I’m concerned that some people might be taken aback by the “chondriac” portion of the name of this blog. I am not in any way advocating that fibromyalgia is not a true disorder. I’ll leave that to the doctor’s that seem to have a God complex in determining what is and is not a disorder…or who does or does not have pain. I have fibromyalgia and trust me, it exists. But “Fibrochondriac” is a play on the way I deal with this disorder. So I’ll share a little bit about myself to explain.
I have always taken my health for granted. I was a single mom for much of my adult life and had too much going on to even consider my health as an issue. My lifestyle choices were horrendous and if I dieted and exercised, it was to lose weight, and had little to do with being healthy. My sleep schedule was erratic because I was too busy to go to bed at a reasonable hour. My weight would fluctuate from a size 4 to a size 18 and back down again in a constant roller coaster. Sometimes I’d lose the weight through disciplined dieting and exercise, sometimes I lost it because I was so stressed out I’d forget to eat.
In 2005, in just a couple of months that changed. My soon-to-be husband and I bought a house. It was a three story house with very high ceilings so there were lots of stairs. The stairs became the bane of my existence as the constant running up and down them caused shooting pains in my hips and knees.
When the pain started interfering with activities I made an appointment with my doctor. If you have fibromyalgia the story will probably sound familiar. NSAIDS, hot/cold packs, physical therapy and finally tests. Lots and lots of tests. Then the diagnosis. It was nice to have a name to what was going on, but it sure didn’t fix the problem. It was annoying at this point but wasn’t a huge issue.
In February 2007 my husband and I took a delayed honeymoon and went for a cruise on the Mexican Riviera. We had a blast! But the week after we got home I developed severe pains, insomnia and anxiety. When my doctor said that this was related to the fibromyalgia I flipped out. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t socialize, I couldn’t even clean house!
I couldn’t accept that. I had to have my life back. Unfortunately the doctors (they multiplied at this point) couldn’t come up with anything that would relieve the pain, much less the anxiety and “fibrofog” (the mental cloudiness that sometimes comes with fibromyalgia. In my case it was severe). They tried so many different drugs but nothing helped and usually made my symptoms worse.
I didn’t think the doctors were right. If all those drugs couldn’t fix my symptoms then I couldn’t have fibromyalgia. Like that line of reasoning? I thought that if they couldn’t at least alleviate some of my symptoms then it had to be something other than fibromyalgia that was causing this, and it had to be something that was fixable.
I would search and search on the Internet for ways to fix the problem. I’d go see specialists and racked up huge medical expenses. I used alternative medicine with little discrimination as to what had the best chance of success. If they said that they could “cure” fibro, I signed up! I would chart my diet, my sleep, my activities…anything to find an answer.. I was obsessed with either finding a cure or finding another diagnosis for the symptoms.
Does this sound like a hypochondriac to you? It does to me. Hypchondriacs are, by definition, obsessed with their health and preoccupied with the fact that they have some horrible disease that the doctors have missed. Really sounds like the place I was during that time period.
It was sometime during this time period that the term “Fibrochondriac” started floating around in my head. It made me laugh and brought some humor to what was becoming an increasingly grim situation.
So Fibrochondriac is my nickname for what I’m going through and how I reacted to it. I still, when I’m having a particularly bad flare, research to see if the magic bullet has been found to kill this disorder. But I don’t obsess on it and realize that it is just one of my many coping mechanisms, along with having a sense of humor.
I think my sense of humor is what saved me. Still have fibro, still learning how to deal with it but I am no longer crazy obsessed with it. But I retain the name…
