Exhaustion consumed my body. The fatigue was itself fatiguing. I woke early every morning in pain, unable to go back to sleep. Before I opened my eyes, I did a kind of mental check to see if the pain was there. It is hard to describe without using the usual words: I had a headache, achiness, flu-like symptoms. But it’s one thing to have these symptoms for a day, or even a week. Suffered daily, they take on a meaning beyond the pain, like being shadowed by a specter. You have a feeling something in your body is trying to defeat you, that something inside you wants you dead. One bright morning I
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