On the move again ..
It was only a matter of a few years before ME changed former tennis coach Ghislaine Brien's life for good, leaving her either bed-bound or reliant on a wheelchair. But years later she is getting to grips with her illness. It started around 10 years ago when she was working as a coach in Sunderland and noticed a painful cramp in her leg. Eventually she went to Sunderland Royal Hospital and ended up staying for a week.
Evening Chronicle 2006
Around this time doctors told her she had ME and her condition started to deteriorate. She was unable to go out and spent most of her free time sleeping. When her legs became increasingly weaker, she found herself bed-bound for two months and using a wheelchair. "At the beginning of this year my mum's friend told me about Wendy," she explained. "I've always believed if you're poorly you go to hospital and they fix you, so it took me a while to come around to this. "I decided to see a therapist and the first time it was very strange. They talked about my feelings when I first became ill. "It emerged that my brother and his girlfriend had lost their baby at around that time and when my mum found out she was very upset and became quite ill. I had been blocking up my emotions about this.
There were some lumps in my leg but they went away so they discharged me," explained Ghislaine, 34, who lives in Elstob Farm, Sunderland, with her parents Karen, 59, and John, 58, and brother Kieran, 29. "But I couldn't walk properly and it was so painful. The doctors just couldn't tell me what it was. The lumps came back and they did biopsies and other tests but all were negative. I certainly couldn't go back to my job teaching tennis." Around a year later Ghislaine started getting pains behind her left eye and grew increasingly intolerant to bright lights, leading to another spell in hospital as doctors feared she could have a tumour. More tests gave her the all-clear and she was again left baffled by her illness. "By that point I was getting tired but I just put it down to the painkillers," said Ghislaine. "Six years ago I had been away on a girls' weekend. When I got home I felt this terrible stabbing pain in my chest.
"I went into hospital again and they told me I had an irregular heart beat caused by a chest infection. That was when I started to get tired." From then on everything was a struggle. She could barely hold a conversation without getting tired or go up and down the stairs.
"Six months after that I lost my grandmother and again kept my emotions to myself." Much of Ghislaine's therapy is about talking through how to communicate with her family and deal with her emotions, all linked to the start of her illness. "As part of the therapy I've been given some simple steps to work through such as letting people know how I feel," said Ghislaine. "Now things are very different. I'm working at a call centre two hours a day and hope to start driving again. "I'm still seeing doctors and physiotherapists but at one point I never even thought I would be this well."
