A Little Kindness

Becoming my parent's primary caregiver over the last year increased my stress and increased my fatigue. I started to wonder how do others deal with fibromyalgia? Are their symptoms like mine? Are they worse? Are they better? Have they found any treatment that is geniunely successful? Those thoughts were the premise for this book.

Fibromyalgia is a strange condition. For me, it is more annoyance than anything else. For others it affects every aspect of their lives. I've lived with the diagnosis of fibro for over 10 years, but I never paid that much attention to it. I'd get tired, I'd get achy, and sometimes my gastrointestinal track launches a major offensive. The bouts of IBS occasionally lay me flat, but the pain and fatigue I can usually work through if needed.

For those who are completed debilitated by fibro, there are often other problems as well. I have interviewed people with severe back problems, lupus, narcolepsy, and psoriatic arthritis. For them, fibro is just the icing on the cake. Their other problems are much greater.

It is so easy to say to yourself, "look at what that person eats. Look at how lazy he is. No wonder he has problems." To some extent that might be true, but the thing about fibro is if you could prevent it through proper diet and exercise, I wouldn't have it. It's like the old chicken and the egg argument. Are they overweight and out-of-shape because they hurt so much they can't exercise, or did they get fibro because they are overweight and out-of-shape. I do believe that proper diet and exercise keep my symptoms at  a minimum.

Often fibromyalgia is thought to have a triggering event such as a major accident or illness. Does that mean you're doomed to get fibro if you're in a serious car accident? A friend of mine worried about this. She feared another friend would develop fibro because she had a bad skiing accident. The problem with this logic is that millions of people experience these types of events and never develop fibro. Fibromyalgia only affects 1% to 5% of the population, so obviously there is something else involved.

Although there seems to be more and more evidence pointing to fibro as being a neurological dysfunction. The medical communty is still unable to determine a definite pathology. Before judging another person's appearance and lifestyle choices, we need to realize that fibro is not something easily preventable. It affects everyone differently. Unless we can occupy another person's body for awhile, we really don't know what anyone is feeling. We need to be kind to one another and listen.