“My daughter is so ill she has had to disengage with her education. She has been house-bound for three years and bed-bound for the majority of this time.”
We want to increase the flow of information to GPs and other healthcare professionals about M.E.
“The GP’s I have seen treat everyone based on symptoms rather than the whole illness itself…”
Emma spent a decade in isolation at home after becoming severely ill with ME in 2004. She has been interviewed by the BBC together with Dr Shepherd.
“I’ve got steadily worse, less and less able to work, missing out on all social outings, not able to take holidays due mainly to lack of finances…”
“Since the coronavirus started to spread I have cancelled all my support because I wanted to be completely isolated.”
We invest in biomedical research but need your support so that we can do more to determine the cause(s) of M.E. and help develop effective treatments.
“I’d like to say once I got the diagnosis, things got easier, but they didn’t. I ended up bedbound then ultimately paralysed in some of the darkest days I’ve experienced.”
This leaflet provides a summary of what biomedical research is telling us about M.E. It considers key symptoms, common triggers, and explains how various aspects of disease pathology could be linked to specific symptoms.
“I continue to be confined to the house. Sitting or standing up for more than 2 minutes makes me very lightheaded, so I spend 23 hours each day lying down.”
“I repeatedly pushed myself to return to work. Every time I ended up off sick again. I was bewildered by a situation where the will to be well failed every time.”
“Positives are there but, in the depths of this dreadful disorder, sometimes they are very hard to see.”
“I feel like I’ve missed so much. It’s like I’ve lived only half a life for 30 years, and then to cap it all in 2016 I was diagnosed with bowel cancer.”
“While writing this I am again thinking, “Why me?” I do not know when I am going to stop thinking about his question, maybe I never will.”
“I was a fit healthy football-mad teenager and I enjoyed other sports too. All seemed well but then I caught scarlet fever…”
“I suspect that the losses faced by many people with M.E. are in some ways uniquely different to almost every other patient group.”
“Yes, school was good, no I wasn’t lying. I just wanted to die. I didn’t care, I was happy to just slip away to stop existing. I was ten years old!”
“I grieve for the old me, while managing the situation I am currently in, and looking into the future and questioning, will I ever be well enough?”
For ME Awareness, the ME Association will be featuring stories from people with M.E. every day throughout May.
This free download provides information to help in the understanding of Myalgic Encephalopathy.
