Hi
@NewOrl -- Yep, still here.
As I recall (which I think is pretty accurate), he was "normal healthy" when he took a single dose of cocaine on a Saturday night, and woke up the next morning severely debilitated, and never improved. I guess the cocaine could have been laced with something else, but I suspect it was the cocaine that delivered some kind of traumatic blow to his brain wiring.
To me, it's at least somewhat in line with a number of other stories I've read about how CFS often begins with a traumatic event. It most often seems to be some kind of infection, such as EBV, or Lyme, etc. But it can also be a physical trauma, like the young, strapping 25-year old policeman who dove into a freezing lake to save somebody's life. He got sick, and never recovered.
I've also heard stories of people going through exceptional stress, lowering their resistance to disease, and lowering the ability of their immune system to respond to pathogens. I actually think the normal body probably harbors a number of pathogens, but is normally able to keep them at bay with a healthy, functioning immune system. So when stress hits, a virus can become activated, leading to chronic fatigue, and chronic immune dysfunction.
My above reasoning fits in with my own CFS picture, which I believe started with a serious head injury/whiplash as a teenager, a severe chemical exposure a few years later, which made me much more susceptible to environmental chemicals in general, and a chronic, ongoing trauma of an overload of amalgams and crown metals in my mouth.
Addressing these factors, and doing everything I can think of to "reset" my whole entire system has allowed me over the years to go from an average functionality of around 20%, to my current approx. 70%. I currently regularly do a number of energy and polarity balancing to bring my chronically stressed electrical system back into harmony. I've thought of starting a thread on some of my techniques, but I don't really know how much interest there would be.