A bit of history:

I mentioned that my child was ill for a year: too sick to go to school.

It sounds easy in hindsight, but it was hellish not knowing what was wrong.

At first we thought that she was trying to skip school; due to tummy aches or some other feeble excuse. Sooner or later it seemed that I was her only defender, arguing with my husband and the au pair that she really wasn’t just taking us for a ride.

She got worse. She had dark circles under her eyes and reacted terribly to almost any food – coming down with tummy aches for 4 days if accidentally ingesting gluten or some other mystery substance.

So it was off to the allergy specialist – complete with flights to the big city and a hotel and rental car. They did a battery of tests and could find nothing other than lowered levels of immunoglobulins.

They did put us onto a dietician who put us onto the regimented FODMAPS Diet, which helped. It really did. It also helped me shift the weight I’d put on since turning 40. It was very restrictive, though; and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have the dedication and funds to see it through!

By this time, she’d stopped going to school completely and we were enrolled with the hospital school.

Eventually the allergy specialist said it was Chronic Fatigue, and referred us on.

The Chronic Fatigue specialist didn’t even do any tests – just asked questions and then said “Yep, you’ve got CFS. Eat this, this and this and you ought to be on the road to recovery.”

We also saw a medical intuitive who said she’d been poisoned, and put her on high doses over Vitamin C and sylmarin for liver support. To be fair, this really helped and we saw an upswing in physical health after this. The mental side went downhill, though, leaving me with a black fear of the anxiety and depressive behaviour in my 12 year old and what it would mean for the future.

At this stage, she wouldn’t even leave the house and often not even her room. We weren’t allowed into her room – she cried like her very soul was wounded if we trespassed, even to clean something up. So we respected it.

She lived like a hermit, coming down to make herself food from the “allowables” list and take the dishes back upstairs. Schoolwork was done by correspondence and grudgingly. Bless the tutor from the hospital school who came to do it, because I was at my wit’s end and couldn’t also have tried to drag this child through her school work – kicking and screaming.

I heard about a 3-day course called The Lightning Process, which has a very high success rate with sufferers of CFS. We signed up – on separate courses, because

a) I wanted to know what the course contained, so that I could help coach – much like I did the FODMAPS diet so that I could cook for her, and

b) if it was going to help cure my child, then she would need to engage properly with it, and my being there wasn’t going to help.

Then she recovered, using The Lightning Process, and a few weeks later declared herself to be agender and then very shortly thereafter, a boy.

It wasn’t until 6 months later that it suddenly was clear to me that the sickness was probably Gender Dysphoria and the depression produced as a result.

I mean, it was clear to me that there was something very wrong with my child; but trying to figure out what it was was like trying to prise a clam from its shell with your bare fingers. None of the specialists we saw had a clue, either.

Maybe one day doctors who are puzzling over odd cases will look at gender issues as well.

I wonder what questions they could have asked?

I would probably have batted the very notion of Gender Dysphoria away – she was such a girly girl: long hair, earrings, nail polish, glitter, dolls, etc.