A Touch Belligerant

Today I am not a happy bunny. It's not smiles times. It's one of those days where there is no way for me to position myself without causing myself a mischief.


I've needed a lot of help from my beloved today. He hoisted me out of bed, helped me up and down the stairs, picked up my stick because I can't bend over, helped pick me up off the floor - it's like being drunk but without the traffic cone and smudged mascara. Shortly he will be helping me into the bath - I suspect the sight of my boobies may be the real reason behind this act of chivalry.

I am in pain. It's what I call a '100% day' - it doesn't get any worse than this. Well, it could. I could be Ashley Cole after Cheryl's finished with him.

Crippling illness is no excuse for crippling stupidity

Just as I was beginning to recover from my latest bad flare-up of Fibro (this week located in my lower back, left arm/armpit and left arse) I made the decision to wear my duvet-slippers whilst walking down the stairs. And promptly fell, setting my recovery back by at least a week.

Stupid bitch.

The Caffeine Myth?

For the past ten or so years, I've had a rather heavy-to-industrial-size coke problem.


I'm talking, of course, of Coca Cola - a point that I need to clarify for fear that I have just appeared on several government watch lists. Don't do drugs, kids. And I should also point out that the problems associated with a heavy cola intake are common to all brands of refreshing, energising cola fizzy pops. End of disclaimer.

Now, when I say that I drank a lot of cola, I mean to say that I drank cola almost exclusively. No other beverage would do. Even alcohol was shunned. We're talking two litres per day - none of this Diet crap. That's for pussies. Real women drink the full fat stuff.

The toll, they say, is a heavy one. I didn't feel the effects of the souped-up sugary goodness and got to the point where I couldn't even sleep without a hit.



My taste buds were so refined I could tell the difference between six brands blindfold - a claim I proved to my students by means of a test, back in my teaching days. Don't ever try to show off to 30 teenagers by mixing the dregs of six different brands into one glass and downing it. Projectile vomiting doesn't impress anyone.

With excess sugar comes excessive weight and fewer teeth. My body having taken something of a battering in these areas over the past decade has meant that everyone I know tries to persuade me against the demon drink on a regular basis. As any addict knows, it's annoying to be regularly reminded that the thing you like is also the thing which is doing you the most harm.

There are, reportedly, links made between Fibromyalgia and the consumption of caffeine. This pisses me off. The one time I get an illness/disability I can't even drum up a decent amount of sympathy without someone pointing out that they told me so. But the facts are there. Caffeine aggravates Fibro - the nth reason for me to give up cola.

The irony is, in 2008 (January, I recall - probably the world's only semi-successful resolution) I managed to get off the cola. In February I had what I now recognise as my first Fibro attack. I stayed off the cola for almost eight months, losing two stone of blubber but gaining, in the process, a crippling life-long illness. Not sure that this is a fair trade-off... By August 08 I was in full Fibro mode and, after a stressful September, the coke came back.

Last week I decided to make another stab at coming off the coke. I'll admit the reasons were fairly altruistic - I wanted to be skinny again (living with your family will do that to you). Within 5 days I had the first full blown, 100% badassness Fibro attack in four months - the first bad flare-up since moving back to Exeter. Is there a link? Can coincidence really be this cruel?

I won't pretend that it's not entirely likely that Fibro may have been caused by a decade of cola-abuse. I may never know the full extent of the harm that I have done to my body. But even so, I'm a good person. I refuse to believe that I am somehow deserving of this punishment just because of my weakness for a fizzy drink millions consume daily. But punishment it is, as this week has been unbearable.

But I will stick by my anti-cola resolve. If I relapse, you'll next hear from me scrabbling through your garbage, shouting at the pigeons and trying to lick the syrup from your recycling.

Some days...

There are some days when you can barely look anyone in the eye because you don't want them to know how much you are in despair. There are some days when you can hardly lift your arm, days when your hands spasm uncontrollably and feel so numb that just trying to grip something leaves you sick with frustration. Days when just a trip to the launderette means that you have to have a sleep in the afternoon to recover. Days when you lie in bed, surrounding by things to keep you occupied but unable to do anything except look at the ceiling and blink back tears. There are days when you can't be funny or put on a brave face because the plans you've made for your life don't apply anymore, and you don't know where you should go from here. Days when you realise that you need to move back in with your family because you, at age 29, cannot cope alone, even with the help of your beloved. Wondering if you'll ever work again, or have kids, or even have the energy to plan more than one day ahead.

