My mother states that as a young child, I always had less energy than other kids. As a school age child I caught 'everything that went around'. I consider these to be my earliest symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS for short).
I was diagnosed with mild CFS in year 6. Year 7 was probably my best school year ever - as it is the only year of primary or high school where I managed to complete a whole 10 week term without missing a day. Years 8 and 9 were much worse. I missed a day or part of a day practically every week in late year 9. In year 10 I eventually gave in and switched to home-schooling.
Home-schooling has many benefits, but it also has a large number of drawbacks. In short I didn't do any TEE exams even though I completed TEE maths. Simply put, one TEE subject doesn't count for anything when dealing with uni's and TAFE.
Dropping out of school at any point in your early life is a bad thing. Mainly due to the adage "out of sight out of mind". If your friends don't see you at school every day, they are likely to forget you exist. This applies far more during school years than at the end of school for one simple reason. Transport. After school finishes in year 12, most people either already have, or about to get their driver's licence, thus enabling a much stronger contact with other people. If you leave school before that you will find yourself in the proverbial "too hard basket".
Loosing friends in this manner is terribly depressing, and only serves to make the person more depressed than they are just having to drop out in the first place. Many, many CFS sufferers go through this. For several years I was in a very black depression. I attribute my recovery from that to three main things:
1 and 3 provided me with outlets for my depression - allowing me to vent all my black feelings. Suzie in particular was very good at solving emotional problems.
Chrysalis provided me with friends that I actually got to see now and then. Chrysalis meetings and social events never happen as often as I would like, but that is only to be expected given that the group is made up of people who are all CFS sufferers, and therefore have no energy to do anything anyway.