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aliceellablog · 8 years ago

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Sick and Tired - (includes my M.E. story part 1)

It kinda seems like it's just one thing after another to be honest. So I woke up on Monday fully colded :( scrap that... I had the FLU!!!!!

Tissues stuffed up each nostril, Sudafed, Lemsips, Vix vapour rub in all the right places... (not there...ouch) and I could hardly get out of bed ... good times!!!

So I basically slept all of Monday and Tuesday... oh and I looked oh so god damn attractive while doing so...

Wednesday I could at least make it to the sofa to watch endless episodes of ‘Catfish’ with my housemates. I think we must have watched them all now- which is an impressive amount of catfishing agwarning!

The next few days consisted of mainly sneezing, coughing, a lot of snot, (how does one nose create SO MUCH?!?!?) eating cream eggs in the bath and watching so much ‘Line of Duty’ that I was pretty convinced I worked for AC-12.

It’s now Sunday and at least the sun is shining and its bladdy beautiful outside - apart from the wafts of blocked drains that keep finding their way up my luckily blocked nose. Rank.

Not much else has happened this week to be honest. I got chatted up by the local weirdo in our corner shop when I was wearing a ‘my little pony’ tracksuit, had no makeup on and looked like I was straight out of the walking dead. He kept asking my name and I replied that I’m not into talking to strangers and could he please leave me alone. His response was that all relationships start with strangers talking....eugh.... he was creepy AF. Then on the way home from said shop three drunk men tried to hug me. GO AWAY. I feel like I was giving out some sort of pheromones that day. Oh and when I ordered my fav Turkish takeaway I asked for ‘fries’ and they thought I said ‘rice’... when I got home I wanted rice.... and there it was! Oh god! what a FASCINATING week!!!!! COOL STORY BRO!!!

Flu will be flu, but I have to say that I am feeling stupidly positive today! And yesterday too actually! Normally when I get a cold or flu or whatever I turn into the biggest pile of woe is me you have ever seen and feel like the world has ended.... Instead... this time I feel like I can’t wait to be better from this and to then continue getting better from the M.E.

In fact. I’m gonna kick it in the balls. hard.

Seeing as my week has been so interesting and totally worth the read... lols... I figure maybe it’s time for PART 1 of my M.E. story. Lord only knows how many parts there are going to be and how this is gonna turn out, but over the next few weeks maybe the whole story will be here...

Ok... where to begin... no freakin’ idea...I guess I will just type...tap tap tap...

I had a pretty great childhood in general, and was a happy and healthy kid. I mean, obviously I can think of loads of messed up things that happened and could go in to a whole load of crap, but I’m gonna start this story when I was 14.

Those 14 years can be rambled on about some other time :)

Long story short...lol lets see if I can actually keep this short... I was at an all girls school in West Sussex, and life was pretty good!

I was popular enough, school was fine- My friends and I would put on ‘The Ali V Show’ at lunchtimes where I would improvise songs about everyone - friends, teachers etc and prance around like I was on the stage of a West End musical. I went to dance classes after school and competed at weekends, and did gymnastics too! Yep... I would be jumping about in a leotard and loving it! Oh how things change! I was also in the choir at school and used to enter talent shows dancing to Liberty X with high kicks all over the place - I did all kinds of crap, and loved it all.

I was at that age where me and all my mates would go out drinking in the local park every weekend- we’re talking the finest WKD Blue, Smirnoff Ice and the odd bottle of Lambrini if we were feeling fancy ;)

These weekends were the best. They were what we lived for. Getting silly drunk, kissing boys, and getting chased down the park alley ways by police dogs. There were loads of us, all hanging around the skate park, and it was all innocent fun really.... other than the under age drinking, but who didn’t do that?

Then we upped our game and started going to these club nights for over 14′s in creepy Crawley. Classy. Man I used to LOVE it!! Walking through the doors and feeling the music hit you in the chest - now I’m always just complaining that it’s too damn loud. Such a grandma.

So I THINK it was on one of these nights that I may have unknowingly slipped my poor little tongue into a horrible diseased mouth LOL and gone and got myself the Glandular Fever that has ruined my life. Great.

We used to play ‘the game’ where you’d have to kiss as many boys as you could and then when you’d get back to your mates house you’d be up all night telling each other all the details, whilst eating enough sweets to ensure you didn’t fall asleep first - cos that made you like super ‘uncool’.

Anyway, I’m not sure if I caught it at one of those nights or not, but Glandular Fever is known as the ‘kissing disease’ so it kinda maybe makes sense.... oops.

So I got really sick. Like a really bad flu. I didn’t think anything of it until I just kept not getting better. All my flu symptoms eventually went - the fevers, the snot (nice), the coughing etc but I just wasn’t feeling better like you usually would.

Weeks would go by and I just didn’t feel well enough to go back to school. I was getting so miserable, missing my friends etc so much that I kept trying to force myself to go. I’d manage go in for the odd day and end up being sent home a few hours later. I could hardly keep my eyes open.

My Mum had obviously written to the teachers and explained the situation but most of them were bloody horrible. I remember once calling my mum in tears asking her to come and pick me up and one of my Science teachers saw me on the phone and started shouting at me and took my phone off me. I explained I was calling my Mum cos I felt so ill but he didn’t give a shit and made me go back to class.

