THE MAKING OF THE FIBRO CAKE

It's amazing how a chronic illness can change you. You make plans and your body seems to sense that you need something else. You want to go beyond the borders of this invisible disease and right away, your body will betray you. The plans I now make are filled with exit contingencies, attendance caveats and anything else I can possible think of so that if the pain is unmanageable, I don't have to go.

Chronic pain chips away at the person called ME. It changes you. Some changes are for the worse and a few are for the better. I think I've realized what I want and who I am however the implementation gets a little fuzzy. So as the humidity rises and falls, I am again incapacitated.

Most people have no clue about this invisible illness. First and foremost there's the pain, then the unrelenting fatigue, the ever-annoying brain fog. I have low body temperature ( 97.1), low blood pressure, leg spasms that make me want to take a baseball bat to them. I feel like a vampire because my eyes are so sensitive to light. I am a human barometer. I struggle to remember information and do memory puzzles so that the few brain cells that I have I want to keep. Then there's sleep. What sleep?

Trigger points are tender? Sounds like chicken. Forget it, they hurt like hell. There are days, like today, that I can't stand to even be touched.

So lets make this Fibro cake.

Let's take the Type A personality

Add some obsessive compulsive tendencies

Add a dash of perfectionism

Throw in changes in lifestyle, divorce and subsequent financial issues

Mix well

Then add high pressure selling, hard and long hours and endless quotas.

Let this simmer for years.

Add menopause, mononucleosis, accident trauma.......

Finally it's done.

Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue will be served up momentarily.