fibromyalgia

Most advice that you will get if you ask for help with your mental health will contain some stock phrases. Make life changes, change your outlook and live your life differently. I have been there with psychiatrists and read it all many years, I have even tried it myself , with varying degrees of success.

What happens if you cant make changes , if the problem causing the mental health struggle will never change. Its a condition with no cure and the main help you get is advice on how to manage the condition. There may well be medication and physical therapy but there's still no cure.

In fact Fibromyalgia is often the diagnosis when nothing else fits the symptoms. I had covid, which became long covid which became constant pain, brain fog and exhasustion among other things. I had blood tests, xrays, heart checks and myriad doctors appointments. In the end the latest doctor had a theory of Fibromyalgia. While I knew some of the conditions that had been tested before , this was a newer one for me.

The basics are that its a life long condition with no definite cause and therefore no definite cure. Not a good start, in fact I was referred to a pain management course before the course had actually been created. In fact I saw adverts to recruit staff to run the courses after being put forward for one.

Fibromyalgia and other long term chronic pain conditions have become much more prevalent since covid, being possible after effects of long covid. Suspected triggers include virus, head injury, trauma and depressive incidents. Symptoms can include constant pain, memory problems through brain fog, exhaustion as cant sleep properly, muscle ache, pain sensation doubled or trebled and sensitivity to sound and bright light. People with the condition can suffer with all or some of these.

Even though there a number of celebrities with the condition, Lady ga ga and Denzil Washington for example, still not enough is known or understood. The best description for the constant pain is a wiring fault rather then a hardwire fault. If you stub your toe your nerve endings send a message via your spinal coloum to your brain, the message says that hurt and you feel pain.

My version is that if i stub my toe the signal gets multiplied two or three times, meaning a trivial knock could cause excruciating pain. The other thing I get is a message to my brain saying some part of me hurts , although nothing has happened. So I get the signal saying it hurts, I feel the pain but there's been no obvious cause.

As I sit here my left and right thigh muscles hurt, I have been sat still and not done anything to trigger the pain signal. Then I could go for a short walk and get no pain. I couldn't walk for as I also have developed asthma with the fibro.

So, I have to accept and get on with it. For various reasons I am on around 18 tablets and 3 inhalers a day. Many are fibro pain management but some are for some other conditions. The training course I did most recently about fibro management started with a question on where we are with the diagnosis. Are we angry, have we accepted our fate or somewhere else.

Answers were mixed between the different people present, mine was moving from why me to a degree of acceptence. Both my children are disabled and it was something that could be only managed rather then treated. So for them we had to accept it and deal with it, now I had to do the same for me.

So I have developed a new normal, my baseline is to be in pain and tired. I then move up or down from there. I accept a flight of stairs will be hard, I cant walk far and I need to write down plans as my memory is shot. My phone and my wife run many part of my life, to make sure I do things I need to. At work I write notes about everything I have to do. Even if the boss says do thing 1 then thing 2 I need to write down the second.

Accepting state is for the rest of my life is hard, I am 54 so at a guess 25 more years like this. Also any condition or restriction from aging will simply be added to the load.

You just live and learn how to adapt and see what your capable of. Basically do a risk assesment of what you can do and what your limits are. Maybe add more rest in during tasks, maybe plan when you will do one and then stop. Don't wear yourself out, stop before you are forced too. Then you have less distance to raise energy.

Live for today and don't punish yourselves for your new limits. Accept your not who you were, hard to do but easy to say. But don't use what energy you have left fighting it.