Chronic Fatigue didn’t stop Anna connecting with God  

I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. My husband at the time was saying, ‘This isn’t just a flu that you’ve got. This is something you’ve got to go to the doctors about.’ I just kept thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve just got the flu. I’ll recover’ because flu symptoms are very much like Chronic Fatigue. If I had to describe it to someone it’s like you’ve got the flu, but 24/7 and it doesn’t stop.

My son Stephen was a little baby and praise God, all my kids had a really good middle of the day nap, they had a decent 2-3 hours. I used to thank God for that because I’d be straight down for a nap too. When Stephen was 12 months old, he’d had his beautiful nap, then he’d wake up and have a little bit of a play, and then he’d start calling for mum.

And I literally couldn’t get off the bed. I was literally having to pray myself off the bed. I would grab the Bible even though I couldn’t read it because Chronic Fatigue affects your cognitive function. But the Bible would always be next to my bed, and I would pick it up, open it up anywhere, and just lay it on my chest, and I’d say, ‘God, you’ve got to get me up, I’ve got to get to my son.’ That was an incredibly hard time and it was back when we didn’t have Christian radio where we lived.

God, you’ve got to get me up, I’ve got to get to my son.

So when my husband said ‘This isn’t right’, I started the whole process of getting all the tests. Chronic Fatigue syndrome gets diagnosed by eliminating everything else, so I remember having a test for diabetes where I was in the hospital for five hours and they were taking blood constantly. I was thinking ‘Yes, let it be diabetes’, because I was wanting a name for it. In the end, after three months of all these different tests, they said ‘Well yes, we’ve got a name for it, Chronic Fatigue syndrome. But there’s no cure.’

So that day I felt like it was like a fresh start. It was like, ‘Right, OK, we know that it’s not just me, there’s something behind this’. But then again, there was nothing anyone could do. I started cold water bath therapy, where you sit in an ice bath, I did vitamin B injections, I did every kind of thing you could do, but nothing ever helped.

I had 25 years of it. I lost half my twenties all my thirties and forties.

I basically had 25 years of it. I lost half my twenties all my thirties and forties. I also had to give a lot of ‘mother guilt’ to God and it’s really only been in the last three years that I gave that to Him because I just wasn’t there. Usually, I’d be able to have a few hours up through the day but then by the time the kids got home I was back in bed.