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.