After texting my twenty-eight-year-old son about my latest health issues, he texted back, “You’re a hypochondriac.”
I texted back, “I wish.”
Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit and the more recent Unbroken, describes her battle with chronic fatigue syndrome in the New Yorker at http://www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html.
I am eminently grateful that my health issues are not as debilitating as hers.
But there’s no question that I have morphed from a healthy, active person for more than half of her life to someone who is no longer at her best physically and, I’m afraid, quite often mentally as well. I haven’t quite given up on the possibility of recuperating to the point of being as physically robust as others my age, and so far I’ve done a decent job adjusting to the need to write things down to remember them. It’s the fatigue that is relentless. I do still have good days, and I relish those. I recognize them as they are happening … “Hey, I feel damned good right now. I have some energy! I can do some of the things I want to do!”
Unfortunately, in my ADHD fashion, I go in about seven different directions when I’m feeling well, so the overall gain is less than it should be. Something that frustrates me even as it happens.
I’m not interested in hashing out the details of the latest diagnosis in my endless permutations of chronic disease, but just to give this episode some context, I’ll just say that the doc says I have “reactive airway disorder” or some such medspeak. I’ve had a bad chest cough for the past five or six weeks. It won’t go away, and it exhausts me. Over this time, I’ve popped two “Z-Paks,” prepackaged week-long dosages of Azithromycin, a heavy-duty antibiotic, to no long-term avail, so my doctor just prescribed an inhaler, some Prednisone (a steroid that reduces inflammation and, by the way, made my mother psychotic when she took large doses to increase her white blood cells so she could take radiation treatments for her cancer), and another hardcore antibiotic.
