S#%t And Sleep

Communicating with Fibromyalgia patients and observing the many stages each and every person goes through as they navigate life with this nightmare of an illness triggers major flashbacks for me. Different people, varying root causes, separate co-mingling conditions, but we all experience the pure misery of a sickness they don't know why we get and certainly don't know how to cure. Little lightbulbs like the twinkling dance of blinking Christmas decorations pop off and on as memories long forgotten rise to the surface of my conscious. Time and time again I answer a question with, "Holy shazam, I totally forgot about it but that happened to me too!" Two major issues impeding my ability to get Fibromyalgia managed were my sleep deficiencies and, ahem, bathroom problems.

I was a small little person trapped between two big thick walls crushing together. The walls of life and sickness. They did not get along, could not meet in the middle and made mincemeat of all unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. I was finally crushed to smithereens between them on September 6, 2006. Raging insomnia, excruciating pain and mental anguish consumed me. I cancelled the sleep study it had taken a whole year to obtain a referral for because I broke down. Bad. I saw no point in living. Same reasons I have gone over in every other blog; anger, pain, frustration, sickness, guilt, panic, fear...it goes on. I was free-falling and the deeper I went the less I cared enough to hang on, the less there was to grab at. I was not suicidal, but it was the first time a complete and overwhelming loss of hope rationalized the will to live as unnecessary. It took a breakdown of this proportion before I finally took this illness seriously, accepted it was not going away no matter how much I willed it to, and it was up to me to figure this out. I got the medical help I needed and started sleeping. And I dreamed! It had been years. Many years. But suddenly strange, odd and sometimes disturbing visions filled my nighttime slumber. My unconscious had found its filter and and trapped images exploded through my brain and out my head. I know now that sleep disturbance, unrecognized by me and medicine alike, was the shotgun at the start of the race to the Fibromyalgia finish line for me, genetics notwithstanding.

So I was sleeping and doing a lot better, but still not well, at all. I was constricted. So stiff, puffy, painful to the touch. It felt like one gentle poke would burst my skin open like an overstuffed sausage casing. I was on Lyrica and gaining 10lbs. a month. Full of toxicity, distorted, swollen, grogging through quicksand, my digestive system was free of the candida imbalance which caused IBS but was still not function properly. I went to dinner at a friend's house and her mom was going on and on about getting a colonic. It dawned on me all the drugs I had been on, dead sickness inside me, the fermented toxins settling in my cells and tissues, none of it had a way to get out. But I was not quite ready to have somebody stick a  tube up my butt to suck it all out either. I did many cleanses, got off the drug obviously not fit for me and started eating healthier, even walking again. Vegetables were good, psyllium husks even better. Slowly but surely as I cut out processed foods my stomach stopped swelling after every meal and elimination became regular. The puffiness came down and there was a marked difference in my quality of life. Now I was sleeping (repairing) and eliminating (toxicity removal) and the energy in my body was flowing. At this point I could actually move forward with the many other layers of healing my dear little central nervous system required. I was now free to set out to repair everything else it had demolished on its way to breaking down.

Thanks for joining,

Leah