In the 10 months I have been publishing this blog and connecting with fellow Fibromyalgia patients I have noticed a frequent trend. There reaches a point where the reality of living with constant pain and fatigue and insomnia breaks you. Or comes within a hair's breath. It hurts my heart to see the pleas for help, the scribbled ramblings of a racing brain ill equipped to withstand the devastation occurring simultaneously in your life and in your body. Screaming someone make sense of this! Someone please just tell me what to do and I will do it! Please take this stupid and random and weird and complex and misunderstood illness away from me! I myself am not immune to it and have seen it enough times, in many different people from all walks of life, to wonder if anyone is. Its like the culmination of all the crap we juggle crashes down. All the strength it takes to conjure up the perseverance and sheer will to get out of bed each morning suddenly vacates. And left with the unfiltered purity of your misery, you snap. But in some ways, if you are fortunate enough to have a support network to help save you from yourself, it can be a necessary step in the life-cycle of coming to terms with, and moving beyond, a Fibromyalgia diagnosis.
Oddly enough I hit my bottom very shortly after I took the final test to confirm this vague and looming diagnosis of exclusion. The MRI to test for MS. I remember exactly how I felt on that sunny-yet-chilly early summer day in northern California. Standing in the middle of my living room on my cordless phone as I was informed there were no abnormalities in my MRI confirming Multiple Sclerosis. I hung up the phone and sobbed. Now please understand I did not want MS by any stretch of the imagination. I understand what a terrible degenerative disease it is. Yet the sobs were rolling deep out of the center of my being because that was my last chance. BECAUSE MODERN MEDICINE COULD NOT TELL ME WHY I WAS SO SICK! So ill that I could not do my job, a very stripped down version of the one I had before I got sick. In so much pain I could think of nothing but the constant hurt, and fatigue so bad making my bed had turned into an Olympic event. But modern medicine was all I knew. And the best they could offer me was a CFS and Fibromyalgia diagnosis with no way to get better. I was in prison occupying a body wracked with illness. And there was no key to get out. So my mind folded.
I knew it was coming, but of course had to push myself over the brink before I finally caved and admitted defeat. I had been to see a Psychiatrist a few days before, and luckily she was there to catch me in the ways a Psychiatrist can, with compassion and medication. My husband and mother offered the emotional support and supervision I required and my MD gave me a month off of work and on to state disability to figure this problem out. A month! Ha! 5 years later and I am still figuring it out. But that was the fire under my bum propelling me into educating myself to the real truths of modern medicine. How it is the symptom, not the cause, that is often treated. How when a doctor with a God complex can't fix you in a 15 minuet office visit they turn it around to make you the unstable and hysterical one. And how if I ever wished to resume living life as a somewhat normal individual I had to figure it out. For myself. And that was really really hard. So when I see these breakdowns occur, as they all to often do, I say a little prayer that strength and hope will be sent their way. And I remember back on my own lowest-low and the subsequent aftershocks that have dotted my journey. Oh friends this is hard. But not impossible, to learn how to live with. I figure there are two ways to look at it. Oh well or I can.
Thanks for joining,
Leah
