Fibro/CFS/ME Foothold
April, 2004 – A Typical Day
This page attempts to document the flow of a more-or-less typical day in my life as it is now, around April of 2004. Of course, there are never any days which are exactly typical and all that, but it’ll give you a good idea of my health and abilities at this time.
Between 6am and 10:30am
If [...]
October, 2003 – A Typical Day
A typical day in my life. Not that such a thing exists.
Between 6am and 11am
I wake up slowly, take my first lot of pills for the day (nine of them) and then I try to lie there quietly for as long as my bladder allows and just cuddle Thomas Cat, enjoy the new morning [...]
June, 2000 – A Typical Day
This is a (probably poor) approximation of a typical day in my life, as it is around the middle of the millenium year.
5:40am
I woke up feeling extremely nauseaus, as per usual. Climbed out of bed and found some medications for it then back to bed. I tried to go back to sleep (something I rarely [...]
December, 1996 – A Typical Day
A typical day in my life. Ha ha.
I wake up suddenly. The sort of waking up where you just know you won’t get back to sleep. It happens when I hear a noise, which might be a house-mate getting up to go to the loo, or just a truck going past – I sleep [...]
Introduction
If you need to know what Fibromyalgia (FMS, FM, Fibro) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS, but not CF) are, you’ll find basic information on the website belonging to my local CFS/ME society which contains some information sheets with the basic details about Fibro/CFS on it. Pages like that – with basic information – are [...]
Foothold Glossary
CFS
Stands for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Also known as CFIDS, ME, PVS, PVFS, and a bunch of less complimentaly things. For basic info, try my local CFS/ME society – it contains some great information sheets with the basic details on it. For some more advanced stuff, try my CFS/FMS pages.
CFIDS
Stands for Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. [...]
Scales for Measuring Illness Severity
These scales attempt to measure overall severity Fibromyalgia/CFS, of pain, or of illness in general for a patient. Remember, these questionnaires are not standardised at all – that means you might score 50% on one test, 70% on another and 4 on yet another! The scales are not connected at all like, say, IQ tests [...]
Charrles Shepherd’s CFS Disability Scale
This is the ability scale from the book ‘Living With ME’ by Dr Charles Shepherd. It seems to be not terribly different from Jill Moss and David Bell’s scales, although I don’t know if this is because it was derived somehow from them, or because there are only a limited number of ways to describe [...]
Personalising The Randall Chronic Pain Scale
This is my personal chronic pain scale, created from Lois’s “Randall Chronic Pain Scale.” Having a personal pain scale helps me communicate with health-care people and know that we’re both talking about the same thing when we refer to a certain level of pain.
Unknown Pain Scale
This scale was sent to me in email, without any attribution. If anybody knows where it came from I will cheerfully obtain the appropriate permissions to post it here and add an attribution as needed. It seems to be a very good scale though (as a person living with severe chronic pain, I can relate [...]