6th July

 Away this weekend for a visit to the family.

Was good. Felt better. Picked me up. Got stuffed with food.

It's more complicated than that. But. Uh huh. That's the headline.

Various options for moving house are forming. Not entirely sure which one comes out of the wash.

Spoke to the CFS/ME specialist today. Very interesting. She went into a lot of the background and causes of CFS, prognosis and her past experiences over the years. Was super informative.

She reckoned I had textbook CFS, no doubt, slam dunk, duh, she also said I almost certainly had Functional Neurological Disorder with it, which she said she sees a lot of overlap with ( based on what the neuros had been saying ), and lastly, she said she probably thought I picked up Covid, and that what I went through sounded an awful lot like long covid - but - crucial but here - they couldn't prove it.

They couldn't prove what virus kicked things off because she said they didn't test for them and even a couple of months after infection she said she had seen negative tests come back despite knowing what it was ( she went into detail about this with particular cases ). She *also* said she saw cases where one virus kicked off another, *particularly* things like glandular fever, chicken pox, the usual suspects. Uh huh.

She said at this point that it was less important that we determine *what* virus(es) kicked it off - and that they'd probably never know that now - but just focus on dealing with it - plenty of tests had been done on me to determine that no major damage had been done during Whatever Malarkey Went On, so that was good.

Prognosis wise - given that my fatigue has been improving decently lately - she said I probably fall into the "80%" category, of recovering, but never fully recovering and it causing issues when infection or stress or trauma or yada affected me.

She's arranging for me to get some help / advice / counselling yada to manage life - which she summarised with, don't push it, make sure you take days off where you don't expect anything from yourself, and manage stress et al as best you can. Learn how to properly relax. And she's also asking the GP to run a celiac disease test on me - just to make sure all the bases have been covered.

So that's that. It was very interesting in general - learning about the patterns and roots of CFS, and it was also good to finally hear someone say, hey, you should try this, don't do that, yes that's good, and here are some expectations. So. Kinda happy with it. S'alright. We got this.

Also the repeated refrain from all seems to be, take a breath. Chill.

Sorry. I can't do that washing up. I have a note from my doctor. 😛

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