Advanced warning - this post is long ! Fellow fatigued people in particular- you may not want to read all at once! In the past I've shared all my medical battles and worries on here very openly. In the past, things have gone quiet only when I was too ill to write, too busy to, or there was little change so little to share. This time it's been a bit different. My long silence hasn't really been entirely for any of those reasons. The truth is that I needed some time and space to process things and understand things privately. When I received my first chronic illness diagnosis, it was many months before I talked openly about it with anyone; this time I was having to have daily discussions with doctors for months and was having to communicate with lots of different people fairly constantly. I couldn't, and didn't want to, hide my illness in the same way as I did back in 2010, but there were certain elements that I didn't want to share publicly/openly. I wanted the p...