I recovered, I hope you can too.

[hbot]

It has been 20 months since my last post viral fatigue symptoms and in that time, I have had a lovely pregnancy resulting in a beautiful daughter, who is now 1 year old, and have felt really well, to the extent that I have almost forgotten I even had PVF. Oh, and last weekend I completed a 10k race! Now I have overcome what I perceived to be the last ‘test’ of my health which was to finish breastfeeding my daughter, and so allow my hormones to go back to normal, my fear being that the hormone changes of childbearing were maybe suppressing the PVF somehow, I now feel truly back to full health and wanted to share my experience for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be experiencing any type of fatigue illness and is need of some hope that they can recover.
My history in brief: three and a half years ago I caught a nasty flu that had been going around my office. Two weeks after I thought I should be feeling better, I still felt dreadful and a week on again, when I was finding excuses to finish work early (not a ‘me’ thing to do), coming home feeling like I might fall asleep at the wheel, HAVING to go to bed for an hours sleep before even contemplating making something to eat, I went to see my GP. First thoughts and tests were for glandular fever but no, symptoms got worse, disturbed vision, muscle aches, difficulty climbing stairs, the constant need for sleep that never seemed to refresh me and a whole load of other weird and not so wonderful symptoms. Work were really supportive, occupational health allowed me to be off for a couple of weeks then come back on reduced hours but still, I remember a couple of occasions when I knew it would be dangerous for me to drive and had to get hubby to collect me or a colleague to take me home.
My choices of diagnosis went round the houses but ended up being ME or PVF (and there was some uncertainty for me about whether these are actually the same thing!) Everyone was keen to latch on to the temporary nature of PVF but about 7 months into my problems, my GP dropped the bombshell that this could well be a feature of my life permanently and that I should learn to live with it. I’m not complaining about what she said, I actually felt I had to defend her to my outraged family and friends. She could well have been right. Once I had stopped blubbing, I decided to embrace this so got a book about ME, downloaded an application form for the ME association, contacted an old friend who had been diagnosed years ago etc etc. I don’t know what changed this outlook but I never filled in the form. I made a decision. I took FULL ownership of my health. I tried to stop thinking the “why me” thoughts and block the dread that all my plans might be scuppered (family, paragliding, travelling) and took the tack that if I did EVERYTHING I could possibly do myself to be the healthiest I could be otherwise, that would give me the best chance of recovery.
As anyone with a fatigue illness will know, exercise is not easy and can backfire if not handled well so I tried to find guidelines about this and ended up realising that just doing daily life could be enough exertion. So my focus went to nutrition and mental health. There is so much misunderstanding about the role of mental health or mental illness in fatigue conditions. There are still a lot of health professionals who would believe that the array of symptoms I had and was trying to describe were all, deep down, being manufactured by my subconscious, maybe a reaction to undue stress or something. I started to believe this myself at times, even my close family and friends eventually started skirting around saying that they thought it might be a factor and its easy to see why but I truly believe that some hard working microbiologist somewhere is soon going to identify a virus or family of viruses that are the root cause of these illnesses and in a few years time, people with these symptoms will be able to have a clear test result so they can know they are not imagining their illness. It would make acceptance and therefore the route to treatment so much smoother.
For my part, I took advantage of a free counselling scheme available through my employer and, though there was no obvious trauma or stress in my life, thought it would be healthy to delve a bit and just check. It helped in that I was able to discuss my fears about possibly having a lifelong fatigue illness and find out that the few emotional issues I did have, I was actually dealing with really well and were not causing me any harm.
So nutrition. I think for me, this was the missing link. I saw a Nutritional Therapist who assessed all aspects of my health, diet, mood, lifestyle etc and gave me specific guidelines about what and when to eat and prescribed some supplements and I can honestly say that within a few weeks I had turned a corner and I followed that advice for the remainder of the 18 months that I would say it took till I was well again and then on into getting pregnant and breastfeeding. And I am thinking of going back to it because I deviated recently (started gorging on sugary things again!) and it’s done me NO favours.
The fact is, it was slow and sometimes imperceptible improvement but I never looked back. I relished every success, and they were TINY changes mostly. Having supportive family, friends and colleagues was absolutely essential and I’ll never be able to express how much they all mean to me but it was me, and how I chose to feel about it and attack it that fixed me in the long term.
Good luck, there is hope.

[lesden]

Hi you mention in your post that a nutritional therapist prescribed some supplements. What did they prescribe?

