Long before the world had heard of long COVID, Sanna Stella experienced firsthand how a simple respiratory infection can shape-shift into a chronic illness.
In 2014, a case of bronchitis left Stella, a therapist who lives in the Chicago area, with debilitating fatigue.
Within a month, she was barely able to walk from the couch to her kitchen table. Eventually, Stella learned she had chronic fatigue syndrome, now called myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or simply ME/CFS.
Patients can suffer from a range of symptoms, including profound exhaustion, brain fog and post-exertional malaise, an escalation in symptoms following exertion. There is no FDA-approved treatment for the illness, which affects more than 4 million people in the U.S.
“As if it’s engaged in a long war against a foreign microbe, a war it couldn’t completely win and therefore had to continue fighting.”
A region of the brain that’s involved in perceiving fatigue and generating effort was not as active in those with ME/CFS.
“Their brain is telling them, ‘no, don’t do it,’” says Nath. “It’s not a voluntary phenomenon.”
“It’s the thing that makes people not want to give effort,” she says. “We know if you do the [cardiopulmonary exercise] test again the next day, they cannot equal their performance on that test with the same amount of effort physiologically.”
So how recently have we stopped just going to bed and resting when we have “minor” illnesses? Could it be that our immune systems really need us to stop doing fucking anything at all in order keep illnesses from turning into long-term problems, but we all won’t just fucking stop trying to go to work when we’re sick? Fuck the capitalist hellhole we’re living in.
