Ah, I'm flattered.
The advertising and the actual product may be different ...
Technically, no, I haven't run in to anyone that their child has ...
However ...
I
am the child who did ...
Dad had symptoms hit sometime in early 1980s, I forget if it was 81, 82, 83, but sometime then and the symptoms hit hard and suddenly.
One morning he was out doing his standard jog before going in to the ship, and partway along he got hit with too much fatigue to even take another step.
Like flipping that proverbial light switch Dad went straight from healthy and athletic military guy to invalid.
Then began a multiple year process of military doctors from all around nothern Virginia trying to figure out what was happening to this guy.
To this day it looks like they are still doing research on him.
December 2005 was when ME/CFS symptoms hit me.
Got fatigued then very fatigued during Christmas shopping season at store where I worked.
Cut back to part time.
Then one day in March 2006 while I was ringing up a customer on the computer cash register I had been one of the 2 people who did its programming when we were assembling the store to open it. all of a sudden I had no idea, zero idea, what this machine did, what I was supposed to make it do, and what all the pretty colors buttons were for.
Thought I was having a stroke.
We got me to the nearby hospital and I don't remember if it was that day or a following day a doctor said to me that it wasn't a stroke, and, "Have you ever heard of a couple things called Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia?"
Still very much remember my response, "Ahhh S#!^, let me tell ya about my Dad, he was Navy's first medical retirement with those ..."
Hmm, Dad and I developed the same diseases at about the same ages,
what's up with that?
And when I was diagnosed it had been 19 years since I'd lived in the same house he did.
Genetic component?????????
Now, given I was a poor civilian, and also had on my medical record a 1981 diagnosis of bipolar, which in 2009 finally got corrected to autism, I got rather sucky medical care and ME/CFS and fibro were pretty much ignored, except for one guy at the nearby teaching hospital it was just blown off as bipolar symptoms.
And largely has been to this day.
My old grey doctor retired and the 6ft 3in studly young guy pretty much fresh out of medical school who replaced him replied that he'd never heard of ME/CFS when I asked him about it, what, almost a year ago now.
To this day I think Black Lives Matter is right about one thing, the United States of America's healthcare medical industrial complex 100% deserves to be burned to the ground. ALL OF IT.
And last year would not be soon enough.
