I tend to go with the view that fibromyalgia is the body’s response to stress (both emotional and physical), because it’s what makes the most sense in my case. I was diagnosed this past July, but had been symptomatic for a good few months prior to that. All things considered, I was diagnosed remarkably quickly–I’ve heard some horror stories from other fibro patients–so I can count myself lucky for this.
My symptoms first started to show at a time when the medication I was taking for Graves’ Disease and the resultant high blood pressure and anaemia was finally starting to take effect, so you can imagine there were quite a few changes going on in my body.
Graves’ Disease did a real number on me, to put it bluntly. It was diagnosed in August 2008, after an immigration panel doctor noticed my swollen thyroid, but I’d had symptoms since January 2006. The trouble is that the symptoms were all so random that I never got properly checked out. I put everything down to a lung infection that had knocked me for six back in 2006, and everything else down to stress and the generally unhealthy student lifestyle that I’d been living.
During the time I went undiagnosed, I had: Weight loss (I’m almost 5 foot 9, but at one point my weight went down to about 7 stone), thinning hair, seriously high blood pressure causing my hands to shake and my legs to wobble, heat intolerance (which may not sound like much, but actually it was pretty horrific when a perfectly mild spring day felt like a furnace from hell), the inability to walk more than five feet without having to sit down, dizzy spells, joint pain, swollen legs, and rather severe muscle wastage.
I also had a pretty unpleasant flare of psoriasis, which covered my entire hands and the soles of my feet for about a year. It comes back from time to time, but has never been that severe since.
I look back at photos of myself from 2006 and I look seriously unwell. My face was so gaunt that my eyes are practically popping out of my head (although fortunately, I haven’t had the eye involvement that can occur with Graves’ Disease–thank God, I have enough issues with my ugly mug without turning into Pop-Eye) and my hair was thin and awful.
I guess I never thought that there could be a real problem because after the first flare up of the sickness (lasting about eight months) things seemed to subside. I stopped experiencing dizzy spells whenever I tried to walk further than the end of the street, and I pretty much wrote everything else off as just me being out of shape.
I went from being able to walk six miles a day to being unable to climb a flight of stairs because my leg muscles just… disappeared. And yet I put it down to being a bit out of shape, not stopping to think that the reason I was a bit out of shape was because I’d suddenly found myself unable to walk without dizziness and unable to climb stairs, for pity’s sake!
I didn’t get my leg muscles back until about February 2009 and I was so damn happy about it. I could do things! I could go for long pretentious walks in the park with my camera! I never had been lazy, I’d just been SICK!
And then, at the end of February, I had my first major fibromyalgia flare. Since then I’ve either been:
a) a completely symptom-free WALKING KING (seriously, I love these days)
b) moderately sore but able to walk without mobility aids
c) in need of my stick due to leg/back problems
d) getting carried home from work by my considerate managers after my back starts to spasm so badly I can’t walk
e) not even getting out of bed, thanks.
So it comes and goes. Much like my mental problems, actually. I would prefer it if I could synchronise them (if I could be depressed whilst in physical pain because then I could just get them both out of the way at the same time, and if I could be pain-free whilst hypomanic, that would be excellent) because I’ve had some ridiculous moments where I’ve been mentally bouncing off the walls…
…whilst bedridden. During a particularly unpleasant mental episode, no less. Picture your maiden aunt lying in her sickbed whilst burning up with restless rage, screaming at the fucking thunderstorm to just bloody well TRY frying her with lightning, and trying to punch the walls, and you’ve got it.
“Good god,” said my coworker, when I described it, “it sounds like something out of The Exorcist.”
Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you… until you remember you’ve got costochondritis and it hurts too sodding much.
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