Janis Bell on “Am I Allergic To Life?”
ME/CFS patient Janis Bell wrote an essay called “Am I Allergic to Life?” for Phoenix Rising in 2014.
From the article:
The camping lifestyle is difficult, yet I never regretted my choice. As symptom after symptom lessened or entirely disappeared, I put up with the hard ground, the cold, the heat, wind, the endless packing and moving, the whiffs of a neighbor’s cigar or cigarettes, the lousy WiFi, the inadequate cell phone service, the dirt, the noise, the diesel fumes of a one ton pickups and large motor-homes.
And I complained whenever the cold wind ripped through my jacket or the rain left me huddled inside dripping nylon walls.
When my most disabling symptoms, PEM and POTS, began to clear in that low mold environment, I often thought, “Maybe all I have is mold illness, not ME/CFS.”
Yet my ME/CFS diagnosis was sound, and approved by specialists. I’d met the Canadian Consensus Criteria and had been a subject for research studies.
Links on this page are in orange (no underlining).