Tag: Disease

I Am Not a Drug Addict.

Despite the world’s insistence on kale enemas being the cure-all for everything from colds to cancer, some illnesses require carefully manufactured pharmaceuticals for a cure, & even then sometimes there is no cure & we can only treat the symptoms. There is a plethora of such illnesses, & as of writing I live with at least 3 of them; asthma, depression, & chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis. Depending on the outcome of my impending surgery, I could be adding another to the list – endometriosis (note: I now live with 4, because having just 3 was boring).

All of these illnesses are chronic. For the most part their causes are unknown, making it impossible to cure them. Instead, all we can do is treat the symptoms for as long as they persist, & the word chronic should give you an indication that the symptoms last longer than a couple of weeks. Yet, as fellow sufferers of such conditions will all tell you, we are constantly being reminded by our doctors that the pain killers & symptom managers we rely upon to function are only meant to be used for 6 months, or at most a year.

You don’t need to be a doctor to know that chronic illnesses don’t have the good manners to abruptly stop without warning after 6 months of using a prescribed medicine. However, at this point we start to be pressured by medical professionals to stop using medicines, without alternatives being offered. We are faced with a choice; subject ourselves to debilitating symptoms, or insist on keeping our prescription & be labelled as dependent on drugs. As far as most doctors are concerned, this is no different to being a drug addict, living from one high to the next, consumed by the need to remain intoxicated. Very few of them seem to fathom that our dependency stems from the desire not to be in excruciating pain.

My prescriptions keep me alive; they mean I can breathe. On top of that, they dull the pain enough to allow me to move. They meant I got an education, a full-time job, a husband. They mean I can write blog posts & make videos, join protests & watch wrestling, socialise & play games. Even with them I remain in constant pain.

Back in early 2019, shortly before we were scheduled to leave the EU for the first time, my main prescription disappeared. No one would supply it. I argued with the doctors & pharmacy daily, watching the number of pills left dwindle day by day for an entire month. Eventually, just before I ran out, the supply returned, but for an entire month I had lived in constant fear. If they ran out, how would I work? If I couldn’t work, how would I pay the rent? If I couldn’t pay the rent, where would we live? Even scarier than the financial aspect was the knowledge that I would be in unbearable pain.

In the current unstable political climate of the UK, & who knows what madness will have taken place by the time this post is published, that fear has returned as the supply of my medicine falls into question. It made me realise just how dependent on these prescriptions I had become.

Dependent though I may be, addict I am not. Addiction is an entirely separate physiological & psychological dependency on drugs, often obtained illegally or for recreation in the first place, which still needs to be treated with far more compassion & understanding than it is given now. The stigmas & stereotypes that haunt addiction also haunt me, & that is what I despise. Chronic illnesses & drug addictions are two separate conditions, in need of different treatment options. To lump us all into one category & regard us all as lazy strays draining “the system” of money damages us all.

When all of this is said & done, there is one fact left to face. If we’re being honest, the pressure to get chronic illness patients to stop using prescriptions is to save money for the NHS, not for our own good as they like to tell us. What good is not being addicted to drugs if we’re in unrelenting misery instead, which ironically is something that drives people to use illicit drugs. While the NHS certainly does need more funding, jeopardising the health of patients goes against everything it was set up to do.

So, when you see scare-mongering on the news about people becoming dependent on prescriptions, just remember that there is an entire side of the debate supressed into silence. We are not drug addicts. We are just sick.

Take the Shot.

If there had been a vaccination for the strain of meningitis I contracted in 2011, chances are I would never have developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Luckily for you, I fell ill and then decided to whinge about it, calling it entertainment.

Vaccinations are a contentious topic in the court of public opinion all thanks to a scientist who wanted some extra pocket money. The scientific community are very familiar with publication bias; papers that show no correlation or have a null hypothesis are far less likely to be published. After all, medical journals are still a commercial enterprise and need to make money, and no one wants to buy a book where nothing happens. So the scientist forged some data to give the false conclusion that the MMR vaccine resulted in autism, and the world reacted with its usual level-headed reasoning abilities. Even if this were the case, measles, mumps, or rubella have deadly consequences, whereas autism is at least manageable with the right support despite its difficulty.

However, there is a debate surrounding vaccinations that is much closer to home for me, and that is the association between CFS and vaccinations. Vaccinations make people who already have CFS feel horrendous, which I can confirm from personal experience. I get a flu jab every year, and for the next 48 hours or so I will feel like Jupiter’s gravity is emanating from my chest and I also have an elephant sat on me. However, developing the actual flu would be significantly worse, leaving me incapacitated for several weeks at best, or at worst, dead. Therefore I consider the flu jab worth it.

The real question is whether CFS can be triggered following a vaccination. Having scoured the internet the vast majority of scientific evidence that I can access suggests that there is no correlation between the two, and given that CFS is often triggered by a severe viral infection, vaccinations may even offer some protection against CFS. However, there are also abundant case reports of people developing CFS out of the blue, and it has been noted that in these cases, a vaccination has usually been given a short time before.

Given that we know so little about CFS, it’s causes, and it’s biochemistry, there is no definitive way for researchers to establish a connection between vaccinations and CFS. For all we know there could be undiscovered associations with air pollution, food poisoning, or physical injuries. Vaccinations are constantly in the media and the forefront of our minds, making them the first conclusion that is all too easy to jump to. I remain extremely sceptical, however, as having studied the biochemistry of vaccinations as part of my degree, I simply cannot align inoculations and diseases like CFS.

It is also worth mentioning at this point that CFS, while a brutal disease that can even prove fatal, places far less immediate danger on the patient than meningitis, measles, mumps, rubella, poliomyelitis, and even influenza. Sometimes in life we have to balance the risks, and take the lesser of two evils. Take the shot.