I can remember going to get my hair cut one very wet afternoon half way through my first year at university.  It would have been February or March of 1995.  I felt terrible.  And this had nothing to do with the usual feelings of terrible that go hand in hand with the first year at university.  I was not your typical first year student.  First up I was two years older than everyone else. Secondly I barely drank.  Thirdly I was always the one who was in bed by 10.30pm and slept to a soundtrack of party noises and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” on repeat in the room down the corridor.

I hated it. Seriously hated it.

Because loathe as I was to admit it, by half way through my first year the M.E. was back with a bloody vengeance. As was the chronic tonsillitis.

After returning from Australia (via the Middle East) and a failed attempt at culinary school, I went to Canterbury to study Classics in the autumn of ‘94.  Kurt Cobain was dead, everybody was in love with the Gallagher brothers and everything had changed. Canterbury was pretty much the only place that would have me.

I used to get my hair cut (asymmetrically – someone had to keep the 80s alive) at a Toni & Guy’s near the Cathedral.  For some reason I can still remember every detail of that salon.  Clearly I fussed with my hair then even more then than I do now.  On this particular wet afternoon I felt like living hell.  My skin was flaking off, my hair was practically coming out in handfuls and I was back on the prescription painkillers.

Not. Fun.

I can remember it taking every ounce of effort to get to the hairdressers, but I’m a great believer in appearances being of tantamount importance.  Start to let your roots grow through and you may as well take to your bed forever!

After all I only had to sit there when I got there.

But it was a turning point.  A sudden realisation that this thing hadn’t gone away. Probably wasn’t going to.  And what was I going to do about it?

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Australia, land of my heart, beckoned me back that summer and after a few weeks of walking barefoot on beaches in Queensland I started my second year at university with a lighter heart (and a better haircut). I was so much better I relieved the boredom of university (turned out I hated it even when I wasn’t ill) by waiting tables again.

Don’t get me wrong I didn’t become the party queen overnight – everyone who knew me at university knew I was the one who slept a lot and got tonsillitis all the time (Bex, if you’re reading this I’m sorry for all the shifts you had to cover for me) but I did have more of a semblance of a life if I gave myself enough time to rest and do yoga (more on that later).  And despite having tonsillitis again during my finals, in the July of 1997 I became the proud owner of a degree in Classics from the University of Kent.

I didn’t really know what to do next.  I’d half-heartedly applied for Graduate Training Programmes but my unwillingness and sureness that I didn’t really have the health for the hours involved must have shone through in the applications and I didn’t get a single interview.  So I carried on waiting tables until they gave me “management responsibilities” which basically equated to more hours for less money.

And so it was that I was Duty Manager the day that 80 Australian Bishops and their wives came for dinner (it’s Canterbury, the seat of the Church of England, it’s full of bishops). It was a logistical nightmare.  For starters they wanted to sit in the garden, so I spent weeks praying that it didn’t rain because the thought of trying to move 160 people inside a restaurant that would be full of other people didn’t bear thinking about. The gods were clearly on my side (or there is in fact only one God and He was on the bishops’ side) because it stayed dry and against all the odds I pulled it off with only two mishaps neither of which were my fault but let’s just say I will never be the Bishop of Sydney’s favourite person.

I can remember how absolutely fucking knackered I was when it was all over.  But I was so proud of myself.  At that point in my life I considered the Day of the Bishops to be my greatest achievement.  Bigger than the degree, much bigger.  But it was also a tipping point. I rosta-ed myself four days off to recover but even that wasn’t really enough.  I had to admit to myself that much as I loved waiting tables (and I really did, as much or if not more than what I do now), it was starting to play merry hell with my health. I had to think of something more gentle on my body, a job with a bit more routine, shorter working hours, holiday pay….

And so it was with a quick detour via Barcelona for some much needed Vitamin D I ended up at typing school and, at the age of 24, learning to turn on a computer for the very first time.

On a side note, typing school is the reason I always put two spaces after a full stop and why my blog posts always look so weird on Google Reader.

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What’s ME20 all about?  Click here.

We’re cycling 20km to raise awareness of M.E. – click here for more information!

Here is a life lesson.

Don’t ignore glandular fever.  Better still find a decent doctor who will diagnose it when you have it and not tell you much later on that you had it months ago. Is it any wonder I’m dubious about western medicine?

