Kristy vs. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

         In my seventeen years of life, I’ve faced many challenges. Most of these challenges have been trivial and easily solved, and none as life-altering as the one I continue to face daily – Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But to understand this challenge, one has to start at the beginning. The beginning was three days into my freshmen year.
         It was the start of a new school year and more importantly, the start of high school. I was excited and scared to be entering a new school, and ready for anything. Or so I thought. The one thing I wasn’t ready for was to catch a terrible cough three days in. I figured I’d be back in school the next day, next week, tops. How wrong I was.
         The cough turned into something more, a bad viral infection and eventually into pneumonia. I was hospitalized for a week while the doctors did whatever it is doctors do, trying to make me better, even if I doubted their expertise when it took three nurses eighteen tries to start up an IV. When I was released from the hospital, we thought it was over, but it was only just beginning.
         The coughing didn’t cease, and visits to the ER became almost nightly. The number of doctors I was seeing began to increase, the list of medications was continually getting longer, and still I wasn’t feeling any better. Doctors began accusing me of faking, that there wasn’t really anything wrong with me, that I just didn’t want to go to school. These accusations were the hardest to get through; if I were going to start going crazy I would be going all out. I would be singing showtunes and bouncing off walls in a white padded cell. I wouldn’t be faking a cough and fatigue. But then it wasn’t just the cough and tiredness anymore, it was short-term memory loss, it was the complete lack of concentration, the perpetual fever, horrible muscle pains, and worst of all, fourteen hours of sleep and not feeling rested.
         The doctors kept at their tests, even if a few still believed I was making it all up. I became suspicious about the amount of blood that they were drawing. It didn’t seem to me like they were making any progress, surely if they were really running tests something would be coming up. I decided that they must be feeding vampires. If they were going to accuse me of being crazy, I might as well accept vampires as a plausible explanation.
         The doctors finally began to find problems in their search for a cause, a very bad hiatal hernia, a bad case of acid reflux disease, stomach ulcers, scarring in the lungs, and finally, something closer to an answer. This answer was echo virus type seven, a virus that causes stomach problems and often fatigue. But there is no cure for it, and it didn’t explain all of my symptoms. It also didn’t explain why no matter how much I slept I was still tired when I woke up. I figured this was probably one of those things that had to do with the vampires. I’m sure the nurses must have been in on it and just wouldn’t reveal their secrets.
         My pediatrician finally diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, otherwise known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It is an immune disorder and overall pain in the butt. Because of CFS, I’ve had to give up sports, school, and my social life. I’d thought I had good friends, but when they never came to visit me, when no one bothered to call, I realized none of them really cared. This, and not the fact that I perpetually felt like crap, was the biggest blow to me.
         For a while I thought this was the end of the world. Of all of the debilitating illnesses to get, I got the one that causes tiredness all the time. It wasn’t even something exciting that caused me to start growing antennae or turn green. I was almost ready to give up when I found my savior in one of the most unlikely places. My savior was my computer.
         I had always had an online presence, posting on forums, playing games, and hanging out in chatrooms. But when all I could do was stay home, it became an outlet for learning. I taught myself HTML (a code for creating websites), some javascript, PHP, and various other computer coding languages. I began to draw a lot more, and my drawing pursuits were shifted over to the computer, where I would scan in my drawings, and then color them digitally. I had found something to keep me occupied between my bouts of passing out and throwing up.
         The more I drew, the better I became, and the more I was stuck at home, the more time I had to play video games. When my parents bought me a drawing tablet for Christmas one year, I spent even more time drawing and improving my skills in Photoshop. Finally after many hours of gaming and drawing and chatting online, I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to design video games. It combined my interests and the mere thought of it made me happy, so I started practicing even more so that one day, I could make this dream a reality. I overdid it a bit though, because last year I developed a cyst in my left wrist from drawing so much and had to have it surgically removed. Oh the things we endure for our passions.
         As time goes on, my formerly very long list of ailments has been cut down, my hiatal hernia was remedied through surgery, and effective medications have calmed even some of the most grueling symptoms. I no longer have to visit doctors and hospitals weekly, nor do I have to take more medications than I can count on my fingers.
         Despite the fact that CFS has prevented me from having a normal high school experience, I see it now as a blessing in disguise. Because of it, I’ve made some of the best friends I could ever ask for, even if they’re hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I’ve been able to make the most out of my drawing talents. Several years of odd sleeping hours aside, I’ve made a lot of progress since I was first diagnosed. Now I’m fighting harder to make it out of the house. In fact, I've started college at the Art Institute of Los Angeles and am majoring in Game Art and Design. So far I'm doing pretty well in all of my classes and I feel like I'm really improving so much. It's great to be able to get out again and make new friends, learn new things and keep going along.
         Even at my lowest points, my friends online and family have been supportive and caring, even if they don’t fully understand what I’ve been going through. Now when I talk about it, I can joke about it. The hardest part is over, and it’s easier to tell people about what a thrill this whole mess has been.
         I haven’t taken on this challenge all by myself, I’ve had many people pushing me forward, helping me work through it, and trying to make things a little easier for me. I may still have CFS, but I also have drive and determination to overcome it. Life goes on, with or without a debilitating illness, and I will continue to make the most of it. Even if making the most of it involves unknowingly donating blood to feed the vampiric population. Life is just full of surprises, isn’t it?