This week I was lucky enough to celebrate another birthday, and every year on my birthday I like to have an adventure day to celebrate the fact that I'm not dead yet, and there is still lots of life out there to live and experiences to enjoy. It's a day that I take for myself to celebrate having made it this far as well as to celebrate the possibilities that the future holds.
As I'm sure you can tell from my dedication to an annual adventure day, I'm a person who likes to explore and see new things and have adventures, but my body, especially as time goes on, is making the ability to do those things more and more elusive. Living with a chronic illness like Fibromyalgia means adjusting to the changes that inevitably come with it, and for me, my love of adventure is one of those things that has needed some adjustment. For me, having Fibromyalgia (along with a few other health concerns) means I don't have as many adventures or experiences as I used to, or as many as I would like, but one thing it doesn't mean is that those experiences can't be had- it just means that they need more planning than they used to.
0 Comments
This week I decided to go to a Love Languages workshop/discussion lead by our local G3 branch (Gather/Grow/Go) and it lead to several moments that left me feeling really good about being open about my Fibromyalgia- which, let's face, is almost never the case. Usually I feel less-than, judged, defeated, or any number of unpleasant emotions after getting real about life with Fibro, but I'm new to the area and am looking to build relationships, and I was legitimately interested in the topic, so before I went I took a moment to set the intention of being open and honest during this talk- and I think it made all the difference.
Moving sucks. There is no way to slice it. The packing, the taping, the hair pulling while moving around boxes to make room for more boxes, hauling your stuff from place to place, unpacking, trying to figure out which box “that one thing” is in, and more often than not, living out of boxes for longer than any human really should because in the end you usually give up on unpacking at least once before you’re done. Now imagine you suffer from chronic pain and you have to deal with all this with a body that may or may not be up to the task.
Unfortunately, the unpleasantness of large tasks such as moving are compounded for those of us living with a chronic condition like Fibromyalgia. The long hours and mental/physical stress of the process can trigger our already active symptoms, cause them to 'flare-up' and possibly even trigger other symptoms on top of what you already deal with on the daily- thus making an already arduous process overwhelmingly difficult. I recently got into a minor car accident, nothing major, nothing that needed reporting, and at the time I felt fine. Well, no different than usual. But as the days went on I slowly got more and more sore, felt more and more pain, had less and less energy.
At first I didn't think anything of it, when your days are filled with pain all day every day it's hard to tell if the pain you're feeling is new, or significant. (Which is a problem in and of itself, but a topic for another day.) After almost a week of, "why am I getting worse?" and "ugh, I feel like I got hit by a car," it finally hit me- girl, you did get hit by a car! Your body got shaken up, and now you're paying for it, thanks Fibro! We all know the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Whether we've actually gone through the stages ourselves or know them strictly via hear-say, the idea is a common one in our culture today- to the point where most people can name at least a few of the stages of grief, if not all of them, if asked.
I, like nearly 10 million other Americans, suffer from Fibromialgia. My main symptoms are chronic pain and chronic nausea (the nausea is actually a by-product of the pain as that is how my body reacts to the stress of being in constant pain), and today was not a good day.
|
Categories:
All
Archives:
December 2019
|
Proudly powered by Weebly