[lesden]

Hi you mention that you were prescribed some supplements by your nutritional therapist. What did they prescribe?

<b>hbot</b> wrote:
<div class=quote>It has been 20 months since my last post viral fatigue symptoms and in that time, I have had a lovely pregnancy resulting in a beautiful daughter, who is now 1 year old, and have felt really well, to the extent that I have almost forgotten I even had PVF. Oh, and last weekend I completed a 10k race! Now I have overcome what I perceived to be the last ‘test’ of my health which was to finish breastfeeding my daughter, and so allow my hormones to go back to normal, my fear being that the hormone changes of childbearing were maybe suppressing the PVF somehow, I now feel truly back to full health and wanted to share my experience for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be experiencing any type of fatigue illness and is need of some hope that they can recover.
My history in brief: three and a half years ago I caught a nasty flu that had been going around my office. Two weeks after I thought I should be feeling better, I still felt dreadful and a week on again, when I was finding excuses to finish work early (not a ‘me’ thing to do), coming home feeling like I might fall asleep at the wheel, HAVING to go to bed for an hours sleep before even contemplating making something to eat, I went to see my GP. First thoughts and tests were for glandular fever but no, symptoms got worse, disturbed vision, muscle aches, difficulty climbing stairs, the constant need for sleep that never seemed to refresh me and a whole load of other weird and not so wonderful symptoms. Work were really supportive, occupational health allowed me to be off for a couple of weeks then come back on reduced hours but still, I remember a couple of occasions when I knew it would be dangerous for me to drive and had to get hubby to collect me or a colleague to take me home.
My choices of diagnosis went round the houses but ended up being ME or PVF (and there was some uncertainty for me about whether these are actually the same thing!) Everyone was keen to latch on to the temporary nature of PVF but about 7 months into my problems, my GP dropped the bombshell that this could well be a feature of my life permanently and that I should learn to live with it. I’m not complaining about what she said, I actually felt I had to defend her to my outraged family and friends. She could well have been right. Once I had stopped blubbing, I decided to embrace this so got a book about ME, downloaded an application form for the ME association, contacted an old friend who had been diagnosed years ago etc etc. I don’t know what changed this outlook but I never filled in the form. I made a decision. I took FULL ownership of my health. I tried to stop thinking the “why me” thoughts and block the dread that all my plans might be scuppered (family, paragliding, travelling) and took the tack that if I did EVERYTHING I could possibly do myself to be the healthiest I could be otherwise, that would give me the best chance of recovery.
As anyone with a fatigue illness will know, exercise is not easy and can backfire if not handled well so I tried to find guidelines about this and ended up realising that just doing daily life could be enough exertion. So my focus went to nutrition and mental health. There is so much misunderstanding about the role of mental health or mental illness in fatigue conditions. There are still a lot of health professionals who would believe that the array of symptoms I had and was trying to describe were all, deep down, being manufactured by my subconscious, maybe a reaction to undue stress or something. I started to believe this myself at times, even my close family and friends eventually started skirting around saying that they thought it might be a factor and its easy to see why but I truly believe that some hard working microbiologist somewhere is soon going to identify a virus or family of viruses that are the root cause of these illnesses and in a few years time, people with these symptoms will be able to have a clear test result so they can know they are not imagining their illness. It would make acceptance and therefore the route to treatment so much smoother.
For my part, I took advantage of a free counselling scheme available through my employer and, though there was no obvious trauma or stress in my life, thought it would be healthy to delve a bit and just check. It helped in that I was able to discuss my fears about possibly having a lifelong fatigue illness and find out that the few emotional issues I did have, I was actually dealing with really well and were not causing me any harm.
So nutrition. I think for me, this was the missing link. I saw a Nutritional Therapist who assessed all aspects of my health, diet, mood, lifestyle etc and gave me specific guidelines about what and when to eat and prescribed some supplements and I can honestly say that within a few weeks I had turned a corner and I followed that advice for the remainder of the 18 months that I would say it took till I was well again and then on into getting pregnant and breastfeeding. And I am thinking of going back to it because I deviated recently (started gorging on sugary things again!) and it’s done me NO favours.
The fact is, it was slow and sometimes imperceptible improvement but I never looked back. I relished every success, and they were TINY changes mostly. Having supportive family, friends and colleagues was absolutely essential and I’ll never be able to express how much they all mean to me but it was me, and how I chose to feel about it and attack it that fixed me in the long term.
Good luck, there is hope.</div>