ME is often linked to an event – many times an infection that did one did not fully recover from (hence the name Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome – PVFS). Sometimes this can be some other catalyst, an accident or an operation or other significant event in life. Sometimes it is not possible to link this with any event however. It may be that an event precipitated it that has been forgotten or just came on gradually.
I cannot link my symptoms to any event – but I can trace them back to earlier than December 2018. In mid to late 2018, I remember starting to feel very unwell. I had zero energy and started to look at my diet. Thinking I was not getting enough fresh fruit and veg I ate a lot more fruit and drank lots of fruit juice.
This didn’t help – if anything I felt worse and worse. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I may have Diabetes. I tested my blood and found a reading of up to (at its height) 27mmol/l – instead of the expected normal of around 5.5mmol/! After a spell in A&E with possible Diabetic Ketoacidosis (turned out not to be – but they kept me under observation for around 3-4 hours), my HBA1C was recorded at around 120mmol/mol – anything above 48mmol/mol is considered to be diabetes.
As diabetes can cause the fatigue symptoms I had, it was natural to conclude that it was this that had been the problem all along. I expected the symptoms to subside when my blood sugar was brought down to manageable levels. My diabetes was handled very well and I got my levels down to “normal” (with medication) and diet. However my fatigue symptoms were no better.
During this time my medication was in a state of flux, switching from one designed to get levels down FAST but not usually used long term to replacing with a long term medication with a dose gradually increasing. This went on for around a year. During this time, I never pursued the fatigue as me reasoning was that all they would tell me is “give it time for your medications to settle down”. So I waited.
I waited until Jan 2020 in fact, when I eventually made an appointment with my Doctor to talk about this. He ordered some blood tests but they showed up nothing. He never contacted me to discuss these, and I never made another appointment either as COVID then hit the news – and I did NOT want to be in and out of Doctors rooms or hospitals when I considered them “unsafe” places to be!
It was not until around March 2022 that I started pursuing this again. I can therefore trace the symptoms – at least the fatigue – back to around 2018. I don’t think this WAS just the diabetes but something else. Of course the other possibility is that it was the diabetes at the time – but that the diabetes was the catalyst for ME. I haven’t seen evidence of an onset of a chronic condition like type 2 diabetes being held responsible for ME, but it is known that it can be triggered by “something else”, so maybe by diabetes too.
I think therefore that its safe to say that I have had at least some of these symptoms for at least 4 years.
