Like many of us with ME\/CFS, I vividly remember the day I first got sick. It was a typical Saturday morning in August, 1985. I was 30 years old. My 3 year old son woke up very early, as usual. I took him downstairs and fed him his breakfast. I headed back upstairs. And, that was when it hit me. Suddenly, like a ton of bricks. The energy drained out of me in an instant. I could barely drag myself up the steps and back into bed. I the stayed in bed, flat on my back, for the next 6 weeks.<\/p>\n
Not only was I unable to read, I couldn\u2019t even glance through a magazine. It just required more stamina than I had. Even talking was too much to bear. My doctor ran multiple tests, finally deciding that “maybe” I had a bad case of mononucleosis. As the months went by, I improved to the point where I was rarely bedridden. But each day was still a major struggle as the symptoms continued: horrible fatigue, low-grade fever, sore throat, headaches, night sweats, heart palpitations, cognitive impairment, numbness in the extremities, blurred vision, and much more. The list of my symptoms goes on and on.<\/p>\n
Over the past 30 years, I have had good days and bad days, relapses and remissions. But I have never been completely well. I currently have been in a relapse for over 5 years meaning I am frequently housebound for weeks or months at a time. My hope is for significant government funding of research, so that effective treatments can be found, or maybe even a cure! I don’t want anyone else to have to go through life with this devastating disease.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humans of ME\/CFS Like many of us with ME\/CFS, I vividly remember the day I first got sick. It was a typical Saturday morning in August, 1985. I was 30 years old. My 3 year old son woke up very early, as usual. I took him downstairs and fed him his breakfast. I headed back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":583,"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\/kari_m.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603"}],"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=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}