Below are the greetings read at the #MillionsMissing Rally on June 2nd behalf of Janet Dafoe.
I send my greetings to everyone!I wish I could be there with you. My husband, Ron Davis, and daughter, Ashley Haugen, are in London at the Invest in ME International Research Conference, so I must stay home with our son, who is severely ill and bedridden with CFS and can’t speak, talk, move, or eat. We can’t ever all go anywhere together. This highlights that this horrid disease affects much more than just the patient! Caregivers, family members, friends, everyone who knows and loves the patient is very significantly affected. Sad, desperate, despondent. And this has been going on for over 40 years for millions of Americans and people all over the world! It’s so unbelievable that such ill people could be ignored, not believed, and left alone with few resources and no help from medicine or our government! I often feel like I’m in some kind of surreal horror movie. I look at my beautiful, gentle, creative, amazing son, who could be contributing so much to the world, and who desperately wants to, and then I think of my brilliant scientist husband who has the ability to figure out this disease, and then I realize that neither our government, nor many other sources of funds have stepped up to make sure that this disease is figured out and dealt with, just like other diseases that affect our citizens. It’s astounding, it’s unbelievable, and it’s absolutely not ok. I know NIH has increased commitment to help. However, I strongly believe that it is NOT ENOUGH. We have the ability to figure this out and ease the suffering of all these people and we could do it in a few years WITH ENOUGH RESOURCES! Ron always tells me, he and his team need $5 million dollars for 5 years to find the answers. I believe him! I have watched this amazing man do collaborative interdisciplinary science solving “unsolvable” problems for over 40 years. He can to it, with the team of fabulous scientists that he is able to gather. Why is this not happening as fast as it can? If people could personally connect with the suffering, I believe it could happen faster. We must all do all we can to show the government and the world the extent of the suffering! Send photos, Don’t be shy! Bring photos and recent science papers everywhere you go! We can speed this up together! I look forward to working with you till we get answers and my baby can come back to me!
