Elle Magazine has published a terrific and incredible article on Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit and her latest book, Unbroken. Elle does a great job of describing how Laura’s life has been living with CFS and I never grow tired reading about her – she is truly an inspiration to women and CFS patients everywhere! Hillenbrand has a very severe case of CFS so I can’t even begin to imagine how she has written the two books she has – all of the research that would be involved would be extremely difficult with the severity of her symptoms.
An excerpt from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Celebrated Author’s Untold Tale:
On a recent night, Laura Hillenbrand lay in bed dreaming of somersaults in the powder-blue bedroom she shares with her husband, Borden Flanagan, in their modest yellow row house in Upper Northwest Washington, DC. Dozing in REM sleep, the author of the acclaimed horse-racing history Seabiscuit (2001) imagined herself tucking her head to her chest, tipping forward, and letting her hips and legs pull her all the way over. A playful-seeming reverie, conjured out of the mists of an athletic childhood.
But then she didn’t stop turning. She couldn’t stop, flipping and flipping in a torment of constant motion.
Most of Hillenbrand’s dreams are like this now, strange, panicked scenarios cobbled together somewhere inside her head—plummeting airplanes and storm-tossed ships are other recurring motifs—to help her process the strange and excruciating physical sensations that she lives with more or less all the time.
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