I was 31-years-old, in the middle of my busy life. I was married and had three very young children. I had three bouts of strep throat in a six month period. On the fourth episode of flu symptoms with a severe sore throat, nausea, chills, and swollen glands, the doctor said the tests were negative for strep, but positive for Epstein – Barr virus. He assured me I would probably be up on my feet and feeling well in a few months. A few months turned into three decades.<\/p>\n
However, the first six years were the worst. Imagine every day of your life facing a severe flu with no relief in sight. When entering my sixth year of illness, I thought I was finally ready to let go of this life. I tried to leave, but was brought back only to be in the same miserable place. Due to an amazing immunologist and my own perseverance, I made it over the hill from this insidious illness to a more tolerable form of chronic immune illness. I refuse to call this disease the insensitive name of ‘CFS.’ It is a chronic immune dysfunction disease.<\/p>\n
I wish that I could have lived a healthy life, chased fire-flies with my children, or accompanied them on class trips. I wish I had been there when my boys received boy-scout badges and I wish I could have been my children’s guide into the adult world. Rather, I had to depend on incompetent sitters and a husband who couldn’t cope with the situation. Who could cope with this situation? All we managed to do was to survive. I have nothing positive to say about this illness, except that I barely survived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humans of ME\/CFS I was 31-years-old, in the middle of my busy life. I was married and had three very young children. I had three bouts of strep throat in a six month period. On the fourth episode of flu symptoms with a severe sore throat, nausea, chills, and swollen glands, the doctor said the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/kathleen_g.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}