Have you noticed how no one gets tired any more, they get one of those frightening fatigue syndromes? Post-viral, chronic, adrenal, muscular, neuro-cognitive…It’s terrifying. I’ve lost track of the number of parties I’ve been to where one of the guests has suddenly announced that they’re really excited to be out because they’ve been in bed for the past six months. (It’s always six months. Never five and a half, or seven.)
And before the Alliance of Fatigue Sufferers accuses me of insensitivity, I must make clear that I’m not denying these debilitating conditions exist. I’m saying that if everyone who claims to be is suffering from an official fatigue syndrome then we need to do something urgently about the fact that Britain is in the grip of an epidemic of immune deficiency the like of which could soon wipe out the entire human race. We need to alert the World Health Organisation and the Pentagon and block off the Channel tunnel.
Also, and more to the point, it is becoming very tiring for all the people who don’t have post-viral fatigue to have to listen to all the people who do have post-viral fatigue. My summer has been pretty much dominated by them. I met two in one week at one stage. The first was a young girl at a house party in the south of France. Within minutes of meeting me she declared, ‘I’ve been in bed for six months,’ then embarked on a very lengthy explanation of why. As I recall, it took 48 hours, virtually non-stop, to flesh out fully the details. Her argument was quite hard to follow at times because she kept leaping up and doing bursts of impromptu yoga. After two days, she had worn me out with exhaustive recitations of the food groups she was combining to keep her energy levels up. ‘I think you’re doing a really good job,’ I said, stifling a massive yawn and aching to tell her to get checked out for hyperactivity disorder before she did someone some real damage.
A few days later I met another one at a dinner party. ‘I’ve been in bed for six months,’ he announced, and thus began to recount the wonders of Chinese medicine. I could feel my limbs starting to ache and my head throb as he did the spiel about food groups.
It must have been so much easier in the old days, when people got ill without finding it interesting. Take my mother, for example. Struck down by rheumatic fever in her youth, she spent a year in a hospital bed, but you would struggle to draw a 30 second explanation of the experience out of her. She did not then, nor does she now, go on about her energy levels, though I can’t imagine they were terribly high. Chinese doctors were not called upon to concoct herbal preparations. My grandmother did not take herself off to the library to research world medical opinion. Above all, no one in Coventry or the surrounding area was lectured for hours at a stretch about the nature of her condition, her feelings about it and how many pounds of organic tomatoes she was eating in her courageous battle to beat it.
In the days before human beings found themselves fascinating, this sort of attitude to illness was, I am told, common practice. Incidentally, my mother also claims that being pregnant was widely viewed as routine at this time. It was not an excuse to show people ultrasound pictures of your womb on your iPhone, nor to Twitter explanations of the holistic painkilling methods you intend to use while in your birthing pool in front of a web camera relaying the action down below to your Facebook page. Apparently, women in those days simply had babies in private. Amazing. A similar show of stoicism about our biological processes wouldn’t go amiss now. If we are going to survive this period of unparalleled febrility, the fatigue syndrome sufferers are going to have to cut the non-fatigue syndrome sufferers some slack or this thing is going to spread like wildfire.
Since my encounters, I’ve barely been able to work for a few hours at a stretch before collapsing in a depressed stupor. Most days I can only just get out of bed and feed the cat before needing a lie-down. Today I can hardly type because my hands keep going floppy. At first I was convinced I’d got a touch of the post virals myself. But now I realise I’ve developed PVFF, or post-viral fatigue fatigue. The worst thing about this is that absolutely nothing comes up when you Google it. No support groups or suggestions for food combining or details about the weight of tomatoes needed. I will have to blaze a trail.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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