The 'Fibromyologist'

The first few weeks that stretch into months have you baffled. You can’t quite figure out why your muscles are screaming at you. There must be a logical reason. Ahh…feels like you did some uphill jogging while unconscious, and forgot to stretch, and you forgot to do the essential – train for it. At this point the pain you feel in your muscles, you blame on not stretching enough. As you try to ‘stretch it out’, what would normally elevate this wretched feeling, now becomes slightly worse. That seems contrary to the norm. Stretch = feel better, equals move the mysterious ache/built up lactic acid (query). Not in your case.

This dilemma is confounding, whole body pain or lower body pain, can set your confidence in the toilet, no doubt. Maybe, by this time you’ve seen you chiropractor and family doctors, offering you lab workups or physical therapy specialists. If you’re like me you may have had an onset of wicked headaches or atypical/typical migraine manifestations.

Perhaps now, your close colleagues have seen you make small winces or verbal complaints as you hide your resting pain face. Not so awesome is the fact that maybe your family has exhausted every tip, and trick that they, and their friends have offered to them. By now, perhaps the pain goes away after a night spent resting. Only to manifest later in the day after you’ve had a full day of work, partners, and children.

It has you stumped. What could it possibly be? All the laboratory results have come back. There was nothing they found to be the culprit. The headaches you’ve been having? Let’s get a CT Scan (Computed tomography), let’s get an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). That’s IF you can get your appointment in a timely manner. In some countries – I’m looking at you Canada – it could takes months to finally get an MRI. Especially if your initial CT scan came back (unremarkable) or in other words…”You’re fine”. But you’re not fine, and the fatigue is beyond adequate words.

Perhaps now you’re in need of better pain management. The occasional Tylenol and Advil aren’t taking the edge off. Maybe you’ve realized vodka is helpful in the evenings to get the pain to a different place. (Vodka has been heard of as helping the CVS – central nervous system.) Obviously, that is not a long term or healthy way to deal with it. Yet, perhaps that’s what you were being drawn to (unconsciously) in order to get some relief. (No judgement here, this is a no judgement zone).

Perhaps you’ve finally gone back to your doctor(s) complaining of needing better pain management options as your Tylenol/Advil (insert your combo here) combo that they recommended is now a joke. Or perhaps, you’ve been suffering in silence, afraid to take medications because of what it might do to your liver.

You need to be better. You want to be better. It becomes difficult to juggle your life in terms of remembering things now. You may chock this up to being distracted, being overwhelmed, the pain, and the incredible irritation of attempting different remedies, and yet nothing works or nothing works consistently. Your family might be getting frustrated at your fatigue, your fitness level, and your sudden onset of forgetfulness.

This stage can be daunting. The brain fog. Where a once quick witted quip that could roll off your tongue – now has become a couple millisecond delay to spit out words. Sometimes more often than not you can forget appointments, special dates when they arrive, grocery items, the list to the grocery items, shifts at work, and even social plans with friends.

One of the things that brought you joy, (yes- even you introverts) is connecting with close friends. By now, you know that you only have a certain amount of energy (I call it ‘Juice’) to manage your day to day life minus visiting with love ones socially. Seemingly normal activities you engage in now require some level of pain management, which can range from medications to meditation.

You started to see a pattern, maybe it scared you a little, that’s okay. That’s the motivation it’s gonna take to get through the next bit.

Make your recovery your new discovery❤️