May is/was ME/CFS awareness month
I only just learned from eladnarra’s blog that May is ME/CFS awareness month, which I guess is fitting given that throughout all of May I’ve been getting painfully aware that I may have been developing it on top of everything else.
Basically, ever since I got COVID last June I’ve been especially prone to fatigue, vertigo, brain fog, shortness of breath, a persistent cough, and a whole bunch of other long COVID signs. The worst of it comes and goes, but this month has been particularly bad, especially on the fatigue front. And ME/CFS is a very common part of long COVID.
I used to love taking long walks, and would usually walk 3-5 miles every day. Now I get completely wiped out if I walk to the grocery store and back once a week, and that’s about 1.5-2 miles for the trip as a whole.
The last few days I’ve been doing a bit better since I’ve been taking allergy meds and Sudafed every morning (because of the ridiculously high pollen counts we’re experiencing) and I suspect that allergies were making things a lot worse, and Sudafed’s stimulant effect is probably helping in other ways as well. But I’ve found it very difficult to get, like, anything done, even things I normally enjoy, like cooking or making music.
I’m overdue for my annual physical so I’ve scheduled that with my doctor (early July, because of course Seattle healthcare is still a tire fire) and I made a note of wanting to discuss long COVID and/or ME/CFS symptoms, but I’m not super optimistic that anything will come of it. At best it’ll at least still be more information for my upcoming disability hearing, though.
I’ve ended up not using the comma so much, just because I’ve been so fatigued that I do not feel safe driving even with the steering assistance. Like, I took a short trip to the hardware store a mile away and that was nerve-wracking just because I kept on feeling like I was barely keeping myself conscious.
In a few hours I have a show in VRChat which I’m hoping will be 60-90 minutes long but who knows how long my wrists will hold out on it. It’s just a casual show, though, and the folks running it don’t seem too worried about how long my set is, nor have they, uh, promoted it at all, but at least that makes it feel pretty low-pressure.
I have many more, much more intense shows coming up in June, such as VRelium and TPVR and of course my choir shows, and just thinking about those has me feeling overwhelmed. There’s also some “due by” dates for the game soundtrack I’m working on, although I think I’m in pretty good shape on that, at least.
But like. Add to that some annoying personal life shit that I’d rather not get into (mostly just different conflicts within different friend groups) and I’m feeling very tired, and that’s just amplofying the withdrawal and isolation I’ve been feeling for the past year in particular.
I was never good at resource-management games, and now that feels like what my whole life is.
Anyway hopefully this is just extra fatigue because of allergies combined with fibromyalgia and not yet another debilitating condition. I already have enough of those.