Dear Ada ... Let me add my condolences on the loss of your husband.

I have CFS. I was under tremendous emotional stress at the time I came down with it and that leads, of course, to lowered immunity. So considering the onset (which others generally have) does reinforce the infectious theory.

I started out with what seemed like a bad very painful achy flu. The acute illness and all the aches and pains faded --- but I developed the most incredible degree of fatigue.

How bad? To get the mail, I walked out the front door, past my neighbor's apartment, down two steps and there were the mailboxes. By the time I got back, I had to spend hours recovering from the exertion. Some days, I was feeling so well that I would go out my back door, step out the patio gate to my car at the curb, drive 4 blocks to the grocery store, park next to the door, walk in, straight to the bread racks - first thing you encountered. Pick up a loaf, turn and go thru the speedy check, back to the car at the curb and home. By the time I got home, I could barely get inside and would need at least an entire day of total bed rest to recover. It could be a week or more before I would again experience one of those "gee, I feel so good - I MUST be better days" and then the trip for a loaf of bread and boom.

I had continual low-grade fever for 6-7 months straight. I NEVER had a normal temp, no matter when I took it. After that, the fevers would be recurrent, but over the next year, would occur at slightly longer and longer intervals. As the years passed, I would have relapses whenever I experienced a severe emotional blow of rejection.

Outside of the ludricrous degree of fatigue and the near relentless fevers, the most telling symptom was the brain memory drain. Now this is NOT the brain fog of PTSD. This is different. I WAS able to read and did spend that entire first six months reading book after book. But by the end of the year, I would sometimes discover myself near the end of a book when I would suddenly reach a page where SOMETHING would trigger a glimmer (a very tiny vague glimmer) of a sense that I had already READ this book a couple/few months earlier. A bit more thought, and I would be able to confirm that I had --- but I would still not be able to remember how it ended.

Prior to the CFS, it would never take me reading more than a few sentences on the first page to tell me, "I've read this before"... so this was totally bizarre.

Years later, I had my fouth (at least) and most serious bout of PTSD, and experienced something different - Brain FOG, rather than brain drain. I experienced a great sense of fear of losing my cognitive ability - my ability to absorb or think about deep or profound or technically challenging material. I even had difficulty attending to the task enough to even READ -- the challenge was simply too much, overwhelming, even when it was the most mundane and ordinary content. It took me over a year to start feeling that I had a good deal of my intellectual functioning back -- but the rest was slow to regain.

So with CFS, it was only the beginning acute flu-like onset where I had the achy deep pains...

Hope this helps.
Teri