This month marks 1 year of ME/CFS, which I am commemorating with a fundraiser for @CODA_research - we have already reached $18K thanks to the extraordinarily generous support from friends, colleagues, and strangers alike, and me and my family will be contributing an additional $10K. I know many of you have your own advocacy efforts or may not be in a financial position to make a donation, but I urge those who can to please consider supporting this campaign for CODA. givebutter.com/CODAFUNDRAISE… I've already written a lot on the fundraiser page linked above, so I will not rehash my story and general musings about this disease, but I do have a few additional thoughts I want to share specifically for the patient community on X. When I got sick in July 2025, ME/CFS was designated by every major medical authority as a real, biological condition. In the 15+ doctors I visited, I was never told once that my symptoms were psychosomatic nor prescribed GET or CBT. When my friends & family looked up ME/CFS online, they found mountains of research and countless medical professionals offering advice on how to manage the condition with lifestyle interventions and off-label medication. I also found community and hope in the patient and research organizations that already existed. I understand that my experience has been better than most. I also understand how easy it is to look at the present-day situation with despair - I do it all the time. But I also feel an immense amount of gratitude towards the patients and advocates that have been at this for 5/10/20+ years, fighting for progress even when it seemed to move one inch at a time. Their suffering and activism have made things that much better for everyone who came next, including me. If you got sick in the UK before 2021, you would've been prescribed GET and CBT based on NICE guidelines that were established based on the infamous PACE trial. It took the heroic efforts of Australian ME/CFS patient, Alem Matthees, journalist, David Tuller, and other advocates to obtain the raw PACE data that, when reanalyzed, proved the trial administrators manipulated their results to produce a positive trial outcome. The result was that NICE formally denounced behavioral/deconditioning disease models and stopped recommending GET & CBT. Matthees' condition reportedly worsened significantly over the 3 years of fighting with the UK courts. If you got sick before 2012, there were few if any philanthropic organizations researching ME/CFS. SolveME existed and did selectively fund some research but was primarily an advocacy organization. ME Research UK existed as well but was quite small and only deployed a couple hundred grand per year. Today (including Long Covid orgs) there is OMF (founded 2012), Bateman Horne Center (2015), PolyBio (2020), We&ME (2020), Schmidt Initiative (2023), CODA (2025), and others. In aggregate, it is likely tens of millions of dollars that these orgs are deploying into disease research each year. Are we where we want to be? Not even close. But, as corny as it is, there is no point in history in which you would rather be sick than right now. So, thank you to every patient that came before - all us new patients owe you an enormous debt that can only be repaid by continuing to fight for funding, awareness, and research. I am happy and proud to do my part and plan on doing so for as long as it takes. Wishing everybody better days ahead. On to year 2.