158 Quotes About Chronic-illness

Do you ever just…” I pick up my hands and then drop them. “I don’t know. Do you ever just get really fucking mad at healthy people for doing nothing but…living their lives, and it’s not their fault, and you love them, but you just fucking hate them?

Mark Vink is a not a typical ME/CFS patient. He is severely ill. It takes him twelve hours to recover from a walk from his bed to the bathroom. While he’s not typical he may not be that uncommon, though. Some estimates suggest that about 25% of ME/CFS patients are home bound or bedridden. Few ever make it into research studies.

Sophia’s case sheds light on CFS because there were changes in her dorsal ganglia – the gatekeepers to sensation in the brain – and we know that fatigue depends on sensory perception.

I have continued to get sicker in part because I refuse to rest as much as I should, because I am optomistic and because I push myself.

Excuse me, universe,” she whispered to the kitchen floor. “When you almost murdered me today—which was rather brutal, by the way, but I can respect that—were you trying to tell me something?” The universe, very enigmatically, did not respond.

A heated and often bitter debate persists over whether chronic fatigue syndrome (or myalgic encephalomyelitis (or the postviral fatigue syndrome) is physical or psychological. Although many doctors avoid controversy by stating the obvious—namely, that the mind-body split is artificial and all diseases have physical and mental components—what is really at issue is whether this illness is real or imaginary.

I guess when I met him I felt some kind of camaraderie. Here was someone who was just going to deal with the everyday slog of being sick for the rest of his normal-length life until he died of something completely unrelated, just like me. That’s a weird and special and boring kind of existence that you don’t get to share with a lot of people.

I mean, I certainly find being sick only affects me in really specific situations,” he says, and the relief of hearing someone call that out, of someone just grabbing that and pouncing on it and identifying it as the bullshit that it is… God, it’s like coming up for air.

Pacing is much easier if you try to live life, but within your limitations. Luckily, pacing often makes it possible to have a life despite ME. It might be a small life, but it will still be your own.