This piece was written by Jenn Vesperman. Used with permission.
CFS fatigue differs from healthy fatigue not only in the severity, but in the quality.
Normal fatigue is tiredness. CFS fatigue is painful.
Normal fatigue occurs when you’ve put in a full day’s work, or extensive exercise, and you can recover quickly. I am now healthy – when I’ve ridden my bike fast for an hour, I feel similar to how I used to feel if I’d walked the length of my hallway. If I rest for a few minutes after the bike ride, I can do other things. When I had CFS, walking the length of the hallway would wipe me out for an hour.
Normal, exercise-induced fatigue is usually combined with exhilaration or satisfaction, and often by endorphins. A CFS patient’s body is usually too sick to manufacture endorphins, and walking down a hallway would rarely trigger them anyway. You get the pain and the exhaustion without the achievement or the pleasure.
Rest and sleep cure normal fatigue. You usually wake up feeling rested and ready to go – if not, you know there’s something wrong. Sleep often seemed pointless when I had CFS. You go to sleep, you wake up feeling just as cruddy, why bother? Sleep was just succumbing to the body’s limits. Again. Sheesh.
The closest analogy I know if is a bad flu. The one where you’re lying in bed, and you know that despite the pain if you just got up you could get yourself a drink. And while you’re up, you may as well do the dishes, put on a load of washing, and feed the cats. So you start to get up .. and discover you can’t even manage to sit up. And the effort of trying to sit up has made the pain worse.
Now imagine that for ten years.
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