In two weeks my beloved and I will be moving in with my family, on the other side of the country. I know it will help. I look forward to being close to my parents, sisters and their families. But some days it's hard to know you're going backwards, wondering if you'll ever be able to have your life again.

Oooh matron!

God dammit I was sick this morning. Woke up to PAIN! Why my body insists on waking me up just to say "By the way madam, today's pain will be located in the torso area, wouldn't want you to miss it," I'll never know. If it's not careful, I'm going to punish it with another tattoo.

Spent the hours between 6am and 8am going from bed to toilet (fruitless) to bed again, thrashing around in agony, in too much pain to even cry, repeating my well-worn mantra of "I don't know how much more of this I can take." My stomach swelled to three times its size - kinda like the Grinch's heart, but without the associated candy canes and annoying Canadian comedian (Jim Carrey's Canadian, right?)

Managed to vomit most spectacularly (any phobias I had about being sick have long since departed - now I understand how bulimics do it) and, examining the underside of my toilet realised how grubby it is. No wonder I'm sick. My parents' toilet is much cleaner - I look forward to next being sick at their house.

I mention this because IBS, I found out the other day, is associated with fibromyalgia, so now I have an excuse to talk about my bowel movements which, I think, means I've turned into Kenneth Williams.

And just to leave you with this bon mot, and something interesting for the search engines to pick up on, taking 32 tablets per day (I counted 'em) really turns things chemically inside you. When I burp I swear I can taste plutonium. And everything smells hazardously chemically - vom', wee, etc.

Oh joy.

Bringing you up to speed

I hadn't intended to leave such a long time between posts and have, in fact, composed some devastatingly witty and insightful posts on living with this condition. Unfortunately, they were composed entirely in my head, so you'll have to take my word for it.

So, what have I been up to since last I wrote? Jesus, I can't remember, it's been, like, a month! My fibro flare-up has been calming down, I'll say that much. Unfortunately it has been a helluva ride - I'm sorry to have denied you the pithy insights that my torturous pain has afforded me. Must try harder!

I've been ill. Pretty badly ill actually. I'm not entirely sure how all of my more recent illnesses relate to fibromyalgia, but I'm going to go into them anyway, should there be a link (there probably is). And this section will be entitled:

Ailments of the stomach and bowels.

I have now be diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). For those of you not familiar with IBS (do such people exist? Surely everybody in Christendom has been diagnosed with IBS by now) IBS in itself is not actually an illness. Not really. It's what you get diagnosed with when Crohn's disease, stomach cancer, food poisoning and gastroenteritis have been ruled out* - basically, it can encompass any stomach complaint ranging from 'a bit bloated' to 'a puking, shitting, shivering mess'.
My Dr, in a move which I haven't yet decided was helpful or not, has prescribed me with Spasmodal (possibly the greatest name for a medication ever, now nicknamed as my 'Spas-tablets'). This was good as I have been suffering excessively and was even followed by a Waterstones employee asking me if I needed any help whilst I was acting in a suspicious manner in the medical book section of the store (when all I was really doing was trying to find a quiet place to fart). Since taking them I have felt a 50% reduction in rampaging trots but am now experiencing chronic nausea. This is not pleasant. It occurs mostly (but not exclusively) between the hours of midnight and 11am and has been so frequent that I have had to take a pregnancy test, just to be sure. I'm not pregnant - a relief, but more on that another day. This sickness is bad - it's a horrible situation to be in when you're often bent over the toilet coughing yourself to the point of retching, trying to be sick because you know it's the only thing that will make you better (whilst managing to negate the healing effects of the other meds you have to take). Admittedly some improvement was made on staggering each of my doses rather than taking the tramadol, ibroprufen, spasmodal and paracetamol all at once several times a day, but last week I was hit with an unexpected bout of sickness whilst staying with my family that left me whimpering to my dad "I don't feel very weeeeeellllll!" at 6am before re-emerging from the bathroom smelling like sick and smiling weakly.

