thanks dreambirdie/dr. donnica and gina
thanks to dreambirdie for the inititave in making this happen.
never saw the dr. oz show before and now i know why....he's doofy and dull.
dr. donnica is great. she needs to get 1/2 hour of time to talk about the disease. she's intelligent, articulate and right on point.
i agree that it is important to have a deeper discussion about the range of how this illness affects people. while i appreciate gina...her situation appears to be mild/moderate when compared to mine...if you paid me a trillion dollars i could not force myself to go to work...it is physically impossible...so i think her talk about forcing herself out of bed each day to go to work is misleading...this is the misconception that many have about my condition...if i just push myself i could do it....no, if i push myself i'll faint and have a heart attack.
so while gina still is able to force herself to go on, there are many of us past that point...physically it would be difficult for any of us to be on a tv show...maybe they should include a video clip of someone in bed or on the couch....managing their lives thru a laptop, telephone and/or family/friends
gina did describe very well the defeat and dismay you feel when you first get ill and start seeing dr after dr....and then get called crazy/depressed/malingering, because they can't figure out what's wrong w/you. these dr's that you were raised to respect and trust suddenly treat you like a joke.
One of my good/kind dr's described to me what goes on in many docs minds when a patient like me walks into their office: 40 something white woman, thin, tired with unexplainable fatigue and pain...quickly we are stereotyped: Oh, no one of those...instead of feeling curiousity about our condition, they groan to themselves....another depressed woman. it also pains their med school trained ego that they don't know how to help us...but rather than ever admitting this, they dismiss us as depressed.
When he told me this I realized for the first time in my "privileged white American" life what it meant to stereotyped and looked down upon. It was an eye opening experience.
i'm happy that the program gave our condition some more exposure, but wary that it enforced already held beliefs that if we just push ourselves and/or exercise a little we'll be better....
what's next: a Frontline episode: the history, mystery, suffering and potential new hope in CFID's...the debilitating disease with the corny name.
warmly, lisa