The Day That Everything Started to Go Wrong.
My more obvious ME symptoms began later in 2014, but it was on this day ten years ago, Friday 28th February 2014, that everything started to go wrong.
It was a normal day, but that evening I experienced something similar to a UTI (urinary tract infection).
I saw a doctor on Monday and they gave me antibiotics, but the test results came back negative for an infection. It wasn’t a UTI.
That began months of mysterious on-and-off bladder/urinary symptoms. At one point I thought it was interstitial cystitis, but I saw a urologist in July and he found nothing, so decided it was overactive bladder syndrome (a diagnosis I always disputed because the symptoms didn’t match) and he prescribed medication for it.
I thought it was worth trying though, so I started the medication. It was then that the other symptoms began. I thought it was side effects of the bladder medication, so I stopped taking it, but the symptoms remained, and then began to worsen.
My (then) GP, and the neurologist she referred me to, thought it could be the beginning of Multiple Sclerosis (MS), but that was ruled out after a brain MRI scan, and I was diagnosed with ME in March 2015.
Were the bladder symptoms an atypical beginning of my ME? The trigger for my ME? Or a coincidence? I don’t know. But Friday 28th February 2014 is the day that everything started to go wrong, and this is the day I consider to be my ME anniversary.
Phoebe Boag
Source: Puffs and Pens
The ME Global Chronicle 