How did you find out you had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

30th April, 2017    |    By  Emerge    |     1.8k

Tess is a 21 year old student. She says she is now through the worst of her three year long battle with MECFS. In the process she says she learnt a great deal about herself.


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Chronic illness

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How did you find out you had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

It’s a diagnosis of exclusion, so you are tested for a number of things that could be present with a similar cluster of symptoms. One of the things is Epstein-Barr, or glandular fever. They test you for that because it presents with quite similar symptoms, and I tested negative for that.

That’s a blood-borne disease, so they can do a blood test for it, and it’s definitive. They also test you for allergies and things like, even, irritable bowel and celiac disease—those kinds of things that can all present with associated symptoms of fatigue and feeling run down. I tested negative for all of those things.

So, with me, there wasn’t a definitive test that they could do to tell me what I had.

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