Vigil on 28/3/2006 at 16:23

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That's entrapment.

Shug on 29/3/2006 at 08:29

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Best put your trousers back on Pig

Shug on 29/3/2006 at 16:30

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ohhhh fig you didn't

YOU DIDN'T

Continuity on 29/3/2006 at 18:24

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Yeah, I was diagnosed with it (Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome aka CFS aka M.E.) when I was about 14, after a bout of glandular fever. I was essentially confined to bed for some indeterminate number of months; I'm recovering reasonably well six years later, although I'm still basically confined to the house. It's not unprecidented, but it can be very serious; I'd recommend you get yourself looked at right away, or at least research more.

There's a good book describing ME/CFS that I have around here, the ISBN if you want to get it out from the library is 0-09-181679-3. It has a lot of information about CFS, written by a doctor who developed CFS himself while working in a hospital.

Glandular fever is a really common cause of it; it rather sounds like you have it. A pretty good test is that the fatigue is brought on either after heavy physical or mental activity, so you should think carefully about how you study (and revise) if you do have it. A good way of explaining the "brain fog" is that feeling you get when you've just woken up without enough sleep. I have problems with temperature control; I can't cope with being in places that are too hot or too cold for very long. People who've had it say that hot baths can help with the symptoms. I personally seem to have an addiction to water :p. So all signs seem to point to yes. However, self-diagnosis is uniformly a bad idea.

You should go see a doctor who will take the idea seriously - because there are no obvious physical symptoms, it's generally a "diagnosis of elimination", which means a number of things that aren't CFS, including depression, malingering, etc, get diagnosed as it, some doctors are very sceptical and some may not even believe it exists, due to the fact it's relatively rare and the inital symptoms look very like a mild cold. Or they may just think you're being a wuss, which they probably get a lot of, the "worried well".

If you do think you have it, I would say: don't try and push through it, because you can't; you need rest. Stimulents like caffience won't help, because you'll come down to a hell of a lot lower than you felt when you needed it. Trying to keep using them is unsustainable and will make the problem worse in the long run.

The problem is that normally, you exert yourself (like running a marathon or whatever), and feeling tired, you rest, and after a while you recover and stop feeling tired. Coming down with CFS is like that, only without the recovering - that's why a lot of people who get it are under pressure to do their jobs (doctors, mothers, etc) who push themselves when they're feeling under the weather. Before I essentially collapsed, I was pushing myself to go into school and study when I knew I felt really, really bad, and it's just a dead end. If you find yourself feeling far too tired, stop whatever you're doing.

One thing that seems to accompany it frequently is stress; the first outbreak of something that is probably the same thing (we think) was at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where a number of patients came in complaining of something diagnosed as an infectious disease, or polio. 70 doctors and nurses were taken ill, with 292 cases in total, but only 12 patients, resting in bed, were taken ill. It's been linked to stress, and there are good biological reasons why stress would make you more vulnerable to it. I developed CFS while studying for my GCSEs, feeling very stressed out for that and other personal reasons.

No, there aren't dietary supplements per se - there are things that seem to help some people, and not others. There's (to my knowledge) no perscription medication for it, no test for it, and no cure, since no-one knows what actually causes it.

Lab mice that have been deliberately brain-damanged in a specific way have developed symptoms similar to it; it's also very similar to post-polio syndrome, where a person who had polio maybe several decades ago suddently develops symtoms very similar to CFS. Examination of deceased persons who had PPS "demonstrate the presence of polio lesions in key parts of the brain, including the brain stem, hypothalamus and reticular activating system - three sites which are implicated in CFS". One person who died while having CFS was biopsied, and there appeared to be evidence of an active infection in the brain stem. There is loads and loads more stuff in the book, above.

tiggerroo on 5/4/2006 at 22:57

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thank you for book recommendation and support