I had letters excluding me from having to do P.E. saying how exhausted I was and could I please not be made to get changed into my P.E. kit (not sure why they always made you when you weren’t even doing it) but they still made me.

I was SO weak. every little thing was a struggle. I also remember when Hayley and Holly (no hard feelings now gals) had such a go at me in front of everyone at lunch. 14 year olds could be so bitchy. They were saying I was faking being ill and that I was so lucky not to ‘have’ to go to school every day. I was gutted. They were my best friends, they were supposed to understand. I broke down and told them to fuck off. They then told the teachers that I swore at them (they also did a lot of swearing at me first FYI) and I was the one who got into trouble for it. What they had said to me was a million times more painful than a simple ‘fuck off’ outburst. ugh. No one understood.

It’s hard to explain- I was feeling so so ill all the time but trying desperately to make it into school and pretend that I was OK. In the end I just couldn’t make it in anymore and I think the last time I went was early in year 10.

I had school work sent home to me and I did what I could in bed when I had the energy but things just got worse and worse. It got to a point where I didn’t have the strength to leave the house, or my bedroom and had to have my food and drinks brought up to me in my bed.

My school friends would visit most weeks but understandably this got less and less and I don’t think they ever quite understood what I was going through. When all I could do is lay in bed all day and then I’d get a text from my friend saying ‘sorry I can’t make it round today hun I’m seeing my boyfriend’ or ‘I’ve got too much homework to do’ - I get it, but it’s like that visit was lit the only thing keeping me going.

During all of this I’d had no diagnosis. All of my blood tests were ‘normal’ and no one knew what was wrong with me. I think that’s why so many people thought I was ‘faking’ or didn’t understand. I’m so lucky that I did have friends who visited as much as they could, but it must have been awkward for them too, I’m sure they didn’t know what to say or do most of the time.

So basically, years went by and I got progressively worse and worse. I would keep trying to do little things - my Mum (who is just beyond incredible and who would look after me every day) would get me into the car sometimes and just drive me around for a bit so that I could see sunlight, fields, animals, civilisation lol. We would mainly go out at around 5pm when the rabbits would come out and see if we could spot any. Now you tell me, that’s a teenagers idea of a good time right? OH DEEEEEAR!!! (I did enjoy it though hehehe)

During all of this I was of course seeing doctor after doctor trying to find out what was wrong with me. I was seeing all kinds of specialists and no one had a clue. Then I went to some big London hospital and saw the fittest doctor ever! (every cloud) It was then that they found a positive result in my blood tests for Glandular Fever. The thing is though that this was years after I had caught it and I was now kind of ‘better’ from the actual Glandular Fever and was just left like this. By this stage I was in a wheelchair. I couldn’t walk more than a few paces and could hardly eat either. At least I lost a few pounds...well a few stone actually! #win

I could hardly even talk and when I was at my worst I could’t tolerate light (so I had my black out blinds shut all day) or any noise- like even people talking was unbearable. I would lay in bed all day, sleeping on and off, and of course couldn’t sleep during the night. I was thoroughly depressed and had thoughts of wanting to just end it all. I could never have done that though because of my amazing mum and brother (totes my best friends) who would try and cheer me up every day. They would even put on little sketch shows for me at the end of my bed to just try and make me smile. I thank them from the bottom of my heart- them and all my other friends and family who were there for me when I really needed them #TotesEmosh

One of the weird things is that my brother had been through all of this before himself. He was just getting better as I was getting ill. We are not sure if M.E. runs in the family or not but I’m gonna go with yes. This means that my poor mum had basically nursed him better for about 4 years (he’s totally better now! yay!) and then had me to deal with!! Ouch. His case was a little simpler though. They found he had Glandular Fever and diagnosed him pretty soon after with M.E. - He did very strict G.E.T. (graded exercise therapy) and found that it really worked for him- This is where you build up your level of activity VERY slowly- so literally one step at a time - (more about this in a bizzle)

So it got to a point where I had a stair lift fitted in my house and couldn’t even watch tv or have a conversation with anyone.

I was fucked.

All we now knew was that I had ‘at some point’ HAD Glandular Fever. No one knew what to do, we only knew about M.E. because my brother had had it and thought it could be a possibility. But I was firmly in denial. He had been so ill for years and years and I was NOT going to have the same thing as him. I was desperate for the doctors to find that I had some kind of easily curable illness. Then some of my blood tests started coming back as positive for other things that indicated Crohn’s Disease. I was in and out of hospital having every test you can think of. My temperature was raised most days and they made charts of this. Now the question was if I had Crohn’s, or M.E. or both!?

Right.... I reckon that’s enough for Part 1!

Let’s see what next week brings and what I will want to blog about at the time, but either way Part 2 is on its way!

Ooh and check out my new blog banner up the top of my blog page - That’s the other thing I’ve been working on this week :) - Shout out to the amazing Simon Ackerman for the photography!!

Huge thanks again if you have read this blog - I am finding that it gives me a sort of ‘purpose’ as stupid as that may sound. It gives me something to think about in the week and then when it’s Sunday I’m like, yay! Sunday blog day!.... is that depressing or what hahaha, but seriously, please get in touch if you want to, more than happy to chat :) And if anyone can *like, *share or *follow this post or my blog in general I appreciate it lots!!!

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