Surviving severe me

by Elle Ward

It started in February. It was winter still I suppose. Coats where worn at lunchtime and I remember the hustle and bustle around a table in the entrance hall, a small place, as cold as outside even. The tiles covering the floor feeling as if you had taken that first step outside on the tiles of a swimming pool, the cool seeping through your black shoes. The table was old and battered, but that was unimportant to the masses gathered around it. Two people sat behind, 6th formers. Who? I can’t remember but it was the week of Valentines Day and their project that particular year or month even, was the one-thing teenagers both before and after struggled with – love. The temptation of the one-day of the year when all that mattered was love meant that even a few boys gathered round to pay their money and send their first valentine.

Laughing with my friends I left school that day and as clichéd as it sounds there where times when I never thought I would return. It was that week I got ill. Naively maybe I see it sometimes as that quick, a day and I was gone, but common sense tells me it was a lot slower than that, painfully slow.

After that last day nothing remains as vivid in my memory for at least the next month, which passes in front of me like a badly filmed home video. I remember the virus that began it all and the endless days on the sofa, but it all seems to have melted into one day that plays over and over in my mind filling up the months in which I was looking for the answers. Not even had I started on the what if’s for a month I wondered the whys.

Then the next vivid dream started, although this time for different reasons. Maybe it was another beginning, like the beginning a month ago when I unconsciously waved goodbye to the old life. I was admitted to hospital and spent no fewer than 8 days there. I was prodded, I was poked, a lot of things happened that week, but as if there was a silver tint in the rain cloud above me, the questions I pondered had a chance to change – they where answered. The why was given a name. I had post viral fatigue syndrome, the masking name which we later found out was exactly the same as M.E. or CFS the 6 months old aliases.

Thus I returned home to my warm bed and to the expectation of hospital visits and family therapy sessions. Dealing with my illness seemed to involve a lot of talking.

So things began to evolve into normality. Not the same as past but my now which was shaped everyday for the next two years by school and the few lessons I dragged myself into, hospital of which I was now a regular attendee and slowly out of chaos came a regime – separated by pain and incredible fatigue but a life was born and out of it I learnt to cope.

My mind became a busy place. The time I had to now spend in bed awake and aware lead me to reveal different things about the me now. Maybe I was never regular, I always had a different side but now it was more apparent, more alive within myself and needed not to be hidden anymore.

Priorities change. People grow up believing that there are a certain set of qualities in a person but yet absent I have survived and grown more that I believe I would’ve with them. A child may believe that the most important thing for them to do is learn and it is portrayed as a life or death situation. As true as this may be for the healthy it is taken for granted everyday by people who are yet to understand the real world and to live.

I laugh, I cry and I make the most out of what I’ve got and my circumstances now. I listen to the wind and have gown to love the sound of the pain pattering on a window pain. No longer will I be a stereotype, a perfect teenager but in self and in mind I will show my true colours as it where, the real me, myself inside.

I know nothing will be easy, I think I realised that the day I was discharged from the noisy hospital ward. Inside I am strong and though often like anyone I relapse both in health and thinking my dreams will never stop and my heart and soul will keep fighting this. The road will be long, mountains will be in my way but I know ultimately I will run down the other side, laughing the wind in my hair. Totally aware of the person I have become and the strength it took to get me there and if the only thing I learn for all the years I spend ill and alone it will to be strong and to show the world your face as it is now. The end. Near or far will come out of this and then a beginning will occur, the ending I hope will be as vivid as the last, so I can turn and stop once in a while and watch it, as the closing scenes of a film and remind myself of how things will carry on changing forever and that not one day will I take my life for granted, there’s always a chance you may wake up in someone else’s dreams.

So I turn over in my dreams and think of the, again naively thought, day I will be well and the things that will evolve out of my dreams and become real. The parties, the fun but also the little things I will appreciate. Maybe I’m being unrealistic, maybe the only day I’ll realise things have gotten better will be months or years after they really have. My dreams will keep on changing – that is all I know and if things remain the same as always for more long years, I know in my heart my changing dreams will finally become a changing reality. Like sleeping beauty I will awake, but not with missing years but years that however I wish never happened I am pleased in a strange way they did because of the things I taught myself and the things I will continue to learn, until an old woman, I will look back and cherish the thought – no regrets, nothing to wish away and I hope I will abide by that until the day I die, fulfilled that I had a good life just a different one.