Let’s talk about fatigue! Isn’t it a drag? When it reaches late afternoon, I find myself struggling to concentrate. I have to put down my book or stop what I was really concentrating on and find something easier to do. Sometimes I can close my eyes in my wheelchair for 10 minutes and this does the trick. That doesn’t mean to say that I can pick my book up afterwards though. Once the fatigue has happened, that’s the end of my ability to concentrate for the day.

It took many months into my Multiple Sclerosis journey to realise what fatigue was. At around 3 PM, I would start to daydream more than usual and quite often my eyelids would be so heavy that I was absolutely certain I was going to fall asleep. Sometimes I can have entire days like this, I call them cognitively cloudy days. You know the days that I am talking about, when you have just finished your breakfast and you wonder when you went to bed because it doesn’t feel like you have slept. I take sedatives to help me sleep, so I know that I have slept at some point, it just doesn’t feel like it. When you have to ration your energy and plan an advance, what needs to take priority and what can be left for another day. Or the days when Super Sarah has to make every decision because I can’t even think. For me, cognitively cloudy days come and go but for some reason 3 PM is always the time that my brain starts to stutter.

I need to be occupied, preferably with someone else doing the work, so I discovered a love of film and TV. We don’t really watch regular television, but we do have most of the streaming services so we can jump in and out of TV shows as we see fit. One of my favourite things to do, when I have reached that point in the day where my ability to concentrate has left me, is to watch Friends. I am the biggest Friends fan on the planet! Even though I could recite the episodes word by word, it still makes me laugh out loud, tear up and smile. It is perfect for cognitively cloudy moments, I don’t have to concentrate 100% but I still know what’s happening and I can laugh or cry at the right points. It’s important to have a TV show or a movie that you can watch that takes little to no effort, I find.

We have a smart TV that is no longer smart, and I know how it feels. One minute you’re young, up-to-date and functioning well. The next you can no longer perform the latest update and slowly but surely your smart leaves you and you are simply a television. Whilst I haven’t lost my smarts entirely, I am in the middle of my second degree, I definitely feel like the latest update is out of reach. I have learned that my best hours of concentration are in the morning, or after a rare cup of caffeinated coffee, so I plan my day accordingly. I study after breakfast, read my book until 3 PM then it’s television time. To combat our fatigued smart TV, we invested in a very reasonably priced Firestick from Amazon and what a revelation it is! It comes with a smart controller that we can talk into or you can just use buttons, it’s your choice. It’s streaming galore!

I don’t know about you, but we tend to have a few shows on the go at the same time. They’re all different genres so there is something to cover most moods. We are currently watching the delightful Golden Girls on Disney+, Grey’s Anatomy on Prime, My Family on BBC iPlayer, It’s A Sin on All Four, Coroner on Now TV and Atypical on Netflix. Apparently, we like to be watching something on each of the streaming services too!

What’s your go to show? What are you watching just now? I can highly recommend a couple of shows. If you love anything Marvel, Wandavision on Disney+ is definitely worth a watch. It covers all bases really, drama, action and fantastic filmmaking. I also adore This Is Us on Prime, the show has my heart in a crumpled up ball, discarded next to the wastepaper bin. It genuinely is a show that is so well-written that you know each character inside out and everything that happens to them feels a little bit like a personal attack unless it’s a good thing in which case I unabashedly weep with joy.

However you cope with fatigue, I hope you have life hacks and tricks to help you through. If not, feel free to borrow mine. It can feel like walking through thick treacle after no sleep for about five days, or it can feel like being hit by a truck and then dragged through a hedge backwards. This is my go to look these days!