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Short story- I'm giving up the booze - yikes - for 33 days and will be doing 5km per day (a whole load of exercise😳!) as a challenge to raise money for Invest in ME for biomedical research. Init. :-)
Longer story-21 years ago my wonderful sister got the dreadful illness, M.E.
M.E. Is a shockingly debilitating illness that can change and affect the entire way the body and brain function.
The symptoms of M.E. are many and wide ranging:
•Extreme fatigue, when even lifting a spoon is an effort.
•Extreme pain when the skin is touched.
•Crazy lack of temperature control. Ha ha, this summer my sister and I went to Nice and whilst I was sat in my swim stuff sunning myself she was fully dressed and wrapped in two towels. She still had goose bumps despite it being 32c!
• every possible digestive problem you can think of!
• 'brain fog', when the simple act of reading a sentence becomes an impossible task.
A simple way to understand a small amount of what it feels like...
If a healthy person goes for a walk they inevitably feel refreshed and envigarated by the release of toxins.
In an M.E. patient these same toxins act as a poison that the body can't get rid of. It then causes huge stress on the entire nervous system and results in sickness, fatigue etc.
Throughout my sister's illness as a family we have tried anything and everything available to help get rid of this dreadful disease. Sadly nothing has fixed it.
Invest in M.E. is run entirely by volunteers and offers support to M.E. patients but also raises money to fund biomedical research to understand M.E. and to find a cure.
There has been a groundbreaking discovery that the drug Rituximab - used to treat some cancers - can treat M.E. It is very very exciting! Invest in ME is raising the money to run the trial of the drug.
In order to run the trial in the UK £520,000 needs to be raised. So far £497,000 has been raised, so the trial is in sight!
To raise money for 'Invest in M.E.' to go directly to the Rituximab clinical trial I am Giving up booze from 4th October- 5th November and will be exercising 165km over the course of the 33 days, 5 km per day with maybe a lengthy walk in there too. :-) 🏃🏻🏃
We wanna raise money to help find a treatment for this dreadful illness but also to raise awareness of the illness.
Please support/encourage me through this challenge. If you're able to donate-awesome, if not thanks for reading this far. There's a link below for more words about the cause.
Thank you so much.
Marianne xx
www.ukrituximabtrial.org
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