I cannot die

“I can’t say whether it is a titanic patience or endless desperation. What are they waiting for? Have they given up waiting? Which is the present they are immersed in?”

Italo Calvino, Palomar

For most ME/CFS patients (about two thirds), the disease has an oscillating course, with some periods of improvements followed by worsening of symptoms. Some of them can even experience recoveries, only to find themselves trapped again, weeks or months later (Stoothoff J et al. 2017), (Chu L. et al. 2019). Some anecdotes suggest that there might be a correlation with seasons, with improvements in summer, but there are no systematic surveys on that, to my knowledge.

As for me, in the last 20 years of pitiful combat with this monster, I experienced some substantial short-lived improvements, mainly during the core of summer. At the very beginning of the disease, I also recovered for one whole year. It was the year 2001, I was 21 and that year has been the only period of normality in my whole adult life. I spent these 12 months studying desperately and what I am as a person is mainly due to what I learned back then. I had already been very sick for about two years and when I recovered, it was as if I were born again. It was a second chance and I was determined to do all right from day one. I decided what was really important to me and I devoted myself to my goal: learning quantitative methods to use in engineering and – one day – in biology.

When darkness caught me again, I was, among other things, reviewing all the main theorems of calculus (particularly those about differential equations) with my new skills and I remember thinking that I was becoming good at developing my own proofs. I had become good at thinking and so, I reasoned, I could finally start my life! But in a few weeks, my mind faded away, and there was nothing I could do to keep a grip to all my beloved notes and books. They became mute and closed as monolithic gravestones. I remember clearly that along with this severe and abrupt cognitive decline, I developed also orthostatic intolerance, even though I hadn’t a name for it back then. But I couldn’t keep sitting, and I didn’t know why. I was forced to lay as if the gravitational acceleration had suddenly increased. My brain had changed to a lifeless stone, and so did my body.

From that very moment, my only thought has been how could I go back to my books and my calculations. And this still is my first thought, when I wake up in the morning. After almost 20 years.

I have experienced some short improvements in these years, during which I had to learn again how to study, how to do calculations, how to code. I never went back to what I was, though. And my brain is ageing, of course, as anyone else’s brain does. But in these short periods of miraculous come back I experience a rare sense of joy (along with anger and fear). Something that you can experience only if you have been facing death.

I was born and I died dozens of times in the last 20 years, and this gives me the perception that, in fact, I cannot die: I feel as if I were immortal and I had lived for a thousand years while at the same time still being in my twenties, since I have no experience of life.

In fact, I lived only when I crossed these short bridges from one abyss to the following one.