Why are you unwell?

Great question, a couple of things contribute to my periodically becoming unwell.

I was rarely unwell until I got pneumonia back in 2018, leading to a golf-ball-sized pulmonary abscess (infection) that saw me briefly admitted to hospital. For about 24 hours, they thought it was something much worse, a crazy story in itself. Thankfully, it wasn’t, but this put me on a 6-month outpatient program, with monthly X-rays and lung function check-ups.

Some time after, I developed a range of new and unusual for me fatigue-based symptoms. These were eventually diagnosed by three doctors to be chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Is it CFS? There are no definitive tests for it, so it’s hard to know, but it is diagnosed by excluding other illnesses. Eight years later, in 2026, I’m still dealing with it, so it’s a significant problem for me.

Symptoms

ME/CFS is a doozy, with a broad range of tedious symptoms that constantly recur. From Wikipedia:

The hallmark feature of ME/CFS is a worsening of symptoms after exertion. People wake up exhausted and stiff rather than restored after a night’s sleep.

Nobody quite understands what causes it, though it commonly appears after infections like pneumonia. There are doubts about whether it is a disease, a syndrome, or even whether sufferers in fact have one of several other diseases with similar symptoms. Whatever it is, though, as all sufferers know, it’s very real and incredibly frustrating to live with.

This raises another point about arthritis: I’ve also got arthritis from years of running and age, and those symptoms mix with those of ME/CFS.

Effects

I can feel good for months, and then just slightly overdo it, and be wiped out by brutal, whole-body fatigue and aches and pains for months. A bit too much at the gym, or in the garden, and CFS punishes you. At their worst, flare-ups prevent me from doing much at all, which is incredibly frustrating for someone as active as I am.

You may wonder: “Mike, I get tired too, what’s the problem?” As a fairly serious long-distance runner for my entire life until the arthritis stopped me, and as a science teacher, I know a bit about effort and exhaustion. CFS symptoms are unlike any ‘tiredness’ I’ve experienced, even after running a marathon.

Take your worst tiredness, add a hangover, sore hips and neck, headache, grogginess, multiply that a few times and then experience it for a month or more at a time, and then live with that for 8 years and counting.

Most people’s instinct is to fight CFS symptoms, but that only makes it worse. I still try to push through, but I’ve learned that when it really kicks in, to just let my body try to recover. There are/were long periods where I feel and function normally, so I only occasionally need to alert customers about it.