I REMEMBER ME

A disease that afflicts many thousands. A disease that some say does not even exist. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) gained public attention in the 1980s with widely publicized outbreaks of a mysterious “Chinese flu” in Lake Tahoe and in upstate New York. But physicians from the Centers for Disease Control came up with inconclusive results, and, when easy answers failed, they diagnosed hypochondria, nothing more. Over the next few years “yuppie flue” became a derisive term for the shadowy malady, which has struck down everyone from high schoolers to Hollywood director Blake Edwards, from Olympics soccer athlete Michelle Akers to . . . filmmaker Kim A. Snyder. At the age of 33, while assisting on the production of the Jodie Foster feature “Home for the Holidays,” she contracted flulike symptoms and has not been the same since. Nine months of paralysis, seizures, “the feeling that somebody had plugged my body into a light socket . . . that on a cellular level I was just rotting from the inside out,” led her to investigate CFS personally. She charts an apathetic medical establishment willing to turn its back and CFS sufferers who have found their only cure in suicide. Mass-hysteria? Or a plague that has been purposefully overlooked? After I REMEMBER ME, you will not be so quick to judge.