lifestyles
A simple story about a complex problem:
Written by Matt Hood
The writer shares his personal experience with chronic fatigue syndrome as he tries to shed light on a misunderstood disorder.
**T** the fatigue crept up like a mugger.
But instead of snatching him
CHRONIC FATIGUE
insense of snatching my bag or emptying my pockets, this criminal added to my load. Each day my book bag felt as if there was an extra textbook inside. My coat pocketlets felt as if I was carrying around extra change. Eventually, I couldn't lift my bag. Ultimately, I couldn't get out of bed to put on my coat.
It was my senior year in high school, a time when teen-agers ought to be invulnerable and on top of the world. I was at the top of my class, carrying an honors load and playing varsity golf after school.
The doctors called it chronic fatigue syndrome, CFS.
I started missing school; the class load became too heavy. I got to where I couldn't even stand up on the golf course.
Then came the fatigue.
After months of rest, I came to college feeling better. But 2 1/2 years after the initial diagnosis, I felt that mysterious weight return to my bag. I've had to quit my job and drop classes. My doctors renewed their hypotheses, and the testing started again.
My assailant is back
Approximately 3 million to 18 million adults in the United States complain of fatigue each year. Doctors disagree about how many of these people are affected by chronic fatigue syndrome, but esti-
million. Most of these chronic fatigue sufferers are in their 20s or early 30s.
What exactly is chronic fatigue syndrome? Doctors and researchers don't have an exact answer. But if each day is a struggle and you're beginning to think that it's all in your head, it's an answer worth investigating. Your illness, like mine, may be chemical, and the torment you feel may be avoidable.
The National Institutes of Health, a federal agency of biomedical research, answers the question this way:
"The hallmark of the illness is fatigue — a fatigue that comes on suddenly and is relentless and relapsing.
well. including severe depression.
On stress tests that doctors administered, I was pushing the end of the scale. I was taking junior and senior classes during my freshman year. I felt driven to make straight A's. A dearly loved aunt had died suddenly. I felt the incredible high of falling in love for the first time and then felt the crash when it fell apart. And I endured the day-in-day-out stress of working as a reporter on the student newspaper.
Charles Yockey, chief of staff at Watkins Memorial Health Center, has seen hundreds of cases of chronic fatigue during his career as a physician. He said chronic fatigue syndrome, a disorder that worsens when mixed with stress and inconsistent sleep habits, can be a nemesis for college-age students. Twenty-five KU students are being treated at Watkins for chronic fatigue syndrome.
I spent the summer after high school in bed. When I came to college, I thought I had left CFS in my childhood room. But after three semesters of balancing school and sleep, stress and new relationships, my illness began to return. It stole the living from my college life.
The list may not look so sinister. Other students work just as hard and do fine. But to the syndrome that had been lurking in remission, I looked like an easy victim. It attacked.
Chronic fatigue
causing debilitating tiredness. Unlike the mind fog of a serious hangover, to which CFS has been compared, the profound weakness accompanying CFS does not go away with a few good nights of sleep but instead slyly steals a person's vigor over months and years."
"The hallmark of the illness is fatigue-a fatigue that comes on suddenly and is relentless and relapsing...
syndrome is a relatively new name for a condition that has been around for ages. Around 1870, doctors began diagnosing soldiers exhausted in battle as having "soldiers heart" or the "effort syndrome." During World War I, 60,000 British troops were diagnosed with the disorder and approximately 44,000 were dismissed from
dismissed from duty.
Modern study of the syndrome has been prompted by epidemic outbreaks of the syndrome.
One of the largest was at Incline Village.
Nev., a playground for the well-to-do by Lake Tahoe.
Doctors can't explain
the high outbreak rates in the yuppie population, especially women, who are twice as likely to be diagnosed with CFS. But they speculate that this segment of the population is more likely to go to the doctor for testing and thus discover the syndrome.
The high rate of illness among young, successful people has prompted other names for the disorder: "the yuppie plague" or "affluenza."
After spending weeks in bed, I have returned to class. When I explained to one of my professors that I had chronic fatigue syndrome, she said with a hearty laugh, "Oh no! You have the yuppie fly."
She meant it to be funny. CFS is brighting out.
There's no dress code in a sick bay. Chronic fatigue is not some piece of the yuppie wardrobe one can put on and take off. It's not some suede-patched dinner jacket or some paisley tie with matching pocket hankie. Polo ponies are not a part of the CFS collection.
There were days when I was so exhausted I couldn't even get dressed. There were days when tying a tie felt like tightening a hangman's noose around my throat. I spent weeks in bed too weak to move. I wore blue-striped pajama bottoms and an undershirt that started to unravel at the neck. They were wrinkled and stained. They smelled of sweat and stale sleep. No buzzing off to the club in a BMW for this yuppie. There were days when making it down my apartment hallway to the bathroom was a small victory.
She meant it to be funny. CFS is anything but.
