cheers

Answer:   A supermarket trolley has a mind of it's own .........

I've had ME for 12 years but am now recovering. For most of those years I was stuck in the ME world and thinking that that was how I was going to be for the rest of my life unless someone found a cure. Then I bought Ashok Gupta's CFS Recovery Programme. It changed my life around completely and I was very soon doing things I thought I would never be able to do again. Although I'm not completely cured yet, my quality of life has improved by 100%. The important thing I learned was that you CAN get better and I believe that I'm now on the final leg of my journey to recovery.

Buying Alex's book has made a big difference too. I found it very inspiring and useful and have thoroughly enjoyed following up many of the useful links.

I forgot to mention that I am 44 years old.  When I got ME in 2002, I was 37.

Bye.

I was a successfull IT Professional and got ME in December 2002, suprisingly near the end of a six month voluntary leave I was taking as I had been working too hard without vacations for almost five years.  Luckily, I had a good disability insurance policy and my claim was accepted (as a depression) and I received started receiving partial replacement of my pre-disability income, enough for me to livereasonably well.

Other than my parents, no one in my family ever really beleived in my illness and my life got more and more stressfull, and my symptomes kept worsening.  After two years and still no diagnosis, my insurance company arbitrarily stopped my benefits, saying that they didn't see any reason why I couldn't work.  By May of 2005, I finally got my diagnosis, but the insurance company didn't accept it.  A  few months later, I found some medication that helped my symptomes and brought back a little quality to my life.

I have been in a legal fight with the insurance company for almost four and a half years, and am now approaching five years with the only family income being my wife's part-time salary.  My court case was finally heard four months ago, but I am still waiting for the judgement and am rapidly running out of savings and credit.  I am fully expecting for a positive decision and am currently crossing my fingers that it will come soon.

I have two daughters, aged 12 and a half and 14, both of whom only remember me as always being sick, and they, along with my wife, have no understanding whatsoever about my condition.  I get no support or encouragement from anybody other than my father (who in looking for information has gotten very involved in the Canadian CFS community), and with the financial and family stresses, my condition is only worsening.

I know that this forum is looking for positive recovery stories, which I certainly don't have right now, but I hope that things could start turning around once my disability benefits are re-instated and the financial stresses are removed.  I hope to find a little encouragement from this forum, as I need all the help that I can get.

Thanks

My M.E started with Glandular Fever when I was 17 - I'm now 33.  I've been to college and I have worked.  At the moment I am doing some voluntary work at my local charity shop.  I wish that I could do some paid work, but I am really enjoying doing the work that I can do.  I have goals but no deadlines.

Feel a bit awkward introducing myself on here  but..I'm Em, 30 and had M.E for nearly 8 years after Glandular fever.  Was absolutely fine before this, just finished Uni, been in my first job for nearly a year then got pretty ill in the space of a weekend.  I was bedbound with the G.Fever and my energy just never really came back, I would say I was housebound for about the first 2/3 years and would severely pay for any activity I tried to do.  I did slowly start to pick up after that and tried so many different things that might help.  The break through for me was learning NLP and changing my diet, all of a sudden I was doing a lot more. I have picked up steadily in recent years but still seem to be missing that last piece of the jigsaw.  Still a work in progress I guess! x

I found this website when I was looking for recovery stories.  I wanted to know that recovery is possible, and I wanted to know how to do it!  I'm a sponge, and I'll soak up all the information I can.  I'm looking forward to sharing experiences with others who are in my same boat.