Hi
@ChronicFatigueSurvivor so glad you are feeling better and that you have climbed out of the misery of illness and into wellness.
Your post took me back many years to when I was very first ill - approximately 20 years ago. I was ill with an undiagnosed illness for about three years that was severe and looked a hell of a lot like M.E. In the end it was suggested that I may have this, but never fully diagnosed by a GP etc.
It was also suggested at the time that my illness was in my head and that as I had two small children I was under a lot of stress - I also suffered from quite severe post natal depression. I thought the Drs where right and so embarked on 'my healing journey' I started with a chiropractor and Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life book. This was all a revelation to me as I had never encountered this kind of new age thinking before. The books convinced me further that my illness was caused by my mind, or emotions or soul or whatever.
I started doing affirmations - writing them all day in bed and saying them over and over in my head. This likely helped the severe anxiety that I was experiencing as a result of being so ill and not knowing what was wrong with me. I was quite young and had only had a bedbound spell for about 6 months and then gradually started to recover. I presumed the doctor was right - I was just mentally ill and emotionally distraught and my thinking was all wrong so If I could think myself into it, I could think myself out of it.
As I started to feel better I decide to have some therapy and then embarked on two years of counselling. I became a new age zealot and trained as a healer - I lived and breathed new age thinking, positive thinking and all the while hated myself for making myself so sick in the first place.
Eventually, apart from some residual extreme tiredness and a touch of anxiety I felt I was better and attributed it to my efforts. Around this time my daughter had a friend whose mother had M.E. She was very sick, completely bedbound at times and struggled to look after her daughter. I went to visit her in her home and she lay on the sofa looking pale and ill while I made tea.
Going home I congratulated myself on curing myself of my M.E and wondered why other people couldn't just get up and be more motivated to do the same. I then came to believe that ALL M.E was in the mind and emotions of the sufferer and they would get better with the right amount of effort.
My health continued to go well and I added in quite a lot of exercise - swimming and yoga and became physically the most fit I had ever felt (childhood and teenage years dogged by illness) I told myself it didn't matter that everyday after swimming the only thing I could do was go home and sleep for the rest of the day or that a yoga class would necessitate a taxi home as I was too weak to walk - what did it matter if my stamina wasn't like other peoples, I was cured and I would never be sick again!
I became a Reiki master, did a lot of rebirthing and decided to buy into the idea that ALL illness was somehow emotionally caused;that even people with cancer where getting something out of it, that it was just Karma that someone was in a wheelchair, I believed that my own breathing problems, asthma and recurrent lung infections where caused by my being adopted and fear of abandonment.
As I carried on with my life, having two more children, getting married, buying a home, my poor stamina and health continued. I was forever going to the Drs for one thing or another. I researched on the internet - maybe I had candida overgrowth, maybe I had hypothyroidism, maybe I was a bad person, in this or another life .I bought self help books and upped the amount of affirmations I did and courses I went on. I hated myself for making myself sick or neurotic or whatever it was that was wrong with me.
In 2008 and age 38 my children came down one after the other with Measles. By the autumn of that year I too had measles, despite having been vaccinated as a child. I then developed pneumonia, then pleurisy and was so sick I was coughing up blood and couldn't get off the sofa. I then had a LETZ procedure on my cervix to deal with a persistent HPV infection that was causing abnormal cells to grow. The technician had been tracking the changes and HPV infection for 6 years and couldn't understand why my body didn't just deal with it itself - most women's immune systems deal with the infection over time, but mine just wouldn't.
After the LETZ most women go back to work that day or the next day. I didn't get out of bed for two weeks, I was so sick and debilitated. I never went back to work or to my normal life. I have now been diagnosed with moderate/severe M.E for the past 6 years and since seeing a specialist Dr I now know that my immune system is a mess and that I have two, possibly three chronic bacterial infections that I have probably had for at least 20 years. I now depend on a carer and a wheelchair and have lost all independence that I had.
If I had known then what I know now I could have had proper testing and treatment for the problems I was having and may never have become as ill as I am now and suffered for so many years. I now see that I did in fact have M.E for the whole twenty years but had just gone into a spontaneous near remission, due to probably my age, length and severity of illness and the fact that I rested and slept a lot!
I am ashamed now of the beliefs I held over all those years. They did not serve me or my family well and only perpetuated my illness and my self loathing and caused me much distress as i sought again and again to cure myself of my illness.
I most likely have had Lyme disease for the past twenty or so years and this, not my disordered thinking, or my emotions or supressed rage has devastated my life.
