Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
Deuteronomy 31:6
When the Chief Medical Officer’s Report on ME was released in January 2002, the CMO for England Professor Sir Liam Donaldson said that ME ‘should be classed as a chronic condition with long term effects on health, alongside other illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease’.
(Quoted from ‘M.E. Treatment “Must Improve”’, 11 January 2002, BBC News website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1755070.stm)
Things hadn’t gone quite to plan when I was born: I arrived ten weeks early, weighing just 2 lb 10 oz, so I was rather a worry to my parents from day one! As a result of my early appearance I spent the first two months of my life in an incubator in a Special Care Baby Unit. There were no facilities back then for parents to stay with their babies, so Mum and Dad travelled to the hospital each day to see me. Other relatives were not allowed in.
Many premature babies, especially in those days, developed both short- and long-term problems due to having been born so early. The most common short-term problem was – and I would imagine probably still is – breathing difficulties, due to under-developed lungs. Long-term problems could include various forms of brain damage, neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy, intestinal problems, hearing loss, and so on. I was fortunate and did not appear to have any noticeable side-effects from being born so early, and the only problem that developed during my childhood years that is thought to be linked to my early birth was my being a bit uncoordinated. Mum says that I used to trip myself up or fall over my own feet, but that was nothing compared with the difficulties some children and their families went through.
However, thinking about it now, after being seriously ill for so long, is it possible that my being born so prematurely could in some way have contributed to all my years of ill-health? This is something I have often wondered about, and I do believe that it is highly likely that it is at least a factor. One doctor I saw some years ago definitely believed that my being born prematurely and developing ME – albeit nearly nineteen years apart – were undoubtedly linked. He thought that my adrenal glands in particular would not have developed properly; there is a big cross-over in the symptoms of ME and adrenal insufficiency, and I do have adrenal problems.
