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.
I suspect it’s worse than just having to ignore rest for work. I think it’s our food supply. In the neverending effort to always squeeze maximum profit out of everything, we’ve made all of our available food terrible.
I’ve been fighting with chronic fatigue and pain for most of my adulthood. Only in the last year have I discovered how much better I feel when I avoid processed foods. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to do in Western society, yet when I stick to eating only clean foods without garbage added to them, I actually feel okay. It’s only gotten more pronounced as I’ve aged, and I’m now at a point where I can’t ever eat anything that has corn, wheat, soy, etc.
Maybe in a more natural environment these foods wouldn’t immediately inflame my body and mind, but since we eat so very much of the same starchy, fatty garbage every day, I believe my body has begun to revolt and won’t tolerate any now.
Current medical thinking is that maybe 20-30% of the population has some sort of undetected food sensitivity to common food ingredients. That’s a significant portion of people who feel bad all the time but don’t know why.
