|
|
||
After dealing with her son's worsening condition for six years, Stafford County woman becomes an advocate for those with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Date published: 7/5/2005
By CATHY DYSON Doctors told her she was overreacting, that there was nothing physically wrong with her child. Teachers called her a "bulldog" and warned others about the way she fought the system for special services as her son got sicker. Her husband couldn't deal with the stress or the specialists, or maybe it was the many meetings with school officials. He left for work one morning and never came home. In the past six years, Shanon McQuown often felt as if she was the only one who believed her son's body was being ravaged by an illness no one could name. "There was nobody else," she said. "I was his mother. I was his doctor. I was his advocate. I was his friend. I was his warden." McQuown also has become his spokesperson and a voice for others suffering from the disease that changed her only child. Anthony, now 18, has chronic fatigue syndrome. He was diagnosed in 2001, after more than a dozen specialists checked him out for everything from cancer to digestive disorders. Things were so bad in 1999 that Anthony was hospitalized. He couldn't have normal bowel movements and was in such pain he either crawled around or was confined to the bed. Treatments to break up the blockages included vile medicine and nose-to-stomach tubes and were almost as painful as the cause, McQuown recalled. Anthony never regained his strength after that. He continued to visit doctors, but his mother said no one could explain the extreme fatigue and weakness. Several said the problems were in his head. McQuown laughs about it now, but it wasn't funny then, when doctors suggested depression as the cause. Her family doctor didn't believe a child Anthony's age--much less a male--could have CFS. When the disease made headlines in the 1980s, it was called the "yuppie flu" because it affected well-to-do women in their 30s and 40s. Today, as many as half a million people of all ages, races and social backgrounds may have a CFS-like condition, according to the National Institutes of Health. Some members of the medical community are still "skeptical of the syndrome," but the number of those diagnosed is likely to rise as "doctors see CFS as a real disorder," an NIH fact sheet stated.
1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
|
|
|||||||||||||
