I’ll admit it has taken me a few weeks to read and digest this piece of writing by fellow sufferer Paul Tomkins. You may have heard of him from football columnist fame. Now that I’ve taken it all in I wanted to share it with you incase you’d missed it. It is an incredible piece of writing. Here are a few extracts.
Paul Tomkins – We are death, warmed up
“We’re not lacking energy and motivation because we’re depressed; we’re depressed because even the basics can be a drain. Our condition doesn’t go away when we are happy, or on those occasions when we’re able to have fun. And yet obviously anything in life seems a little easier if it’s enjoyable. Adrenaline will get us through on certain occasions, but the bigger the rush the worse we feel afterwards.”
“If you – the healthy reader – do nothing but lie in bed for a month you will feel like we do, grow weak like us. Just look at the astronauts returning from months on the international space station, and how they’re too weak to walk. They have to be carried from the return module like newborn babies. But if, like them, you try to get better, you will. We won’t. We know, because we’ve tried.”
“At times it’s easy to forget that ‘normal’ people feel tired too, although, of course, they often like to remind you. The key is the word chronic in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (although we don’t like that name as the illness is not just about tiredness). No one says to someone with arthritis, “Yeah, but I also get aches and pains.” Everybody gets aches and pains. That doesn’t mean they have a chronic condition. Everybody gets headaches, but that doesn’t mean they have something seriously wrong. No one says “I get headaches too” to someone with a brain tumour. People with M.E. get tired, and get headaches, and have a lot of pain, and their experience of them is frequent and ongoing.”
“How do you imagine a pain greater than you’ve ever experienced, or a torment wilder than your own mind has endured? I’m not sure that you can.”
To read the full article click here.
M.E. myself and I 