Today I was on the tram and ran into an old pal from high school, Kasey. I haven’t seen her for yonks. We’d never been that close, but she seemed up for a chinwag, so I really went for it and told her all about my bung knee. She reciprocated by telling me about how she’d been struggling with chronic fatigue since her final year at uni, and had just recently come across a treatment that seemed to be alleviating it.
One of my cousins has chronic fatigue, so I was pretty interested to hear this. The treatment, Kasey told me, is a type of oxygen therapy. In the Melbourne area, it hasn’t been all that easy to access, so she’d had to shell out heaps of money on the whole thing. Even so, the results had been so good that she hadn’t been fazed.
I looked into it a bit more when I got home. I found out that it’s called hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and involves the patient spending time in a chamber with a high internal air pressure. I’m not 100% sure how it works, but it’s something to do with being able to take more oxygen into the lungs.
Kasey was saying she’d been looking into investing in a portable unit for home use, which makes sense now that I can see what the chambers are like. Buying a portable hyperbaric chamber would save heaps of money and time in the long run, compared with having to go to a treatment facility every time she needs to have a session. I guess it’s not that dissimilar to people installing saunas in their homes for health support purposes.
It’s good to hear that Kasey has found a way of dealing with chronic fatigue that works for her. I wonder what kind of timeline the treatment happens on. In her case, it sounds like she expects it to be an ongoing kind of deal, or she probably wouldn’t be considering buying a chamber for herself. In any case, I’ll have to talk to my cousin about this.