I know this comic has already been posted on lemmy. But it’s the only way that I feel captures my feeling, it’s like I live on an unspecified timer, everyday, after that I go back to the can.
There’s the constant pain, the lack of sleep and/or quality of sleep, waking up everyday like you’ve been run over by a train.
Then there’s the extra sensitivity, and the “electricity”, every time I sweat I feel an electric shock in my body. At many points, it feels like an active electric current is being run through my body, like I’m strapped to one of them electric execution chairs.
Then there are the constant brain fog/headaches, no matter what I seem to do, half of my brain is preoccupied with pain in random areas. My brain is like “Hey wassup, I know you’re trying to focus, or sleep, but your left leg is in a g o n y, because no reason really, maybe you moved too much. And so you have exceeded your uhhh free trial of leg for today.”
Depression comes in play too, either because I don’t go out much because of the pain, or because of the lack of sleep. And then depression fuels anxiety, and they fuel each other, and we have kick started our “mental doom engine.”
Then there’s the sleep. I have school coming up, it is absolutely necessary that I stick to a schedule, except that won’t happen. Because the only way for me to fall asleep, is to be at that point when you’re so sleep deprived that you can’t keep your eyes open. I have tried at many points to use this my advantage, but it seems like this point is almost always at 5 or 6 AM.
I have abandoned traditional art, and almost anything that involves the use of arms. I can type on the keyboard pretty comfortably because it requires only my wrists and fingers, but even that starts to hurt after a while.
And lastly, it is almost treated as an invisible disability. “Your limbs don’t seem to be broken/swelling”, “You’re not using crutches”, “You’re not on a wheelchair”, and “Fibro my what?”. I have been using sticks/staves/brooms in many situations to get up and move, and I use whatever object I can grab and get up with.
Since I grunt all the time, move slowly, use long objects all the time, I have always joked that I feel like an old person. As I’m writing this, my old person knee is acting up for no reason whatsoever, it just likes to be silly at times (night).
Tl;Dr: The comic I posted, I guess.
Thank you for reading.
EDIT
The good ending. All of the responses were to my surprise, overwhelmingly positive! I thank everyone who has commented with their own insights, I learned a lot, remembered a lot, and discovered a lot of things that would help me manage my pain. Thank you all, I wish you all the best of luck
What does that have to do with anything?
Fibromyalgia is a recent catch-all word for general aches and pains and fatigue that is only common (but not exclusively) in fat people, when no other causes can be found. The general cure for it is diet and exercise. The things fat people avoid. In other words, it’s usually a symptom of a poor lifestyle. With exceptions, of course.
You’re trying to lecture a chronically ill person on their condition and want to make it sound like it’s their own fault.
Cordially: Piss off!
If their chronic illness is because they’re fat and eat poorly, is it not their fault? All those doctors that always suggest for you to exercise and eat right aren’t saying it to just blow smoke up your ass. Go to the mayo clinics own website and look up treatment for fibromyalgia. It’s literally eat healthy, stretch, exercise, and get appropriate amounts of sleep. It’s generally a self caused illness, like most cases of type 2 diabetes.
Sorry if you want me to be nice about it or pretend it’s just bad luck for the person or be like “oh no, they can’t find any medicine that works to help”, but maybe they just need to hear the hard truth of it. If they want to get better, the8r isn’t a magic pill they should be looking for or something out of their control to blame. Diet and exercise. You didn’t and now you hurt. You want to stop hurting and physically and mentally feel better, you’ll have to actually put in the effort.
You are always welcome to suggest strategies that may help someone. Diet and exercise are important to keeping a health lifestyle, but do not guarantee health. A perfectly fit person will still experience pain when hit by a bus, and no amount of dieting or exercise can prevent that.
In contrast, telling a person that their entire medical condition is caused by them being fat and lazy while providing no assistance is inconsiderate and unhelpful.
I know people with fibromyalgia who were fit and healthy until their pain stole most of their life. Fibromyalgia is not just caused by excess weight. It is the catch-all term for a very large number of undiagnosable conditions, many of which are completely unrelated to lifestyle.
You have not helped anyone by writing this comment, and the world is no better off as a result of it.
Fibromyalgia is term for a wide range of conditions that couldn’t be diagnosed because doctors don’t understand any of them well enough. Weight has nothing to do with it.
You’re blaming someone’s pain on their weight without even seeing them, in a space where they are just trying to talk about it.
This is victim blaming. They did not cause their pain. It is a medical condition.
Weight has very much to do with it, as most patients diagnosed world wide are overweight or obese, and all studies done that I’ve seen show a link between increasing weight and severity of symptoms. Also, as I’ve already stated in this thread, the Mayo Clinic recommends treatment consisting of diet, exercise, weight loss, and stretching.
You can call it victim blaming if you want. I don’t know anything about OP other than they wouldn’t answer the weight question. For OP it might be completely not their fault, but it could be their own doing.
If I jump off a house and break my leg I’m not going to blame gravity. If I drink a 12 pack of mountain dew a day and develop type 2 diabetes I’m not going to blame the soda. Sometimes you’re a victim of yourself. Odds are that how OP feels is because of OP, because odds are they’re overweight and don’t regularly exercise.
I hope you never need to learn how wrong you are the hard way.