I don’t really like to make any old year / new year stuff, but this time I thought it might be beneficial to show the yearly progress (regress?) of my dearest companion, fibromyalgia.  Last January I could walk with just one stick – now I need zimmer frame on wheels.  I could get up by myself, have a shower, get dressed and eat some proper food.  Now I can do none of these, and to add insult to injury, I can no longer even undress myself in the evening, so when I go to bed I just lie down in my cloths and wrap the side of the blanket of top of me.  I don’t remember when was it last that I slept in the bed rather than on top of it.  With eating, the list of what I shouldn’t eat is far longer than the list of what I’m allowed to; in fact, during 2012 I had six surgeries to keep the lower intestine “open”, plus a gastroscopy, when they had to knock me out and, funnily enough, they found a large sciatical hernia sitting (hanging?) just beside my stomach, so the result is that when I eat, the food sometimes goes into the stomach, sometimes – into the hernia.  And yes, I can tell the difference... 

 

What else is new? I have breathing problems which I didn’t have before; my varicose veins have spread from the calves to entire length of my legs; I lost feeling in the tips of my fingers, especially in the morning – it’s just pins and needles, nothing else; the right shoulder keeps jumping in and out of the joint; and the pain in my legs and my back (which is not helped by the fact, that one of my upper-lumber disks started to ‘click’ very painfully in and out) is so bad sometimes, that despite the fact that my pain threshold is very high – I can’t help crying. 

 

In fairness, if not for my friends and the assistance I get from the local Health Centre (I have assistants coming three mornings a week, to help me get up, shower, and get dressed, plus they do some shopping for me and some basic housework, which I no longer can do myself), my life would be one hell of a real hell on earth.  The strangest thing of all is that fibromyalgia is – by some doctors – regarded as “a condition” rather than “an illness”.  But this “condition” is proving far more difficult to live with than many illnesses that I had a doubtful pleasure to go through, chronic migraines or cancer including.  Yes, I do mean what I just sad: I had cancer before, I survived it and I survived radiation, which to say the least was not a pleasant experience.  And yet, it was and is much easier to cope with and to live with than “the condition” of fibromyalgia.

 

Anyway, for the moment I’m still alive, despite odd times when I feel I have had enough of this circus and I’m ready to go...