Since then I have been hit by this twice more, both at night and both ensuring that I was sobbing onto my beloved until finally falling asleep at 5am, praying for death.

I've discussed this at length with my beloved, my parents and my friend/ex-boss B and it seems that my IBS is generally triggered by dairy products. This is a bad thing for me as dairy is my favourite type of food after meat (and lots of it). Omitting it from my diet has helped with the trots but not with the sickness. So I was back at the Drs yesterday to get more drugs for that!

I'd be interested in knowing how many other fibromyalgia sufferers also suffer from stomach related complaints. Sometimes I find it hard to tell whether or not I'm suffering from this mythical IBS or if I'm experiencing fibro attacks in the muscles around my digestive system. It makes sense to me.

Anyhoo, I'm going to go down today to pick up the new tablets and hope that they will stop me from spewing through the early hours although, if past experience is anything to go by, they'll probably just give me another illness complication to contend with.

* Do not trust my blog for medical facts and opinions unless I specifically state that I have the information from a trustworthy source. I am, after all, the girl who genuinely believed that a device had been invented that would allow DVDs to be projected onto the ceiling by spinning them on a finger-worn device really fast. Also, I read The Mirror.

To sit or not to sit...

My arse is a contrary thing. I wish sometimes it would pick a side and stick with it. When I was a teenager it was pert and round and, I am assured, quite popular. "Go ahead, eat the chocolate," it said. "I'll always be this way." Lying sonofa... Nowadays even the most softened of descriptions would have the word 'plump' somewhere within.

Whether my butt is deliberately out to get me is up for debate, but it has certainly proven to be a willing colluder with the dread illness Fibromyalgia. Oh, the ample opportunities my ample derrier has now been afforded to torment me with. Numbness in the left cheek. Muscle strain. Pins and needles. And the pain - oh the pain! It's like sitting on an evil genius (something which I had hoped would only ever be reserved for Jason Isaacs' Lucious Malfoy).

Today the butt has been trying my patience again. When I woke up this morning, after a particularly bad few days, I felt pretty good. A bit of pain in the old left leg which meant I'd have to use old faithful, Sticky the walking stick (whilst I am quite happy to christen my inanimate possessions I draw the line at going through the efforts of creativity when naming them) I knew that I'd be able to get through the day with only a moderate limp. As I have a little work on at the moment I would have to grin and bear it, but the long (2 hour) commute into work would swiftly be rewarded with a four-hour sit down, broken up by three 5-minute-long breaks when I could stretch my legs if needs be. Sitting down - a bit of an effort when in full Fibro flare-up but once you're down you're down and only the process of standing will draw attention to you as a huffing and puffing cripple. In short, the resting of the body is welcome and not the worst discomfort (unless you're sitting on a giant spike, in which case you should probably reconsider a life as a circus freak until after the flare-up has passed).

Feeling very much under scrutiny after having had to take a few random days off work over the last fortnight, I did my best to be breezy, wanting to give off signals that shouted: 'I'm doing fine today, nothing I can't handle; look, see - I'm not a malingering git!' Then I sit down with my first student. Comfy. Ahhhh, bliss - take the weight off my dead leg. The hour passes - shit, I can't stand up.

I stoically waved my student away and heaved my carcasse up of the chair using the table as a ballast. Emboldened by the table not collapsing, I lunged for Sticky and experimentally staggered a few paces until I could straighten my back. My boss stuck her head round to smile and say "Oh good, your leg's looking better!"

'We'll see," thinks my bum.

By the end on the morning my left arse seems to have calcified. I cannot move my leg as a should. The muscle around my hip has frozen so tightly that I have to remind myself of old biology lessons and diagrams of hip joints. Ball and socket. My leg should be moving, even with pain. But no - the pain is there, so excruciating that I can barely lift my foot a centimetre from the ground. I have to stand at an angle even to do that. I now shuffle a lot slower than I did this morning and by God, if I move a fraction too far my pain receptors know about it. I drag my sorry ass to the tube station, get a seat on the tube, nearly miss my stop when I (almost) fail to haul myself back up again in time then have to rest in Paternoster square for 20 minutes. I get up and this time I sat right. I'm cured!

For about an hour, until I've been home for 20 mins. Now I have to be levered in and out of bed by my beloved.