The years between 16 and 18 can be tough for many, many reasons.  In a lot of ways I was lucky.  I was at an artsy, liberal sixth form college, had a bunch of great friends and for a freaky weirdo in a leather jacket was relatively popular (the key thing about artsy, liberal colleges is that everyone is a freaky weirdo….) but it was still tough.   Three A levels in English, Classics and Biology, Dance Foundation (kind of three-quarters of an A Level), a part-time job and a semblance of a social life filled up most of the hours that I didn’t spend asleep.

And I slept a lot.

It started the summer I turned 17.  I went on a college Classics trip to Greece. I spent the first three days of the trip asleep. I have no recollection of visiting the Corinth Canal.  I had to make a special trip to the Acropolis because I slept through the first one.  This wasn’t normal teenage sleeping, this was borderline narcolepsy.

But as I mentioned, I was busy.  I didn’t have time to wonder why I was so cripplingly tired, or why my throat was always sore and my glands were always swollen and tender.  I had dance shows to choreograph, rehearsals to sleep through attend, endless pieces of homework and coursework to hand in.

By the Christmas of 1991 I was beginning to feel a bit broken.  Everything ached all the time.  They gave me prescription painkillers and I just got on with it.  By the time I sat my A Level exams in the summer of 1992 I’d had to stop dancing and I’d pretty much given up any hope of going to university that year.  There was talk of me having had glandular fever the year before, but nobody bothered to tell me at the time.  M.E. had been mentioned – burned out before I’d even begun.

I can barely remember my exams.  How I passed them is a mystery to this day.

As soon as my A Levels were over my parents took me to Portugal for a week or two in the sun. Looking at the photographs I resembled a cadaver.  A ten day old cadaver.  Attractive.  Then I got tonsilitus.  Again. By the time I got home from my recuperative holiday in the sun I was sick as a dog. The doctor had to be summoned from Stansted Airport. I am the only person in the history of the western world who didn’t drink at her 18th birthday party because she was on such high doses of antibiotic.

And then my friend died in a car accident.

I could have given up then and taken to my bed.  I knew there wasn’t a hope of university that year.

But I’m not one to give up.  As you may have noticed.

So in a rather mad move I decided that I was going to take my sick body 12000 miles round the world and live with my aunt in Tasmania for a while.

Turned out to be the best thing I ever did.

I got me some space.  Space away from all the things that had gone wrong, space away from what I “should” have been doing if this horrible thing they still liked to call “Yuppie Flu” hadn’t hit me.  I walked barefoot on the sand (walking barefoot apparently is the cure to all ills, sadly you don’t get to do it much in the UK), I got some sunshine, I missed an entire British winter, I swam in my aunt’s heated pool every day.  I started to put on weight and my skin turned from that shade of white that is so white it looks blue to a more normal sort of white (to say I tanned would be a huge overstatement). I made new friends and went to parties and saw (terrible) bands (good bands never went to Australia in the early 90s – it was like grunge never happened).

By the time I came home I looked and felt better.  Ever the optimist I foolishly thought I’d beaten this thing.

Still if you can beat it once you can beat it a thousand times right…..(TBC)

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What’s ME20 all about?  Click here.

We’re cycling 20km to raise awareness of M.E. – click here for more information!

If you follow me on The Book of Faces, you will already know that May marks the 20th anniversary of my initial diagnosis of having M.E. I was 17 and just about to take A Level and Dance exams. The timing couldn’t have sucked more quite frankly! If you’d like to read more about my journey with this chronic condition then go here.

Whilst there have been things I have had to give up and dreams that have had to remain dreams because of this horrible bloody illness I want to mark 20 years as a celebration of all the things I have managed to achieve in spite (or because of?) it and to remember how without it my life (and Type A personality) would have led me down a very different road.

So how am I going to mark this momentous event other than by blatantly ripping off paying homage to the PJ20 logo and posting it all over the internet?

Well firstly during May I am going to write a short series of posts about all the amazing twists and turns my life has taken with this condition just to prove that an M.E. diagnosis doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

And secondly, in July, Himself and I will be taking part in Cambridge’s Big Bike Ride to raise money for Action for M.E. It goes without saying we will be doing the 20km ride not the 200km one (I have got M.E. y’know!) and while 12 miles might not seem a lot to some of you mammoth bike riders/walkers/marathoners out there, it is a huge deal to me.  Most things I do feel like they are being done in a sea of jam after all!!!

If you would like to help raise awareness, a penny or two donation would never go amiss and you can visit our JustGiving page and read a bit more about why I’m doing this here.

Sometimes I think I must have lost my bloody mind….