Introduction
Dear reader,
I want to start this ebook with telling you my own story.
My name is Eva van Dal and I’m a survivor of Q fever. I was born in 1994 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. My Q fever journey starts around April/May 2011, when I was 17 years old. I had a few vague symptoms such as headaches, but overall tiredness. At that time I was thinking about glandular fever so I went to see my doctor.
After explaining my story he told me he would take some blood samples to see if glandular fever could be causing it. After a few weeks I went back to see him and he told me the test came back negative, and that was it. I was surprised with the outcome, but my symptoms were bearable and not extremely severe. It was causing me inconveniency since I had a part-time job that wasn’t going well at all since it made me really tired.
But, I left it that way because I trusted my doctor. Then after this, I was feeling better for a while but felt tired again after a few months.
Then in September 2012 I started to study and I the tiredness got worse. I was ridiculously tired with big headaches, pain in my muscles and joints and mood swings and this time it wasn’t bearable anymore.
Then again after a few weeks, I went back to my doctor – this time it was another doctor – and explained my situation again. Obviously she asked me questions about my life, if I felt depressed etc., since this was the second time I came back with complaints of tiredness. However, she said she was going to test me again and this time for everything that could be causing tiredness, including Q fever.
After a few weeks I received a call from the hospital where they took my blood and the women told me there was nothing wrong with me. I can tell you I was absolutely clueless at that moment and at the point of going crazy since I was extremely tired. So tired I could barely do anything. I needed to take this in for a few days and was thinking about what I was going to do. It almost felt like it was in my head and I was making problems up that weren’t actually there, which is extremely terrifying.
But thank God, after a few days my own doctor called me and said that there was something wrong with me. She said that they found antibodies in my blood for Q fever phase II and that they found the Epstein-Barr virus in my blood; which causes glandular fever. Which means that at that point, I was having glandular fever and probably also the post-Q fever fatigue syndrome. The second one was hard to diagnose since there is no diagnostic test for it but later on it became more and more clear to me that it must have been that too.
Right after my diagnosis my doctor told me there was nothing I could do about these things and that I just needed to wait until the tiredness and the headaches, joints and muscle pains and mood swings would go away.
Again I trusted my doctor and listened to her, there was nothing I could do about it so I waited. But while waiting my tiredness didn’t get any better and it was actually really bad, I was waiting and waiting and nothing changed. I started my study in September 2012, and right from the beginning I was struggling with this extreme tiredness. What caused me to not be able to do anything except Studying for almost 3 years. I couldn’t go out anymore. I needed to sleep every day at 8 o’ clock in the evening, most of the times even earlier. I went to bed tired and woke up tired. I barely saw my friends and family and every time I did go out I was worrying about how the evening would go because I would be tired halfway through or I would be worrying about the next day because if I wouldn’t be tired that evening, I would be tired the next day. It was a constant battle between living
my life and listening to my body which didn’t want to do what I wanted to, simply doing what every 18-year old girl wants to do.
Then I was also struggling with a lot of misunderstanding from people around me. Obviously tiredness and all the other symptoms are very vague, and I noticed people judge very quickly. I think that Doctor Anthony Komaroff described this very well. He talked to Medscape Medical News about fatigue syndromes:
“I think the most important thing for physicians to know is that while we don’t have a diagnostic test or a proven treatment, there is now abundant evidence that in these patients there is an underlying biological process. Their symptoms are linked to problems of their biology and not imagined.” – Dr. Anthony Komaroff.
This is an aspect of it that was also just really hard and everyone who’s suffering from Q fever can confirm this. The disease is so unknown and most people just don’t care.
In October 2013, I went on a holiday to Morocco, which felt like freedom! For that whole week I barely had any complaints and I felt so much better than I did back home. Personally, I think this has to do with the fact that Morocco has a totally different ambiance. There’s less working pressure and obviously the warmth also plays a part in this. Next to that I just loved the place, the culture and the people. It became my passion. All I wanted to do was go back there. This in the end played a huge part in my recovery.
Right after being home from my holiday and after 1.5 years of being so tired that I was at the point of depression, I found out that there were ways to get over this horrible syndrome and I had motivation: going back to Morocco.
My recovery track started when I went to a meeting about people suffering from Q fever just about a week after I was back home. Once I was there I met a lot of other people suffering from the exact same thing as me. It was amazing to talk to people who had the same experiences at me but, at the same time it was also very discouraging and a little bit depressing. I found out that there were people who had been suffering from Q fever for years and years. And there I was: having it for 2 years and I was already almost at the point of going crazy. How was I supposed to deal with this for another 2 years at the least?
Being there I also found out that there are ways of treating this syndrome and that there was even a hospital specialized in Q fever in Holland. Then after being home again after the meeting and taking all this information in I realized something had to be done. I didn’t want to live with this for much longer.
I started homeopathic treatment and I can tell you that this was the first big step in my recovery. During this journey I decided I wanted to go to Morocco for a long time to follow my passion. This way I wanted to break free from the cycle I was in. I was using the homeopathic treatment for about 7 months when I went to Morocco. I stayed there for approximately 9 months and I can thankfully say that this – together with the homeopathic medicine – was the thing that finally made me break free from Q fever. After almost 3 years of suffering, at age 20, I’m finally done with it!
This is my personal story, but I’m sure you have your own story and I hope that this ebook will help you with that. I combined a lot of research with my own experiences. The ebook is therefore diverse with a lot of different information. I can recommend that you read the chapters that are the most valuable to you. It’s all about what you are looking for. I tried to write the chapters in a way which enables you to read all of them separately. This means that there might be a lot of recurrence of information, I did this to make it easier for you to read it and to make it possible to not read everything if you don’t want to. I would like to point out that I do think that all the chapters within this book are important to read or to at least go through because it will give you a complete image about Q fever. As someone who has been through it, I think that this complete image is very useful –
you need to know what you are up against with this disease.
I never felt like the right information was provided to me. It therefore took me a long time to figure most things in this book out which caused my journey to be a very long one. I have been through it and I know more than anyone how Q fever influences your life. That’s why I hope that my ebook will be able to make your journey a lot shorter. I can’t get back the years I’ve lost due to dealing with this disease but I can help you to survive Q fever.
If you have any questions or have any feedback for me, feel free to contact me on Facebook (Q Fever Away) or email (eva@qfeveraway.com).
Also make sure to keep up to date with my website (www.qfeveraway.com), since I’ll be posting a lot of important (new) information about Q fever on there.
I hope you enjoy reading my ebook and I wish you the best of luck with your battle to survive Q fever.
Teys Australia 