The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will
trust.
Psalm 18:2
There is no word in the English lexicon that describes the lack of stamina, the paucity of energy [and] the absolute malaise that accompanies this illness.
(Charles Lapp, Professor of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University, USA, Co-Cure, 3 June 2004)
It was December 1991. I now had a diagnosis of ME, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a neurological disorder, but the consultant had offered no hope and given me no information. I wasn’t bed-bound or house-bound, and over the following months and years nothing dramatic happened – just a gradual worsening of my health.
Mum and Dad were, as they always have been, an amazing help and support, but trying to explain to family and friends this mysterious illness, which at the start I knew very little about, was not easy. At the beginning my knowledge of ME consisted of thinking that it was ‘something to do with a virus’. Most cases of ME do indeed start following some sort of viral illness – although there are quite a few of us for whom it started with a vaccination – but such scant knowledge was not very helpful.
A close friend saw an advert in a magazine for an ME support charity and she sent off for an information pack for me. It was helpful to have some facts about the illness and leaflets that I could pass on to others, but even so, there were still a few friends and family members who were rather sceptical. A couple of times I attended a local ME support group, but I found it rather depressing, with most of the people a lot older than me (probably about the age I am now!). They spent most of the time talking about their symptoms and how bad they were feeling, and there were no other Christians present, so I didn’t keep up with going to the group.
A few of the people I had been at school with did stay in touch for a while after we left, but once I became ill, it got difficult to keep up the contact. Whenever they arranged to meet up, I wasn’t well enough to go along. On the couple of occasions that they came to see me, the conversation wasn’t easy; they were doing well in their studies, had done some travelling, all sorts of ‘normal’ things – and I had done nothing, apart from seeing my GP or attending a hospital appointment! At this time I was still able to attend church, although the frequency with which I went to the meetings gradually declined. Even when I was first ill I didn’t make it to all of the meetings, but at the start I did usually manage the Sunday evening services (I don’t do mornings!) and occasionally the mid-week meeting. As a result, I think that many people in the church weren’t really aware that I was ill; with my not being at all the meetings, some thought I had returned to nurse training!
A few months after becoming ill, I got in touch with a Christian lady we had known some years before and who was a trained medical herbalist. She really thought that she could help – and I have no doubt that herbal medicines can help with many different conditions – but I was unable to tolerate the various herbal concoctions that she suggested. I didn’t know it at the time, but having problems tolerating medication, whether orthodox or complementary, synthetic or natural, is virtually a hallmark of ME and has been an increasing problem for me over the years.
Not having found any benefit in the herbal remedies, and not knowing that being unable to tolerate many kinds of medication would be an ongoing problem, I then got in touch with a consultant homeopathic physician who, like the herbalist, was also a Christian. He was a very nice person to talk to and was very supportive (he wrote excellent letters when I got into difficulties over disability benefits!), but sadly the medication he prescribed brought no relief. In fact, I reacted badly to everything he recommended. I had the ‘aggravation’ of symptoms, as they call it in homeopathic medicine, but I never got the improvement that is meant to come afterwards.
For just over seven years I experienced a gradual decline in health. The amount that I could do, the distances I could walk, all slowly got less, as did my walking speed! It wasn’t that I lacked motivation or anything like that. I wanted to get better more than anything, but there seemed to be nothing that I could do to stop – or even slow down – the deterioration. Whatever those Hepatitis B vaccinations had done to my body, they had certainly caused a lot of damage, which became more obvious as my condition progressed – and it would become even more obvious in the coming years. As well as trying both herbal and homeopathic medicines, I tried various diets that some ME sufferers had reportedly found helpful – gluten-free, dairy-free, yeast-and-sugar-free – but, again, they made no difference, apart from starting off a long-term interest in all things nutritional! I have come to see that nutrition is a much-neglected area of medicine, most medics having very little – if any – training in or understanding of it. I firmly believe that nutrition can play a big part in our health (or lack of it), especially in chronic illnesses.
