People with Chronic Fatigue or pain are neither lazy, nor ''making it all up''. In fact despite all those affected having different symptoms and levels of incapacity you are united in one thing – your story of how it started and progressed. Every single one of you regularly pushed yourself to your physical or mental capacity – or both. You are the exact opposite of lazy, hence your understandable frustration and sensitivity to people thinking you are, or that you bring it on yourself.
You are likely to be a highly driven person and have always pushed yourself to the limit, mentally and physically, often more than your body can cope with, typically with a greater concern for looking after others than yourself. The illness starts with one or more of the following; a viral infection, severe illness (other), vaccination, severe stress or a traumatic accident/incident (the trigger) etc.. Several weeks later when you anticipate you should be feeling better, you now have the illness that gives you the chronic fatigue and pain symptoms. This continues for many years, if not for life, whilst you become more and more frustrated by lack of diagnosis, answers or remedies. You may even accumulate more illnesses as your immune system overloads. At some point you will feel so low for so long that your internal voice will keep repeating a phrase that reflects the terrible thought that you are never going to recover. As you rarely look poorly, you also have the issue of not only feeling very ill but having to convince others that you are. Their comments are far from helpful and are in total opposition to the driven person you know you are. This adds to the pressure and continues the downward spiral. At times you may be lucky enough to feel a bit better but whilst playing catch up with life you find it is the fatigue and pain that catches you up!
Your body's safety emergency program....
We all have an excellent survival mechanism that is run by the same processing system that controls all bodily parts and functions. I believe that in order to protect you in a situation of severe overload it shuts you down. Not just a trip switch it actually carefully shuts YOU down in the best way for YOU. This ensures your immobility and even dampens your mental capacity. This is to conserve energy to recover from whatever initial trigger occurred and to stop you from doing further damage (in the same way doctors put people in a coma to recover from head injuries). It stays like that until it is convinced you won’t carry on in the same “driven” way. (Unfortunately “driven” is your nature and the more you fight the illness the more it thinks you need to be immobilised, hence why this goes on for years or you never recover!) Pain and Fatigue are natures way to stop you, as is brain fog and blurred vision (so you can’t even watch TV). Your survival mechanism actually could not have done better for you, thanks to its totally unique blend of symptoms designed especially for stopping you! Whilst that was a great defence at the time, stopping you from possibly fatal consequences, it is now the protective shield you are pinned under! It is no coincidence that many of your symptoms will be similar to stress related illnesses such as: bowel problems, fatigue, brain fog, changing vision, autoimmune problems and unwarranted pain. This is because you are now constantly in a stressed state, being in a situation you have no control over. Pain is a message to us to stop what we are doing and concentrate on getting “fixed”. The greater the perceived damage the greater the pain level to ensure you do all that is necessary. It can only be concluded that your pain will continue whilst it is thought necessary by your instinctual processes. The pain will only go when it feels safe that you will NOT keep pushing yourself to the limit. You cannot fight this illness, it will make it worse!
Are you driving way too fast...?
I always use the analogy that you are driving yourself at 100 miles an hour in a 50 zone. But you get there slower than others who drive at 50 miles an hour because you get pulled up by the police at every lay-by for half an hour. You then run at 120 mph trying to play catch-up and get pulled up even longer by the police who may even suspend your licence for a while. Your 100 mph spurts and your idle time in the lay-bys give you an average speed of about 10 mph. So – you can decide to run at the safe speed or continue to not learn from experience and keep facing the consequences. It really is your choice – 10 mph average with pain and fatigue, or 50 mph of regular comfortable and uninterrupted speed!