Laura Hillenbrand's Diagnosis Of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

In “A Sudden Illness” by Laura Hillenbrand, she describes the journey of her diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In the beginning, her illness came quite suddenly when she instantly became nauseous, hot, and got the chills. She was checked out by the paramedic but, they dismissed her symptoms as food poisoning and left. However, this was not the only medical professional that dismissed her illness. The paramedics became the first in a long line of people to not believe she was sick. Before dropping out of college, Hillenbrand was unable to eat, her bones and joints ached, and she was having trouble catching her breath. One day she woke up and was unable to move. She then moved back to her mother’s house where her symptoms worsened. She went to her old pediatrician where he diagnosed her with strep throat, prescribed her antibiotics, and referred her to an internist. He was one of the first doctors to not give her the correct diagnosis.

Hillenbrand then went to a psychiatrist who she had seen before to deal with the death of her ex-boyfriend. After seeing him Hillenbrand said, “he wrote a letter to my internist stating that he would stake his reputation on his conclusion that I was mentally healthy but suffering from a serious physical illness” (Hillenbrand 58). When her internist received the letter, he dismissed the psychiatrist’s professional opinion and told her to find another psychiatrist. When demanding she was not happy with her treatment, her doctor said he was, so she asked for her medical records and saw that he had written that she could not handle school and dropped