The Good With The Bad

I’m having an incredibly bad fibro day. The pain started yesterday evening and just kept increasing until everything hurt. I do mean everything. Even my butt cheek muscles seem to be screaming out in pain. Last night I couldn’t even pet my poor dog because just the task of lifting up my arm to make the petting motion was agony.

And I didn’t sleep well at all last night. The Flexeril didn’t appear to do any muscle relaxing and the Melatonin didn’t make me sleepy enough to be able to sleep through the pain. I couldn’t find a comfortable position because everywhere hurt and no matter which way I tried to lay on the bed, this or that limb or muscle group complained angrily.

So, I’m cranky today and I don’t feel like being on a diet or sticking to my 12oz of caffeine or drinking 24oz of water.

Read the rest of this entry »

Big Butts & Accomplishments

I guess you could tell I’ve been a little out of sorts for the last week. I’ve actually been mulling over some grumpiness since my last therapy visit on the 4th. I went to my session feeling kind of proud of myself for everything I’d accomplished since the last session about a month before when I’d basically decided that I wasn’t going to let my depression “define” me. I had come to the conclusion around that time that my depression was reinforcing itself and I wanted to put a stop to that.

And I feel as if I’ve come a long way…or at least a way. I’ve been making a constant effort to clean my house, something that never seems to be done and never seems to be close to done and seems to be more like one step forward two steps back. (I still can’t figure out how my living room got so messy since I was only awake in it for about 2 hours yesterday and don’t recall doing anything in those 2 hours. It was clean on Sunday. And how does one person make so many dirty dishes and so much dirty clothes?)

And I had signed up for a couple of classes/lectures — one on Seasonal Affective Disorder and a six-week thing for people with chronic illnesses. I was very excited about the prospect of getting Pugly into the next training class and eventually agility training.

Really, except for my frustration with the fibro pain and my problems with communication with my GP and the Rheumatologist, I was in a fairly good mood overall as far as the direction I was heading. I thought I was making good progress and I was ready for my pat on the back and some support and sympathy for the communication issues.

Clearly, that’s not what happened.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sucking It Up With Help…Finally

The appointment with my GP yesterday afternoon went better than the one in the morning. I always feel better when I actually see her and not just her staff or a nurse practitioner. I’m just going to have to be more insistent about that in the future; I don’t care how busy she is. She was far more open-minded and understanding than the Rheumatologist, especially when I told her that I didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of care I felt I needed from him. I told her that I felt that his basic message to me was “Suck it up.”

Oh, yes, I get what he was saying about how we need to treat the depression and the sleep disorder and that will help the pain overall. I’m not stupid. I do understand the connection all of these things have to each other and how it’s easy to get caught in some sort of whirlpool drowning effect where the pain makes me more depressed which affects my sleep which causes more pain which makes me more depressed and so on… I got it and I told her all of that. However, I also said that I can’t foresee “sucking it up” if things continue as they are because things are only getting worse and not changing anything isn’t going to help matters as I see them. Certainly, I don’t see my depression getting better or my sleep improving if nothing is changed.

Read the rest of this entry »

26 Million Minutes

Over the weekend I read a well-written article in Health magazine by a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease. What I particularly liked was her thoughts on the inner-frustration, the fact that unlike other patients of well-known illnesses like cancer, you don’t have something growing inside of you to be angry about, to blame, to focus on; the thing attacking your body is you. It’s your own body that’s harming you and hurting you and slowly killing you in some form or the other and for the most part no one knows why or how to stop it. You have no one to blame but yourself and you don’t even get a ribbon or a badge or a parade or a march. In fact, most of the time, you’ll struggle to find a doctor who’ll give you the right diagnosis, if you find one that believes you at all — like a flashback to the days when PMS was all in our “pretty little heads” and the doctor would pat us on the head and smile patronizingly.

Read the rest of this entry »

MIA MDs

I was right about not hearing back from my GP after I sent that email. So after a week of not hearing from her office, I called there this morning and the front desk clerk told me that the email wasn’t even attached to my file (later the nurse insisted it was but that the clerk just hadn’t been looking in the right place. Riiiiight.) .

Anyway, I said that I didn’t understand the purpose of having an email option if no one was actually going to look at the email. I told them that I was under the misunderstanding that it was going to be looked at with in a day or so of it’s arrival and that the whole idea was that I’d be able to use it to be more specific that I could over the phone. I was upset because it had been a week and no one had even acknowledged that it had been received and that I had discussed a number of medical issues in it — one of which I felt had been mistreated by the nurse practitioner back in mid-July. On all of the issues, I was asking for advice and a change of medication. I told the nurse that I was extremely stressed out about my insomnia and pain problems.

To be honest I truly feel that I’m not being heard.

Read the rest of this entry »

Book Review: The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan

Friday night I finished reading The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan by Monica Reinagel and I figured what better place to share my opinion of the book than right here?

First of all, it’s important to note that the book is not written by a doctor. Also, since the copyright is 2006, I expected the book to talk about chronic inflammatory diseases such as Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but there wasn’t any mention about them. Reinagel focused on diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and aging. Since I suffer from Fibromyalgia and not diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s or cancer, I was disappointed. Despite my disappointment in my ailment being left out of the book entirely, I pushed onward.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seeing The Light

So I’m on day 5 of the light therapy experiment. I’m not particularly sure it’s working out the way it’s supposed to. I kind of got the impression from the bits of research I did that there would be some positive improvements right away even if they were small ones.

According to the directions, you are supposed to take an assessment at Apollo Health’s website. This determines the start-up schedule for using your light. For example, since my body naturally wants to wake up at 9am and I want to wake up about 6 or 6:30am every morning, it recommended starting on a Saturday with 15-30 minutes at 8am, then Sunday at 7am, then Monday at 6am and continuing from then on at 6am and eventually you may be able to go to every other day at 6am, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fighting The Fibromyalgia Backlash

I feel trapped in my own body today.

The backlash of accomplishing so much in so little time over last weekend is pain.

I assume this is the fibromyalgia; it must be. I’m told that normal people get over their aches and pains much quicker than this, so it must be the fibromyalgia. All that work I did on Friday and Saturday and here it is Tuesday and I feel just as sore if not more so.

Read the rest of this entry »

Revisiting Alternative Medicine

I’ve been thinking a lot about (re)focusing on alternative medicine lately as a means of improving my health. I got to thinking about it because of a bad experience at the doctor’s office where I didn’t see the actual doctor but a nurse practitioner who’s “advise” was basically useless. Plus, my anti-depressant medication doesn’t appear to be working anymore and I’m having a flare up with my fibromyalgia with the extreme heat and humidity from last week.

So, I pulled out the diet recommendations from the Alternative Med Doctors I saw last November and December when I got my IgAN and fibro diagnoses. I figured now was a good time to check in and review how I’m doing.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Pursuit of Sock Knitting

I spent most of the day watching DVDs and T.V. and trying to learn how to knit socks — in particular baby socks.

I had purchased a learn to knit socks kit from the internet with 5 double-pointed #2 needles, yarn, and instructions. I had read through the instructions the other night and reread them this morning and I thought that the first part — the casting on, the cuff, and the ankle — sounded fairly straightforward and easy.

That is until I tried to do it.

Casting on is extremely easy, unless of course you have bad fibromyalgia and your hands don’t want to work. Of course, my first thought was that I only had to do Casting on once…silly me.

I ended up having to Cast on about 20 different times today. I was fine after the casting on, I thought, until I had to do the k2tog (knit 2 together), which was a new knitting “stitch” or whatever you want to call it, for me.

Read the rest of this entry »