Catherine Hale

Action for ME strategy launch - Speaker's House, 29th June 2016. Hello, I’m Catherine, I volunteer as a policy research officer for Action for ME. I feel very lucky to be here this evening. Lucky because I’m out with you at such a glittering event, while someone else is putting my children to bed. But I’m lucky in a deeper sense. And this evening, instead of talking to you through powerpoint charts and statistics, as I usually do, I’m going to talk about my personal experience with ME, to explain why. When I became ill with ME I was 18 and training full time to be a professional dancer. The illness began with sudden and strange loss of power, and pain, in certain muscles. The symptoms spread, my condition deteriorated and within a year I was mostly confined to bed, too weak to do anything other than very basic self-care. I wailed and sobbed, in the way teenagers do, over the loss of my dance career, a career I worked so hard for and that gave me such joy and exh