User:Wikiterry
From DoctorMyhill
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Terry Ellison
I am a maths graduate who has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years. I first learned to program at fourteen and I was competent in Fortran, PL/I and S/360 Assembler by the age of eighteen. After graduating from Cambridge and a short spell in the Royal Engineers, I then joined for a leading UK systems house and consultancy initially working in mathematical, defence system modelling and real-time programming (via the signal processing connection). I worked up the consultancy / development hierarchy to become chief engineer and technical manager of various business units. During this time my company was acquired by EDS and for the next 15 years I worked within the EDS organisation moving over into its services arm where the last three posts that I held were divisional CTO jobs. EDS was itself acquired by HP in 2008 and was subsequently renamed HP Enterprise Services.
My life and CFS/ME
I had my first bout of ME in 1988 which hit me hard, but I recovered from this fully over next couple of years. However, it left me with a general susceptibility that could be triggered by immune-system assault, and I had a number of post-viral fatigue type relapses typically after periods of high work stress plus a viral infection (perhaps every 2-3 years and lasting for a few weeks or more).
I had a severe CFS relapse in December 2007. However, once I had been diagnosed as suffering from CFS/ME, my GP remained supportive but also strictly followed the current NICE guidelines. As NICE recommends that there are no cost-effective diagnostic tests or treatment for CFS sufferers. this meant that all attempts at diagnosis and active treatment effectively stopped. I was pretty much bed-bound over the next 18 months with my energy levels typically at around 15-20 on the CFS Ability Scale without treatment.
My local GP offered Prozac to help me manage any psychological symptoms and an appointment to see a psychologist at a regional CFS counselling centre (nearly a one hour drive away). Whilst I was somewhat frustrated with my lack of mobility and inability to concentrate, my response was that I preferred the alternatives of reflection and positive thinking to the use of mind-altering drugs. Secondly, given that I had enough difficulty coping with a 30 minute visit to the GP surgery (it took me about two weeks to recover my already pathetic mobility and clarity of thought from doing this), so a 3 hour round trip to see a psychologist / psychiatric consultant was a total waste of my and the specialists time for what I regarded as fundamentally a disease with biological origins.
I came across Sarah Myhill's work and her website as a CFS sufferer. I found that taking supplements, magnesium and B12 injections as per Dr Myhill's recommendations helped me to improve to ~30 on the ability scale. I later dropped wheat from my diet, even though I didn't have obvious Coeliac symptoms, to find that this triggered another step improvement in my stamina over a few weeks and slow but continuing improvement of the following months. (My GP subsequently ran a test which confirmed this.) This increased energy meant that I could start a sensible pacing help recover muscle mass as by that point I had body-wide muscle wastage, and I've now got to ~50 on the scale. Living life 'to the half' is not full recovery but it's a damn-site better than having to lie flat in bed for 23 hours a day.
I have subsequently tried to reduce / remove my use of the mineral supplements, but on both attempts my energy levels fell over the next few weeks by perhaps 15 points, and this was quickly recovered by restarting supplements. No doubt some of the supplements are a waste of time, but life is too short to work out through trial and error which I need and which I can drop.
I have kept myself mentally engaged during this last two years by contributing to various Open Source communities such as OpenOffice.org where I help to run the OOo User Community website, and the VirtualBox.org User Forum. I am also an occasional contributor to Wikipedia. I have also been working with Sarah and Hania on migrating her website to a Wikipedia style.
After almost two years of long term sickness, with the remote likelihood of return to full-time work in the next year, HP and I agreed that I could be of little use to HP, so we terminated my employment in Oct 2009. In practice, I have had to take early retirement because of my ill-health.
My Involvement with this Site
When I came across Sarah's old site, I found much of the medical and dietary advice really helpful in managing my illness, however the site itself was dated and user-hostile. I started to work with Sarah and Hania to migrate the content to a Wikimedia engine. I have done any programming needed as well as the Wikimedia system configuration and administration. I have also done any migration scripting that was required, and helped by providing the bulk of the editorial and formatting clean-up (without altering the medical content).
By nature, I am a rationalist who believes in the Scientific Method. I do not claim that this is without fault: a clear example of this is that researchers can only publish findings in areas where they get the funding to do research in the first place, so a lack of evidence is very much not the same as hard evidence to support a counter viewpoint. The current canon of UK based CFS research is riddled with such political influences, and there are just too many stakeholders such as Prof Wessely who are too influential in diverting limited funds to their own ends and starving other valid research avenues. (BTW, I am sure that Prof W is a gifted psychiatrist who has done a lot of excellent work in his field; I just feel that this is work also irrelevant to most CFS sufferers whose illness is biological in origin).
Because of this lack of solid peer reviewed research, the proponents of a non-psychological causes for CFS (such as Sarah) also have to walk on thin ice at times. This being said, I find that Sarah provides a unique and valuable perspective – one that has made a real difference to me. I think that perhaps she occasionally presents her personal view as fact when it is one of a set of possible alternatives, and on the odd occasion I find the views of other experts more compelling. So even though my name is on the edit history, please remember that the content is Sarah's and not mine.
My Sandboxes
- Mockup Main Page
- My current worklist
- Migration Notes (now under DoctorMyhill:Migration)
- To do list (now under DoctorMyhill:Migration)
Feedback
If you want to contact me then please use my talk page, or for comments relating to specific work pages on their respective discussion tab.
