Me too - you might 'get over' another illness on top e.g. EBV, flu, tonsilitis on top of it or finally shake off a crash/relapse (the ones that come 6mnths after you've done stuff that in retrospect you kick yourself for as it seems obvious, but at the time you were thinking 'you were managing it vs ME/CFS limits' which is why I have
such an issue with the treatment - even pacing - and descriptions by most who think they know about it, because you can 'managing to work at your limits' and think you've cracked functionality even thought it is impossibly hard to do
but that's how you give yourself the worst downward spirals and their advice would unfortunately put many in that situaiton re: workplaces or partners) like a year or more on. But that wouldn't be back to where you were before - just you would find it difficult to remember where you were before anyway by that point.
I don't know how we find a way of helping people - as it only comes after maybe a decade, maybe 2 (depending on yourself and circumstance) of enough experience and experiences - to measure, even in themselves, the disease itself. Because at the moment it is like you'd need to measure acceleration/deceleration (someone used term 'ability to get fit
ter' which is close to one part of it) whereas currently everyone is reaching for at best measuring speed but mostly either just 'time' or 'distance' - it's something about the trajectory 6mnths, 12months, 18months and 24months on from doing certain things (ie recovery times in themselves) that would actually tell you if your body is better
than it was.
Goodness knows what 'better' technically accurately is if you aren't using matched-pairs with e.g. people of equivalent abilities at school for cognitive and physical abilities? It would surely take a while to feel like your 'unimpeded life' was here to stay and not going to result in longer-term payback or you just being excited about feeling less than awful but still can't do x like you used to without spending the rest of the week in bed.
The quote by
@Mij is part-way there but perhaps missing the possibility that you need to look at the longer/medium-term effects of doing these things cumulatively and whether 'getting away with something at the time as a one-off' is quite different to 'no longer having to think about it' like normal people etc. because e.g. if you did train slowly for a half-marathon or whatnot -however carefully and cleverly you thought you did it at the time - it wouldn't lead to your health being worse in 2yrs time.
