IT’S CALLED chronic fatigue syndrome, but a better name for severe cases would be living death.
Every year tens of thousands of Americans catch a virus — for example, a novel coronavirus — and they never really recover. For months that can stretch on to years, they suffer from headaches, brain fog, chills, fevers, restive sleep, irritable bowels, limb pain, and more. And even after their initial symptoms abate, they experience a fatigue so heavy that it feels like slow-onset paralysis, like being slowly frozen into place or turned to stone.
In bad cases (I have one in my household), the afflicted are lucky if they can make their own food, or even sit with their families at the dinner table. If they try to return to their old lives, then their symptoms can recur, stronger than before, and after every crash they may find their blanket of fatigue a little heavier, their functionality diminished a little further, until one day they can scarcely speak, chew, or even weep. It can go on for decades. The result is less like a conventional illness and more like the kind of suffering that the French mystic Simone Weil dubbed affliction. Only about five percent of cases result in complete recovery. There is no cure, or even a reliable way to manage the symptoms.
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