--said. Unlike testing for pneumonia or some other quantifiable illness, there is nothing tangible about CFS.
Even the clinical name, "syndrome," connotes a certain amount of confusion. Joseph Brewer, physician and specialist in infectious diseases at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., said that the medical community had not yet found a cause for the disorder, and there were no definite tests to prove a patient had it. Thus, he said that chronic fatigue was classified as a syndrome, not a dis-
"With a disease, we know what it is," Brewer said. "A syndrome, on the other hand, is a clinical constellation of signs and symptoms. There is no specific and definite way of diagnosing it."
Yockey agreed that there was a great deal of uncertainty about chronic fatigue syndrome
"It's a diagnosis of exclusion." Yockey
didn't tell the audience.
"When testing for CFS, I can't see anything, and I can't hear anything," Yockey said.
Chronic fatigue can look like a dozen different disorders, some of them strictly physical and several that
Reeve's vertebrae fusion goes well
Surgeons used 11 titanium wires to tie together
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Surgeons piece together two shattered vertebrae at the base of Christopher Reeve's skull Monday to immobilize the paralyzed actor's broken neck and keep his riding injury from causing further harm.
"Everything went well," said Reeve's surgeon, Dr. John Jane. "We did the fusion we anticipated."
Surgery won't restore actor's ability to move
The Associated Press
The six-hour operation on the "Superman" star wasn't expected to restore his ability to move and breathe on his own.
receive, 42, was paralyzed from the neck down on May 27 when he was thrown from his horse during a jumping event. He landed on his head, breaking the top two bones in his spine.
Reeve was an avid rider who had trained for eight years.
Reeve's upper two vertebrae.
They also connected the first vertebra to the base of the skull with a ring. Bone shavings from Reeve's hip were grafted between the first and second vertebrae.
Doctors hope the surgery will immobilize the damaged vertebrae and allow them a chance to heal. It also was expected to prevent further damage to the spinal cord, two surgeons familiar with such operations said.
"It was a little more complicated just to get everything absolutely, exactly right." Jane said at a news conference. "The vertebrae were so fragmented."
Christopher Reeve
"It will allow him to begin his mobilization, to sit up and, hopefully, to begin his early rehabilitation. That will depend on his overall medical recovery," said Dr. Rick Delamarter, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California at Los
Angeles Comprehensive Spine Center. "There's very little else medically that can be done."
Propping Reeve upright should improve his breathing and help prevent any recurrence of pneumonia, a common complication in such cases. Jane said.
Reeve's fractures should heal in six to eight weeks. However, it could be weeks or months before the full extent of spinal cord damage is known.
The actor has some feeling in his neck and chest, indicating his spinal cord was not severed, Jane said. He said it was impossible to say how much mobility Reeve can hope to achieve.
Delamarter and Dr. Jack Wilberger, a neurosurgeon at the Allegheny-Singer Research Institute in Pittsburgh, said Reeve could be turned in bed or positioned upright in a chair in a few days. That should help prevent bed sores, blood clots in the less and potentially fatal ailments.
reieve's inability to breathe without a ventilator will inhibit his recovery and rehabilitation and increase the risk of complications, Delamarter and Wilberger said.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
SECTION B
JUNE 7,1995
BOX OFFICE HITS
LOS ANGELES — The ghostly "Casper" took in
LOS ANGELES — TI an estimated $14.1 million in its second week of release to remain No. 1 at the box office.
The figures are based on estimates of ticket sales Friday through Sunday. Final figures were due out Monday.
The Clint Eastwood-
Meryl Streep romance
"The Bridges of Madison
County" was second with $10.8 million, studio and industry sources said Sunday.
The weekend's top 10 films were:
1. "Casper." $14.1 million.
2. "The Bridges of Madison County," $10 million.
3. "Die Hard," $9.2 million.
4. Braveheart, $7.5 million.
5. "Crimson Tide." $6.5 million
6. "Forret Paris." $3.7 million.
7. "Johnny Mnemonic." $3.3 million.
8. "While You Were Sleeping,
$3.3 million."
10. "Tales from the Hood," $1.9 million.
1995 TONY AWARDS
NEW YORK — As expected, Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard" was named best musical Sunday night at the 1995 Tony Awards. Then the best play award went to "Love! Valour! Compassion!" by Terrence McNally.
McNally said the play was dedicated to Nathan Lane, who starred in "Love! Valour Compassion!" Lane, who was one of the co-hosts of the television program, didn't receive a Tony nomination for his critically acclaimed performance.
"Sunset Boulevard" took home the most Tony's, seven, followed by the Harold Prince revival of "Show Boat" with five. "The Heiress," a revival of the play based on Henry James' novel "Washington Square," picked up four prizes including the best actress award for Cherry Jones.
Other big acting wins were scored by Matthew Broderick in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" and Ralph Fiennes for his portrayal of the melancholy Dane in a revival of "Hamlet."
Compiled from The Associated Press.