Looking at myself looking ill is not something I like seeing. So, come hell or high water, no matter how rough I feel I ‘always’ make the effort with how I look. I honestly think that it helps me feel better than I am.
It’s not the first time that someone has said how well I looked ‘considering’ I am ‘supposed’ to be in so much pain !!!! Our looks don’t fit with how we truly feel. I’m not really sure ‘ how I am supposed to look’, but it’s not very nice when someone says that to you.
At the end of the day, people in chronic pain have to get on with their lives. We don’t walk around with a message across our forehead saying ‘I’m in pain’, and we don’t want everyone making a fuss. But, why would you say you are in pain if your not? I don’t know about you but I don’t want to walk around looking sick because when I do look sick, it draws attention to me that I really don’t like.
It’s actually the other way around with me, the minute I’m pain free everyone knows about it and I enjoy life to the full while I can.
Fibromyalgia, in particular has been labelled an ‘imaginary’ condition for far to long and only recently have I felt I could talk about it as though it was a genuine problem of mine. The difficulty I have is that a lot of my spinal pain is similar to Fibromyalgia so I have tended to blame it all on my back but deep down I have known it was actually the Fibro that was causing it.
Why should we feel like we are ‘faking’ it sometimes when the last thing we want in PAIN. Some skeptics should try living with it 24/7 to see how it feels no matter how small or how overwhelming the pain is. As far as pain from Fibromyalgia is concerned they do now say that “Instead of being in the brain, the pathology consists of excessive sensory nerve fibers around specialized blood vessel structures located in the palms of the hands,” said Dr. Rice, President of Intidyn and the senior researcher on the study. “This discovery provides concrete evidence of a fibromyalgia-specific pathology which can now be used for diagnosing the disease, and as a novel starting point for developing more effective therapeutics”. Dr. Rice continued, “We previously thought that these nerve endings were only involved in regulating blood flow at a subconscious level, yet here we had evidence that the blood vessel endings could also contribute to our conscious sense of touch… and also pain.”
Fibromyalgia isn’t a new condition, in fact it has existed for centuries. Healthline wrote, ‘it was once considered a mental disorder. But in the early 1800s, it was classified as a rheumatoid disorder that caused stiffness, pain, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping.
Fibromyalgia tender points were discovered in the early 1820s. The condition was initially called fibrositis because many doctors believed pain was caused by inflammation throughout the body. It wasn’t until 1976 that the condition was renamed fibromyalgia. The name was derived from the Latin word “fibro” (fibrosis tissue), and the Greek terms for “myo” (muscle) and “algia” (pain).
In 1990 the American College of Rheumatology established guidelines for diagnosing fibromyalgia. The first prescription medication to treat it became available in 2007.
So, next time someone ‘implies’ you look very well considering you are supposed to be suffering from ‘Fibromyalgia’, say it’s because you have a positive attitude which obviously helps and life is to short to be miserable.
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