rest, maybe even lay back down just to get the energy to get back up. You manage to function for an hour or so, if you’re lucky, only to have to rest again.
Daily struggles with
- full body exhaustion,
- headaches,
- painful joints,
- sore throats,
- and a feeling of misery.
Family and friends struggle to help and understand with many of them telling you to snap out of it. You’ve said, “I would if I could,” but in your heart and head you know you can’t.
Many doctor visits have been attended without an answer. Diagnoses of depression and that your mind is making you think you are sick are given to you. Frustrated and defeated you try to carry on each day and manage the best your body will allow.
Eventually, a diagnosis does come: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). So now there is a name, but there aren’t very many answers or solutions to follow.
Chronic fatigue syndrome is much more than simply being tired. The symptoms include:
- Extreme physical fatigue,
- memory loss,
- inability to concentrate,
- sore throat,
- painful swollen lymph nodes,
- joint pain,
- and headache.
Individuals suffering with CFS experience extreme exhaustion after normal daily physical and/or mental activities. Additionally, sleep does not provide the rest or refreshment to rebound and face the next day.
These symptoms lead to such restrictions on day-to-day life that the individual can experience social isolation. They can even lose their job due to an inability to go to work on a regular basis. With all this, depression is an understandable side effect.
For more than 30 years CFS was, for the most part, ignored by the medical community.
It was labeled as a mental disorder with no true physical cause. Government funding for research was non-existent. However, for the last 20 years, a small number of scientists began doing their own research into the cause and possible treatment of CFS. Through their efforts a common cause began to be seen.
In the internet article, Is chronic fatigue syndrome finally being taken seriously? the work of scientists to discover a cause and treatment options is described. In this article, one of these scientists Jose Montoya, describes that he believes CFS is developed as a result of a precipitating infection.
This is key in understanding the misconceptions around CFS.
Due to the fact that the infection is usually long gone by the time an individual seeks care for the symptoms of CFS, they are frequently misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Though not believed to be the only cause, it is thought be to a leading contributing factor to the development of this chronic disease.
Many other contributing factors are being uncovered and are paving the way for diagnosis and treatment. A growing understanding of CFS has caused a shift in the medical community and funds are beginning to become available for research.
While there is a long way to go, this growing recognition of CFS is a long time coming. The change in attitude of the medical community and the addition of funding support will hopefully bring about the answers and understanding so badly needed for the proper treatment of this life altering disease. It’s about time.
