This is a wonderful book. Invaluable for anyone with CFS, but particularly for teenagers who find it hard to relate to the usual CFS literature built around an older world of paid work, housework and children. For parents, carers and health professionals it provides an inside view of an experience from which they are usually twice removed - by both health and age.

Jacki Schirmer tells her story simply, from the day she came down with a virus in 1989 through to her participation in a gamma-globulin trial and her experiences in a residential rehabilitation program. She chronicles events rather than analyses them, and this makes the book much more valuable than the usual ME story full of advice for other sufferers and hints on how to get better. Through the simple telling of her daily struggles, her small advances and sudden collapses, and her changes in mood as she tries to understand them, we see the process of someone first being swamped by the physical devastation of the disease, and then gradually coming to a new understanding of how to cope with the limitations it imposes - how to treasure energy, how to see it as a resource and choose where to spend it with great care.

One of the most interesting aspects is that Jacki seems to reach this understanding almost in spite of the largely unhelpful 'help' of the rehabilitation program. This is an experience common to many people with CFS, and it makes the book a valuable resource for any health professionals trying to devise a recovery program for their own patients. In Jacki's case, none of the rehabilitation staff seemed able to comprehend that CFS sufferers cannot be rehabilitated in the same way as stroke or accident victims.

They want her to walk around the zoo as part of her social rehabilitation even though they've already established that she can only stand up for six minutes. Because she is too exhausted to play games at night they ignore the fact that she has doubled her day-time activity. They lend her a wheel chair so she can go out, and then as soon as she overcomes the embarrassment enough to enjoy using it, they take it away in case she becomes dependent on it. And perhaps most uncomprehending of all, when a new activity is obviously too much, they continually tell her to push through the pain, when at only fifteen, she can see for herself that it is making her worse.

But Jacki Schirmer must be one of the strongest fifteen year olds in Melbourne. She has the perception to realise that despite their misunderstanding and mis-handling, not to mention their lack of respect for her knowledge of her own body, she is gradually improving and increasing her daily activity. She refuses to accept their criticism of her progress and perseveres with the program for the good she sees in it, particularly the idea of pacing yourself, of setting yourself small, achievable amounts of daily activity, rather than exhausting yourself in desperate bursts that end up in bed.

By the end of the book, as well as being partially recovered, Jacki has achieved something indispensable to anyone with a disability or chronic illness - she has learned how to manage her condition. We can only hope that her recovery continues, that the medical profession takes note of the gaps in their understanding, and that other sufferers and their families and friends find the way a little easier for the insight she has given us.

Reprinted from Emerge, March 1995.