Carolyn Bishop, now 39, first began having symptoms of fibromyalgia when she was 14. “It’s really hard to be an honor student,” she says, “if you go to school for eight hours a day and you come home exhausted, and you have five hours of homework.” She skipped classes and her grades suffered.

Her symptoms got worse as she grew older. When Carolyn was pregnant with her son, she developed severe pain in her left shoulder blade. After he was born, she says, “The exhaustion was just complete. There were things I wanted to do with him and I couldn’t because I was tired.” She felt like a horrible mother. “When he was two years old I would sit him in front of the TV with a bowl of Cheerios and then I would lie down and fall asleep.”

When her daughter was born six years later, the fatigue was diagnosed as postpartum depression. “My husband at the time would leave for work and come home 10 hours later, and I’d still be in the same spot in my pajamas.”

Carolyn also experienced memory problems. One November, when filling out Christmas cards, she says, “I literally forgot who I was—what my name was, where I lived, what my address was. I didn’t know, and it scared the hell out of me. I was never so scared.”

NEXT: Finding help, at last