by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: September 01, 2008   Last Updated: February 16, 2009

The phone rings. It is dark and I fumble to answer it. It is a friend of mine and I ask her what time it is. She says that it is seven and I ask if this is seven in the morning or seven at night. She says that it is seven in the evening. Confused I ask her what day it is? This is my life now that I suffer from chronic fatigue. If you suffer from this disabling condition then you know all too well what the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome are.

The fatigue is almost a constant shadow hanging over me. There are days when I do awake to find my mind alert and clear but they are the rarity. I am usually dopey and confused. They call it brain fog and it makes functioning, even in an awake state, difficult. I'm not tired, I am beyond that, I am exhausted. There is no strength in my body. I have difficulty just accomplishing the most basic tasks that are required for me to exist in my life and these seem to take more energy than I could ever have imagined they would be able to. Simply trying to concentrate on a visiting friend's conversation is now work so I try to limit the amount of socializing that I do.

I also no longer read the books that I used to love because I can no longer stay focused long enough to read past one page. Too often I found myself rereading the first paragraph over and over again. So I now skim through the newspaper articles or read brief articles like the ones that can still be found in magazines like Readers Digest. I love to write but now I have to check my work time and time again. I make silly errors like putting in are for our, and on bad days, I don't even recognize the logic that I am attempting to get across. Everything just takes so much more effort than it used to. Every task just uses so much more of my day's allotment of energy than it used to. Even the simple task of chewing food can leave me feeling exhausted.

I am also now prone to headaches which seem to appear whenever I overdo my day's energy supply. They last for two to three days at a time and are often accompanied by a locking pain within my jaw that is very similar in nature to that of a Charlie horse.

I want to be me again. I want to live again but instead here I sit at one in the afternoon, still in my housecoat, draped over the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in my hands. I feel like a car that has run out of gas and that now sits by the side of the road. Incapable of more because there is just no energy left to continue on with.

I am actually a very fortunate person

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