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Beth Dobbin knows just talking about it is going to make things worse.
Just five years after running the 200 meters at the Tokyo Olympics for Great Britain, the 32-year-old is confined to bed for 22 hours a day as she battles myalgic encephalomyelitis, a fatigue-inducing illness.
“I’ve done little things like attend a blood test at the doctors and been in bed for months after. So doing this interview, chatting away for 30 minutes, that could have an impact on me in 2027,” she told BBC Sport. “But I felt like it was really important to do that to get the message out.”
Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), otherwise knows a chronic fatigue syndrome, is an incurable, long-lasting illness that makes any form of physical and mental exertion difficult, per the CDC.
For Dobbin, it makes her feel like her body “is shutting down; it feels like you are a few days from death”.
Something as simple as a conversation can cause her to “crash” for anywhere from 24 hours to months on end. The Scotland native said she only gets out of bed to eat or use the bathroom.
Other common symptoms include a frequent sore throat, digestive issues, allergies, sensitivities, muscle and joint pain, nausea and headaches.
“It’s life-decimating like I can’t even put into words,” she said to BBC Sport. “I feel like I’ve lost everything. I have still got my family, but I’ve lost my independence, my health, the ability to work, the ability to exercise.”
Dobbin, a 200-meter specialist, battled Covid and glandular infections back-to-back in 2021-22, owing lingering exhaustion to a condensed season.
She soon experienced restlessness and dizzy spells, and lost all feeling in her legs in the starting blocks of a race, resulting in a false start.
“I think I saw four or five different specialists because the symptoms that I was having, they were across multiple [body] systems,” she said. “All the specialists said ‘this is ME’ and we don’t want it to be that because there’s nothing out there for it.”
She is emboldened with hope after the Covid pandemic and the emergence of long Covid, which shares symptoms with ME and has brought awareness the illness she shares with a known 400,000 people in the United Kingdom and another 3.3 million in the US, though those numbers are believed to be low estimates.
“I said I wanted to speak about it. It’s not necessarily that I want to discuss it [but] it’s raising that awareness. And unfortunately, athletes are believed a lot more than the average person,” she said. “A lot of people that have this illness that I’ve spoken to have said to me ‘I don’t get believed, people think I’m lazy.’ I’ve never experienced one person that doesn’t believe me and that’s because, why would an athlete just suddenly stop after 20 years?
“I’ve got a slight platform. If this happened to most people they wouldn’t be able to speak about it, so I do feel like I’ve got a bit of a duty to do that.”