Pacing

Pacing is the best thing you can do if you have M.E.

It means taking it easy, never doing more than you are capable of, in fact never doing as much as you are capable of.

My specialist (in my teens) said never do anything today that you wouldn't be able to do tomorrow. So if you're having a good day today and feel like doing a bit more than usual, don't!

He also recommended never doing anything for more than 15mins at a time. So you can watch your favourite TV show, but only for 15 minutes, then you have to go and do something else, something completely different like ironing (just an example never happens in this house!).

Pacing as a teenager was relatively easy as I had no commitments, no deadlines, no need to do anything. Having said that I was still pretty hopeless at it. If I was feeling up to it I would watch that whole film, read all of that book I was enjoying, generally not follow the rules.

Pacing with 2 small children underfoot is even harder.
The bare minimum; meals have to be chosen, shopped for (all be it online but with brain fog even this is tough), prepared, cooked. Clothes have to be washed, and the house kept in order. Children need to be delivered to and picked up from school not to mention entertained and refereed!

I am fairly stubborn and a parent, so often feel the bare minimum is not enough. Therefore when I am feeling good I forget all of the rules, we go to the beach, we go to the shops, or to the park, basically I go that extra mile, use up all of my energy to try and make my kids lives that little bit more fun.
This always backfires when I then crash which means even the bare minimum is too much...

Will I ever learn how important pacing is?

Every bug is scary

For most people catching a bug is inconvenient, and never very nice. 

For me catching a bug is one of the scariest things in the world.

To start with you don't know if its actually a bug or if it is a crash, a contamination of food, or just some lovely new symptoms to add to the list.

You try to carry on, plodding through the daily to do list until the bug takes hold and in my case this week leaves you passed out on the floor.

So then you take it easy and you hope it will pass quickly - just like any normal person would.

Now 4 days on I should be feeling better, but the overwhelming fatigue is still here. I cannot stand or do anything for very long, and I daren't even consider leaving the house under my own steam.

So then I start wondering is this just a bug or has it struck me back into relapse?

I feel today how I felt a year ago. 

I have worked so hard in the last year to get myself back to what almost resembles normality. To have all of that taken away by a small insignificant bug is just not fair.

I've written this to share my worries, now I shall go back to thinking positive. For one of the awful catch 22s of M.E is the more you worry and stress about it the longer the recovery will take.