Description

This video by TV360 shows you how Ann copes with the Epstein-Barr disease and how it affects her daily life part 2/2.

Transcript

How to Cope with Epstein-Barr Disease Part 2/2 In ends circumstance her positions, I think, her illness maybe cause by the Epstein-Barr virus. The Epstein-Barr virus is very well known as the cause of common mononucleosis. It’s a great frustration this illness to the patient and to the physicians because to date, its still an illness without a very well establish cause. The illness strikes young adults often young women, young adults middle age adults. These are otherwise very effective people. They’re busy, there are professionally accomplished, they maybe parents. They are hard at work and over relatively short period of time. They discover that their fatigue and indeed that’s the most prominent symptom. They want to take a nap in the afternoon. They sleep longer at night. They feel washed out. They don’t have the usual kind of energy for their usual activities and has that sort of fatigue. She also has something that’s reasonably common namely that she feels a light headed. This is different than the fatigue. All of a sudden, she feels woozy and this could be demonstrated in a physician’s office that when people who have this syndrome sit up suddenly. They have a grope in their blood pressure. You can see that along with fatigue is very troubling. Some people also have weight loss, a kind of fading off of their appetite and in addition on occasion, people have fever but its usually not very high and its not sustain, so now and then. Since, we don’t know the cause, I'm afraid we don’t have specific treatment. It’s not like giving insulin for diabetes or an antibiotic for a conventional bacterial infection. We don’t have a magic bullet. Once the diagnosis has been established, we educate the patient. We tell them they have a real illness and then we can give them a prognosis. And the prognosis, here we come to the good news is actually rather good if you take a long range view. And went into a program of slowly increasing her physical activity, pushing herself on a regular basis out to the limits of when she would become fatigue and then perhaps taking a step further. And that’s a good thing to do. Don’t give in to the fatigue. Don’t become depress. Fix it in your mind and then work on overcoming it in a steady way, I say steady. The time frame we’re talking about is measured in months and even perhaps a year or two. But if we go back and look at these patients, a year or two years after the on set of their illness over 90% are at or almost at where they were before the illness took place.