Severe ME Awareness Day

Hello everyone,

I wanted to post here today as August 8th is Severe ME Awareness Day.

(Source)

ME is a neuroimmunological multisystem disorder. The main symptom is a severe intolerance to any form of exercise, stress, and stimuli. It also comes with a lot of other symptoms including pain, fatigue, brain fog, orthostatic intolerance, gastroenterological issues, neurological symptoms and so on.

ME is categorised into mild, moderate, severe and very severe. Today, we think of those who have severe and very severe ME and of those who have already died of this disease. People with (very) severe ME are mostly or completely bedbound, often have to lie in a dark and quiet room for most of their time, and some are even completely dependent on carers and a feeding tube to stay alive.

So far, there is no treatment for ME. The only recommended strategy to deal with it is pacing, which means, staying within your boundaries to not trigger the bad response to exercise, stress and stimuli that I've mentioned before. Healing from ME completely is unlikely at the moment. We can only hope that research finds a solution for all ME patients soon. 

Therefore, let's think of the severe(st) ME patients around the world today, hope for a better future for them, and grieve those who we have lost. 

Thank you for reading the post. If you want to learn more about ME, here's a link. MistyMagic has also interviewed someone with ME in the past, so here's the link to the interview.

Take care,

audienta