From Health to Chronic Illness: When My Life Looked “Normal”
Before chronic illness reshaped my life, I was a high-functioning, successful healthcare professional.
At 31, I worked as a Speech and Language Therapist in the NHS, specialising in complex neurological and critical care rehabilitation. I was deeply committed to my patients, often working long hours in an overstretched healthcare system where “accidental overtime” is normalised. My identity was rooted in being capable, dependable, and helpful.
Outside of work, life was full. A long-term relationship, a big close-knit family, a busy social calendar booked months in advance. Weddings, festivals, birthdays, travel and every available moment filled. I was the organiser, the supporter, the one people turned to in a crisis.
Like many people living with chronic stress, I didn’t see this pace as a problem. Stress felt normal. Exhaustion felt earned. Rest felt uncomfortable.
As I worked in medicine, my understanding of health was largely biomedical. I trusted conventional medicine deeply and believed holistic or mind-body approaches weren’t real, maybe useful for others, but not relevant to me. The mind-body connection felt vague, unscientific, even “pseudoscientific”.
I didn’t yet understand how chronic stress, nervous system overload, and repeated illness were quietly accumulating beneath the surface.
The Onset of Chronic Symptoms, Long COVID and ME/CFS
In March 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, I contracted COVID-19 at work. At that time, personal protective equipment was limited, and testing was unavailable to most frontline staff.
I recovered enough to return to work, or so it seemed.
Over the next three years, I experienced repeated infections and a gradual but noticeable decline in my health. Fatigue became a normal part of life and I began falling asleep on the floor after work. Brain fog appeared and my memory problems became a running joke. Digestive symptoms that had been around for 15 years intensified. Hormonal disruption and migraines became frequent and more severe. Individually, each symptom could be explained away. Together, they told a different story.
Like many people with early-stage or mild chronic illness, I kept going.
Culturally, we are taught to “push through”, to normalise stress, and to accept low-level chronic symptoms as part of adult life. So that’s exactly what I did, until my body could no longer compensate.
When My Body Could No Longer Compensate
In July 2023, I woke up with what I thought was a migraine.
Within days, I was profoundly unwell. Severe dizziness, nausea, sensory hypersensitivity, neurological symptoms, autonomic dysfunction, and crushing fatigue made even basic tasks impossible. I took sick leave, assuming I would return within days.
Instead, I became bedbound.
Over the following months, I developed a wide range of symptoms, including extreme fatigue, muscle and joint pain, autonomic instability, digestive shutdown, allergic-type reactions, hormonal dysregulation, heart rate irregularities, post-exertional malaise, and cognitive impairment.
Eventually, I was diagnosed with conditions including Long COVID, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), POTS, orthostatic hypotension, IBS, and mast-cell-type symptoms.
Guidance was difficult to come by and focused on long-term symptom management rather than recovery. I was advised that full recovery was near impossible and that I would need to adapt to a permanently reduced level of functioning.
For someone trained in medicine, this was devastating. I believed it.
Searching for Answers Beyond Symptom Management
As many people with chronic illness do, I searched relentlessly for answers.
I tried supplements, medications, functional medicine, acupuncture, restrictive diets, pacing strategies, meditation, and physiotherapy. Some approaches helped and others didn’t. I moved from completely bedbound to being able to manage short periods of activity at home, but I always plateaued.
I continued my exhausting search for hope and began to notice a pattern.
People who experienced partial improvement often focused solely on symptom management.
People who experienced full recovery consistently addressed the brain and nervous system.
Again and again, full recovery stories referenced brain retraining, nervous system regulation, somatic therapy, and trauma-informed approaches grounded in neuroplasticity.
At first, I resisted this idea.
It felt like saying my symptoms weren’t real, that it was “all in my head”, but my purple toes, rashy face and severe bloating were very visible. My assumption completely misunderstood what mind-body medicine actually is.
