Ten years ill, and nobody could tell me why
It started in the middle of the night, in February 2015. I woke feeling drunk — properly drunk, couldn’t-walk-a-straight-line drunk — except I hadn’t touched a thing. The world looked wrong, like my head was full of cotton wool. I assumed it would pass. It didn’t. It got worse, and then it kept getting worse.
Over the years that followed, my body produced almost every strange thing a body can produce. Constant allergic reactions. A gut that stopped digesting food properly. Vertigo, heart palpitations, muscle weakness, brain fog. Numbness and tingling all over — at one point my skin was so uncomfortably numb that I used hot water bottles in the middle of summer, just to bring the feeling back. My head felt too heavy for my body; I’d lean against walls while my heart pounded in my head and neck. Throbbing headaches most of the day. Ears ringing on and off. Spots coming and going in my vision. I stopped driving. For a long stretch I was mostly housebound, leaving once or twice a week — usually for appointments.
And nobody could tell me why.
I spent a fortune on tests, supplements and prescriptions, always believing the next test would find the missing piece. A few years in, I’d collected several diagnoses — and I still wasn’t getting better. Every label described what was happening. None of them explained it, and none of them changed it.
If you’re in your own version of this, here’s what I desperately needed to hear on the worst nights, so let me say it to you plainly: I believe you. It’s real. You’re not imagining it, you’re not lazy, and you’re not making a fuss. Nobody said that to me for years, and the missing of it became its own kind of weight.
The turn, when it finally came, wasn’t a treatment. Nothing I swallowed made the difference. What made the difference was a set of lessons nobody had ever taught me — lessons I’d honestly have rolled my eyes at in year one.
Lessons like: rest is not something you earn. Like: a body that has spent decades braced needs to learn, slowly and with enormous patience, that it’s allowed to stand down. Like: no is a complete sentence, and every swallowed no gets stored somewhere. Like: listening to a body I’d spent my whole life overriding — eating when hungry, lying down when tired, instead of pushing through as a matter of policy.
Simple things. Almost insultingly simple, when you’ve spent years searching for a complicated answer. But I had to learn them in my body, not just my head — which is a different thing entirely, and it took years, not weeks.
I want to be careful with this next part. I’m well now. That’s my history, not a promise. I can’t tell you your story will follow the shape of mine, and I won’t pretend to — different bodies, different roads. But these days I live a largely normal life, and most of the time I don’t think about symptoms or limitations at all. There was a decade when I couldn’t have imagined writing that sentence.
And if you’re still in the middle of it, hear this too: what’s happening to you is not weakness, and it is not your fault. You didn’t fail at health while everyone else quietly passed. Some of us were simply never taught the first thing about rest, or safety, or saying no — and our bodies kept count the whole time. Nobody showed us another way. That was never a personal failing. It was a missing education.
I’m not asking you to believe anything tonight. I remember exactly what hope cost on the bad nights, and I wouldn’t hand you a bill like that. I’ll only offer this, from the far side of ten years: the story isn’t necessarily finished — even when every test says it is.
— Adam