If you think being tired all the time is not normal, consider yourself lucky. Some people fight this battle every day of their lives.

In the summer of 2008, a recent high school grad went on a class trip to Greece. It was her first time out of the US, and she and her friends were thrilled to go. During her trip, she felt exhausted, run down and had to struggle to keep up with the schedule. She chalked it up to jet lag, but it took all of her willpower to hang with her friends and enjoy this trip of a lifetime.

When she got home, she collapsed in bed and slept for days. Something was not right. A visit to the doctor produced a diagnosis – mononucleosis. “Kissing disease.” Typical for teenagers, right? Nothing to worry about.

Only it did not go away.

When she got to college that September, things got worse. Her energy level hit rock bottom. While her friends were going to parties, staying out late and reveling in their new freedom, she struggled to just attend classes and get homework done. She could not enjoy the occasional drink out with her friends because she found that alcohol made her feel worse. Why was she constantly exhausted? Instead, she should have been applauded for carrying on anyway, fighting this uphill battle with exhaustion. But at that point, it was supposedly all in her head.

She transferred colleges, stayed closer to home, and dealt with her symptoms as best she could. Constant pain. Always tired. Worn out by a short walk. She described it as kind of feeling like she had the flu, but all the time.

After countless trips to doctors over the next few years, including neurologists, rheumatologists, chiropractors and more, and after many blood tests, they settled on a diagnosis. Myalgic encephalomyelitis, more commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome. One study defines ME‐CFS as an "illness characterized by persistent and fluctuating symptoms of fatigue, pain and loss of endurance to normal activities associated with conspicuous deterioration after exercise." She was relieved to have a hook to hang her symptoms on, but the knowledge did not make them go away. Today, there is no known remedy for ME/CFS. That is sad news for her and for the 2.5 million Americans who suffer from ME/CFS, most of them undiagnosed.

But there is hope for her and those who suffer from ME/CFS because we live in 2019, where the digital age is in full force. Big data sets can be analyzed in ways previously not possible. Doctors’ abilities can be augmented and expanded thanks to artificial intelligence. Studies are underway, like Open Medicine Foundation’s ME/CFS Severely Ill Big Data Study, to identify markers and root causes of the disease.

Maybe most importantly, the disease is being studied, quantified and acknowledged as real, something that the people who suffer from it have known all along. They are not crazy or lazy or unmotivated. They are fighting for a normal life.

I am proud that the analytical technologies my company, SAS, develops and that are used by data scientists in companies throughout the world, may contribute to one day solving the mystery of ME/CFS. Until then, I want to remind myself that we never know what the person next to us is dealing with, and you can never go wrong by being kind.