Mail & Guardian Online, Feb 26 2011:
Kay Gilderdale helped her 31-year-old daughter to kill herself over the course of one long December night, crushing up sleeping pills and antidepressants when the morphine overdose she gave her to inject did not immediately work.
It’s almost incredible to think that a mother and daughter could be driven to such hellish extremes by a disease that is not fatal. Lynn Gilderdale had ME. But Lynn’s extraordinary and distressing story takes few people acquainted with ME (myalgic encephalopathy), also known as CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), by surprise. If nothing else, it illustrates the despair that ME/CFS engenders.
An estimated 250 000 people have the condition in the United Kingdom, of whom 25 000 are children (Lynn became ill at 14). Most struggle to get a diagnosis, many are unhappy with the limited treatments available and all want to know what has caused them to be afflicted with this most miserable of illnesses, which saps their energy, wrecks their lives and leaves some like Lynn bedridden and tube-fed. Read more>>
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