I have coexisted with Fibromyalgia for 26 very long years. It is a part of me as much as my leg or my nose is. When it gets in the way -- as it does every single day! -- I have to accommodate.
When you kiss you turn your nose left or right. With Fibromyalgia you have to be prepared to do the same.
Wing it.
While it hasn't been a bag of laughs, day in day out, what I object to is the way it sets you up for so many of the other bogeyman ills that shadow us. I really don't know where my Fibromyalgia leaves off and other chronic conditions kick in.
It's all the one medley.
I get used to dealing with the Fibro, but when the other stuff kicks in...I get annoyed.
Mind you I am very proud with my achievements. Despite my invalid status I've done well. I've managed a good life -- and in some instances a better life than I could have had -- despite the sentence.
Every day is a blessing (of sorts).
While I would not wish Fibromyalgia on my worst enemy, the illness, while devoid of credits in its own right, demands so much of you that you have to deliver (a life/ a manufactured life) or go under.
You'll have to forgive me if I suggest that I would have preferred to be blind, or in a wheel chair or without a limb rather than suffer from Fibromyalgia. You blind, limbless, and paraplegic souls are fortunate to suffer a constant existence. Each morning when I wake up I have no idea what the day may bring in way of cognitive or physical mobility.
I can never know my future -- because I can never know my future capacity to do stuff, to achieve.
My life is about prediction -- of assuming and guessing what I may be able to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow... because I may, as much as anything else, be in bed or hobbling about in pain or mentally gah gah as anything else.
So keeping to schedule is not so easy to do.
In my case the mercurial and unpredictable nature of my existence is ruled by the weather.
And we all know how much the weather changes!
Me, I'm a weather vane.
What primary features of meteorology overwhelms me is something I have not been able work out. Despite 365 day-in-day out days over 26 long years of coal face experience I cannot finger the culprit.
But the core problem is not the weather, it's what is inside me. I could have just as easily been stressed out by foods or some other catalyst such that I may as well have been a manic depressive despite any pathological etiology.
But after 26 years, who really give a stuff? Me and this thing inside me get along. Despite any rigor I have to put up with I know that I'll recover from the worst of the suffering on any one bad day.
It's my grin-and-bear-it approach.
Nonetheless, as the years tick over I note the price I'm paying in way of mobility and cognition. Dexterity, strength, memory, word recognition, flexibility, gait..and all the rest -- I'm losing the battle to stay ahead of the deteriorating symptom pack. It's not just ageing. I have these festering complications that have worsened in step with my illness. But like some chronic alcoholic losing their memory of yesterday's breakfast, I am proceeding to lose my capabilities at a leisurely pace.
That's a plus.
The inebriate may confabulate on the fly, but I have the leisure to accommodate to my stiffenings and mental transgressions while I work on any number of means to compensate for the loss.
It's a hobby.
This brings me back to "the other stuff" -- the ageing and all the surprises in my family's gene pool. If the Fibromyalgia wasn't bad enough, I have to deal with the dead hand of past generations!
I have to say that I would have preferred better parents and a healthier pedigree.
I'm no genetic determinist* but my Fibromyalgia has set me up to be visited by some of the skeletons in my family's closet.
I guess that's the joke played on all of us: we can go so far until the leash tightens and you become an offspring still tied to the family tree.
* 'I'm no genetic determinist' was originally written as 'I'm know genetic determinist.' Thus my brain deteriorates in Fibro mode. For now I can correct most or some of these mistakes. (But who am I to talk? How do I know?)
