Has anyone been diagnosed with C.F.S.? I really would appreciate your opinions on my situation and would like to know you are able to manage it.
So, my doctor has put me through a battery of tests--all negative--to see what my be causing my fatigue. But she isn't really helpful...I have to keep asking her, "Well, if these come back negative, then what?" because whenever I don't ask I just get a message on my phone from her nurse saying the tests were negative...and that's it. As if that means nothing's wrong. So here's what happened, and maybe you can tell me if this sounds like CFS:
A little more than a year ago I started getting progressively more exhausted until eventually I could sleep for 48-60 hours straight and still feel bone-tired when I woke up and not have any energy to even crawl out of bed. In fact, that's usually how I had to spend my weekends. I was having to rest my eyes at red lights, sleep in classes, and I was unable to stay awake while studying (not because I was bored...I can't tell you how many nights I fell asleep studying at my desk and woke up on the floor the next morning). I wasn't just falling asleep at 11 or 12 at night...it was around 5 or 6 p.m. when I usually could not keep my eyes open anymore (that's pretty early for a college kid).
And I don't know if it was because I was exhausted or what, but I also started developing memory and concentration problems, which is alarming to me because given that I am pre-med I need my memory and concentration!!!
I don't remember having a sore throat or anything like that (which I know a lot of people with CFS have reported), but I was achy a lot and my joints would hurt for no good reason. A few months into all this, my hair even started falling out (that kind of died down after 3-4 months). My psychiatrist put me on Pristiq (antidepressant used to provide energy) and Provigil (sometimes prescribed to narcoleptics), but neither worked. They made me shaky and "on edge", but at the same time I still had that same exhaustion that I could feel in my very bones...as if those medications were targeting something entirely different than my symptoms.
It has been incredibly frustrating trying to make my regular doctor take me seriously. I was an all-A's, pre-med student in the honors program at my university. It's been a little over a year that I have had these symptoms. During that time I have been put on then taken off of 4 different medications, seen my grades and attendence drop, and I even had to withdraw from the university for a semester because my symptoms were so bad.
Anyways, I was just wondering what people actually diagnosed with C.F.S. thought about this (if this sounded like a familiar experience) and how they are coping. It is very hard to make other people understand the level of fatigue I feel (as if I had just pulled 2 all-nighters even though I got 10+ hrs of sleep the night before). I consider myself now in a period of slight remission (if there is such a thing). Strangely this comes after I was put on heavy duty antibiotics after developing a goose-egg-sized abscess and had surgery.
However, I'm afraid that my symptoms will again get as bad as they were earlier this year.
