ME/CFS Recovery Journey - Mental Olympian

A ME/CFS Recovery Journey

For 10 years I had been undiagnosed. I didn’t know what was wrong with me exactly, but I felt like crap on a daily basis. I would wake up tried after sleeping 8 hours and become drained throughout my day. As a result, I ended up skipping classes when I was in college and I had to take naps during my lunch break at my jobs. 4 coffees just weren’t cutting it and neither were all the lifestyle changes I had made.

Over that time period, I did everything to advocate for myself and my health, but kept arriving at dead ends. Doctors would run labs and tell my everything was normal. It must be all in my head or that I was just depressed. I knew based on my symptoms that this wasn’t caused by depression, although the lack of answers for so long did affect my mood.

As time went on, my health progressed to the point where I decided not to go back to work. I was greatly fatigued, had horrible brain fog and memory issues, pain and muscle weakness in my arms and legs, etc. The crashes would be so bad, that I would be bedridden and house bound for weeks, before I would get out and cause a new crash.

4 PCPs, 9 Specialists, 4 Psychiatrists, 10 Therapists, and 10 years later (with a lot of digging), I finally got some answers. Thankfully Dr. Systrom was able to find some finite issues with my body and has started to treat the ME/CFS by treating the Dysautonomia. This here is my story with chronic fatigue syndrome and my journey to what I hope is some recovery.