Today, in addition to being Mother's Day, is World ME Day, aka ME/CFS Awareness Day. I celebrated, if you can call it that, by donating to the Open Medicine Foundation. The OMF funds research on ME/CFS, long covid, and other diseases that can cause pain, crushing exhaustion, and the general derailment of your life.
At the end of the online donation form is an optional Additional Information field. "To help OMF communicate effectively with you," it says, "please identify your connection. Options include things like Patient, Family Member, and Caregiver. For the first time, I checked Healthy Ally instead of Caregiver. Felt weird. I honestly hated being a caregiver (although that's not the reason the person I used to care for doesn't live with me anymore), and I'm happy to have gotten my life back. But it sucks that people stuck with this disease can't also just opt out.
So, my contribution these days has been to kick a little money in the direction of the OMF. And to ask other people to do the same.
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