While everyone gets tired from time to time, individuals with CFS experience fatigue that is so extreme that some describe the feelings as having been run over by a truck repeatedly or as having raced back-to-back marathons or as having stayed up for days on end.
Even after a full night of sleep, a CFS sufferer may feel no more rested than if he or she had stayed up all night working a manual labor job. In fact, many individuals with CFS do have disturbed sleep patterns (like insomnia), but even the solid sleepers do not seem to be refreshed in any way by the extra winks. A person with CFS may fall into bed exhausted at night and wake up feeling just as tired if not more so the next morning.
With the extreme fatigue comes feelings of muscle weakness, difficulties with concentration, and often oddly patterned headaches of varying degrees in many victims. Many CFS sufferers also complain of overall feelings of pain and tenderness similar to flu symptoms, so CFS is often lumped with fibromyalgia though the two conditions are not one and the same. They are, however, often tandem conditions. It’s not unusual to get a dual diagnosis and to find information on the conditions lumped together in the research and readings available.
There are a few noted differences in the onset and markers of the two conditions. CFS generally appears first as a rather flu type illness though may be gradual or rather sudden. Fibromyalgia is more often associated with some type of injury or trauma—either physical or emotional. In addition, patients diagnosed with fibro often have abnormal readings on serotonin levels (pain signals) and more specific body pains than CFS suffers who tend to have more generalized feelings of discomfort.