Was there a gap between trigger and onset of your ME/CFS?

This is a fascinating question! Beginning 7/26/90 I had a vicious GI bug that landed me in the hospital for a week. Intense diarrhea for 8 days straight. When that ended, I was really wiped out, as expected, but each day I felt a little stronger. Then I woke up on 8/9/90 feeling like I'd been hit by a truck, and that intense, weighed down, unrelenting exhaustion never went away. I've always wondered why I had the little gap of recovering health, and what trigger shut it down so rapidly and completely.

Edited to add that I was completely well before I got the GI bug, but I had had a terrible flu about 8 months earlier.

 

@Jonathan Edwards - this is from another thread:

This reminds me that before vaccines were available for Covid, there were a lot of reports that people would get an acute Covid infection and then about five or six weeks later would get hit really hard by it, even if it had seemed to have improved in the meantime, and that it would be worse than the original infection.

I had exactly this pattern at the time with what appeared to be a virus, though I wasn't able to get a Covid test. But the experience - the big gap, and then getting whacked harder than when the infection first happened - was quite unlike all my other ME experiences with viruses.

Do you have any thoughts about why this pattern was seen with Covid and not so much with other viruses? I don't know whether this aspect of Covid was ever thought much about. I haven't heard people really talk about this pattern much since the vaccines came out.

 

I think there is a problem with physicians who have an interest in this sort of thing in that what they see in clinics may be very skewed by referral patterns. There is also the problem with Covid that since almost everyone has had it, it is hard to know whether or not it has anything to do with why they are ill, especially if it is a few months later.

 

I had a cold that wouldn't go away and lasted for six months, however, I attribute my ME/CFS to the antibiotics that I was put on. Three days after starting on the antibiotics I woke up that morning feeling the best I had in almost a year, and then that evening I was hit with the worst exhaustion I have ever experienced and still have it almost 34 years later. The exhaustion didn't start gradually - I went from feeling great one second and the next second it was like someone had flipped a switch. So for the poll I answered "less than a week".