“You alright?” I say absently to a fellow student who has just walked into our commercial law class.
“Not really,” she says and I look at her. “I had glandular fever over the break.”
I have to say, I feel a slight chill at that.
“Oh,” I say.
And then – “I had that.”
“Really?” she says. “It feels like I can’t swallow anything, my throat is so sore.”
“Yeah…” I say. “It was responsible for my year off.”
“So you had it for…?”
“Well, months and months I guess. It was more my body’s reaction – post virally,” I say, words so familiar to me falling out of my mouth like reading an Autocue.
“What – what was it like?”
I tilt my head and think for a moment.
Sometimes, even now, it is like my whole world is coloured in with thick, dark lines. That Easter weekend, I didn’t think I would ever get well again. When you were going to work and catching trains and visiting parents and cooking food, and turning off televisions and leaning out of windows, I was lying down. On Thursday and Friday, and the next Thursday and Friday, and the ones after that, too. It is a half life; that lack of options: a life – actually – not really worth living if it goes on for a very long time, regardless of people telling you that you can eat chocolate and watch movies.
A fellow fatigue survivor regards the worst part of it – now – to be that the body remembers. Every cold, lack of sleep, too much hoovering, alcohol, caffeine, the body never forgets, and responds the only way – for some reason – it knows how: it prevents you doing anything. And if you haven’t experienced it, it’s not exactly easy to explain tiredness that is so severe that you cannot sit up. It is at once less severe than a broken bone, and somewhat altogether more sinister. I could walk to the kettle, but the floor tilts. That feeling – of the body slamming its brakes on with such force that you postpone making a drink for a week – a week – is utterly chilling.
I have not broken my back. I have not had cancer. I am grateful that there is – bizarrely – nothing wrong with me. But there’s an injustice in that, too. You have to endure the comments – “but my sister had glandular fever and was fine,” “but you’re looking great,” “maybe you’re not eating well enough/thinking positively/resting/exercising” – and, moreover, the notion that the person you’re talking to thinks it will not happen to them. Because, let’s face it, being chronically fatigued is a bit naff. And if you happen to have good make up and a tan, people may not even believe it’s a physical problem at all. So where the person with the broken leg may get chocolates and flowers and a warm welcome back at work, ‘fatigue’ survivors are often met with questions that leave you pondering what the person meant in the middle of the night.
I tell people I am normal. And I suppose I am. I can pretty well do what I like. But my days have a different texture. I still quantify my days in terms of energy. If I don’t sleep for ten hours I feel like you would on two hours’ sleep. If I walk a lot, I rest when I get home. It has added another dimension to how I manage my life. Workload, friends, boyfriend, family, time, energy.
I still freak out if I am left alone for too long. It forces me inside my own head, where I spent a year of my life. I don’t watch much TV. On day one of a cold, I am on day 300 of a chronic illness. I lose my shit. I never used to.
For a while I thought I would never get better. Once, I removed a razor from the bottom of the bath by its neck, like a poisonous snake, threw it across the room just so I wouldn’t think about what I could do with it. Now, I know I probably will get over flues and colds and wheat flour and sleepless nights. But that clinging desperation hasn’t gone: I will get over a cold if I get one, but I emphatically do not want one. It is still too novel, to walk in the rain, exhaust fumes circling my legs as I cross Birmingham’s busiest streets. Every raised gland, earache, sneeze is a potential to have another three weeks coloured in in those dark, black lines. Plans are made tentatively, disclaimers written red in the air; to me, a huge elephant sitting between me and everything I want to do that I don’t talk about.
I come to. “Oh it was just like having flu for 10 months,” I say.
