Why are you unwell?

Great question. There are a couple of things going on.

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 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, so it’s hard to know, but eight years later, in 2026, I’m still dealing with it, so it’s a problem.

Symptoms

ME/CFS is a doozy, with a broad range of symptoms, and I can’t overstate the tedium of them and their constant recurrence, but if you know, you know. 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 yet seems to quite understand 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.

Either way, I imagined this might last a year or two. I had no idea I’d still be dealing with it, eight years later, whatever ‘it’ actually is. This raises another point, about arthritis: I’ve also got arthritis in various places, and those symptoms mix with those of ME/CFS in terms of joint stiffness, aches and pains.

Effects

I can feel good for months, and then slightly overdo it physically or mentally, and be wiped out by deep, 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.

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

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.

It’s especially frustrating because your first instinct is to fight it, but that only makes it worse. I still try to push through, but I’ve learned 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. Thankfully, it’s not worse. My case of CFS is mild on the spectrum.