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This past July, Brian Vastag, a former science reporter, placed an op-ed with his former employer, the Washington Post. It was an open letter to the National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, a man Vastag had formerly used as a source on his beat.
“I’ve been felled by the most forlorn of orphan illnesses,” Vastag wrote. “At 43, my productive life may well be over.”
There was no cure for his disease, known by some as chronic fatigue syndrome, Vastag wrote, and little NIH funding available to search for one. Would Collins step up and change that?
Vastag still remembers the exact moment that separates his former life from his new, sick one. In July 2012, he was visiting his family in Wisconsin when a 102-degree fever hit him “like a hammer.”
“Immediately, I felt foggy in the head, like when you have a bad hangover,” he said.
When people first get chronic fatigue syndrome, they might think they’re going crazy — some are told as much by doctors. Patients feel ill for weeks and months, bouncing from doctor to doctor and getting diagnosed only through the process of elimination.
Justin Reilly, a former New York lawyer who also suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, says it feels like, “you wake up one day with a bad flu and it never goes away. Ever.” Sufferers feel achy and weak, with a mental state Reilly describes as trying to think through a “pea-soup fog.” Sleep isn’t refreshing.
Read full, original post: The Tragic Neglect of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
