From Powerlifter to Housebound: Client ME/CFS Recovery Story
A note before you read: this is one person's recovery story. ME/CFS is a complex illness and recovery looks different for everyone. I share this not as a blueprint, but as a source of hope.
Who I Was Before
Before April 2022, I averaged 11,000 steps a day and strength trained four to five days a week. I had a background in competitive powerlifting, and before that, marathons and half Ironmans. I worked full time in the office of the CEO of a health authority. I could count on my body, and movement and activity were my life.
Getting Sick
In April 2022, I got COVID. What followed changed everything. I lost my voice entirely for six months. It took eighteen months to get it back fully. I developed ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, severe POTS, and MCAS.
For roughly two years, I was bed and then housebound. Showering and leaving the house happened maybe once a week. I carried a small fold-up stool everywhere I went because I kept getting dizzy and falling. In stores, I would try to push through and I would end up on the floor. Each attempt at activity risked weeks or months of post-exertional malaise in bed.
The symptom list was relentless: nausea, dizziness, severe headaches and migraines, flu-like illness, and a fatigue that made talking feel like a marathon. Driving was nearly impossible. Word-finding was difficult. Executive functioning was low. I was profoundly isolated because I simply did not have the capacity to connect with other people.
For eighteen months, my world was the one-block radius around my apartment building, around which I walked. I had to stop every step or two because my heart rate would spike and my symptoms would flare.
The Turning Points
We moved to a small town close to the beach and the forest. Being able to drive myself to the beach most days, to be near water and trees after eighteen months in a city block, was something I believe was genuinely healing for my nervous system.
My first walks along the road beside the beach were under ten minutes. I did them most days anyway.
We adopted a cat who became a daily dopamine booster, instituting purr-therapy and demonstrating expert-level resting.
I had to learn things that felt foreign to someone who had always pushed hard to achieve my goals: how to rest, how to listen to my body rather than override it, how to be comfortable with stillness, quiet, and just being, rather than doing. I had to get much better at boundaries - acknowledging, communicating, and honouring them. I learned to pace using a spotlight system, what I later learned to call symptom-titrated activity. The goal was to find the edge of my capacity and stay just under it, not to push through it. It was not a linear journey.
What Helped
Recovery was not one thing. It was a slow accumulation of many things:
1. Supportive family: I had a very supportive spouse and family, that accepted where I was, and showed up for me anyways. This was especially critical in the days and years I could not take care of myself. They witnessed what was, no matter how ugly, so I was never totally alone.
2. Medications: Mestinon for POTS, and low-dose naltrexone plus aripiprazole for energy and cognitive function. ADHD medication, including Vyvanse, made an enormous difference to my cognitive functioning.
3. Pacing and graded activity: I worked with physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and eventually a personal trainer. I stopped and started many, many times, particularly with strength training, which for the longest time, consistently worsened my symptoms. Consistency mattered more than intensity.
4. Education: I completed courses through Dr. Ric Arseneau's ME/CFS education series, including programs on brain health and nervous system regulation. Understanding what was happening in my body changed how I related to it.
5. Neuroplasticity work: When I had enough capacity, I completed the Primal Trust program. I also committed to the physiological sigh every day: five minutes before getting out of bed, five minutes before sleeping. I did this for eighteen months without skipping.
6. Cognitive rebuilding: I took online continuing education courses and slowly, over about nine months, increased my cognitive activity time until a return to part-time work became possible.
7. Identity shift and Joy as medicine: I had to learn that my whole being did not exist only to achieve. And that fixing my health could not be my sole purpose in life. Finding joy in something each day was not optional. It was part of the work.
Where I Am Now
I estimate I have recovered approximately 80 to 85 percent of my pre-illness baseline. In the summer of 2025, I officially returned to work as a workers' advocate, representing ill and injured unionized workers in their WCB claims. I work close to full time, from home.
I have been back at the gym for a year now. I started at one session per week with an amazing personal trainer, barely able to do five push-ups from my knees. I now do multiple sets of twelve from my toes and squat with more than body weight on the bar. I lift weights and do strength and conditioning classes three times a week, and I run three times a week with long runs up to 75 minutes.
I can socialize again. I can connect with people again. I continue working to expand my capacity in a controlled, thoughtful way, while also taking great joy in the life I get to have now.
If you are in the thick of it right now, I want you to know: the fold-up stool, the one-block walks, the fog and the isolation and the grief of losing who you were -- I know those. And I also know that slow, imperfect, non-linear recovery is real.
