Raise awareness about chronic illnesses by understanding their impact, symptoms, and the importance of support and education.
You’re sitting in the doctor’s office, being told you have an incurable illness. Maybe you have to leave your career, or pull back on your workload, with set accommodations. You can’t live up to being the involved wife, parent, sister, or daughter you planned on being. Travel becomes difficult, athletic ability falls off, and favorite hobbies or pastimes become more challenging. But mostly you just don’t feel like you. A period of grief ensues over…
The world lost a woman yesterday.A boy lost his grandmother, three people lost their mother and a man lost his wife.This woman was a pistol, tough and strong and a force to be reckoned with.I grew up with her tales of adventure, living overseas while young and newly married, her husband in the military.I learned of a day in 1929 when this girl took a shoebox of money she was saving to the bank, to…
Either that or this terrible impatience and frustration and I kinda have to admit, pure anger pouring out of me is the premonition of a flare. But I have to say all I do is look around at the wreckage that is my life and get really pissed off. The dust bunnies are having babies, getting my carpet cleaned has only made it dirtier, not that I ever vacuum. The laundry needs to be done,…
Causes of FM/CFS: Scientific Basis for the Gupta Program The premise of the Gupta program is that fibromyalgia (FM) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME) are caused by abnormalities in the functioning of brain structures that process physical and emotional threats to the body. However, connections in the brain are not fixed and can be rewired. Neuroscientists call this process “neuroplasticity”. The program was created by Ashok Gupta, who suffered from ME/CFS himself, but has since…
Part I: From Onset to Diagnosis For Fibromyalgia Awareness Month, I wanted to share my illness journey here on the blog. My story starts eight years ago. It wasn’t a climactic beginning. It was just achy low back pain that got worse the longer I sat writing my M.A. thesis. It seemed like a common enough problem to have, except for the fact that I was 23. The nurse told me to take ibuprofen 24/7 and…
Like an ‘invisible illness, Fibromyalgia is difficult to diagnose. The symptoms of Fibromyalgia overlap with many other chronic pain conditions, which is why receiving an official diagnosis is often problematic. If you have Fibromyalgia, you will experience widespread pain. This may be felt throughout the entire body or could be worse in certain areas, such as the back or neck. The pain is likely to be prolonged and unpredictable; there will be times when it…
Fibromyalgia and celiac disease are two debilitating conditions that prove to be extremely difficult to live with. Some symptoms of both conditions overlap and are very similar. In this blog, we look at the connections between the two conditions and how they may be related to one another. Fibromyalgia is a complex, long-term chronic condition with a multitude of different symptoms, including widespread pain all over the body, and without a single known cause.Many people…
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on”, Robert Frost My friend has become my guru for updates on research regarding pain. I take hope because of her personal struggles with the issues surrounding living with acceptance in lieu of catastrophizing. Daily pain is exhausting, depletes our energy, and leaves us with a sense of hopelessness. Each new symptom (and there are many) can be like taking one…
” The biology of pain is never straightforward, even when it appears to be”, Lorimer Moseley I thought I knew it all: fibromyalgia is a constant hyper-arousal of the central nervous system and all the symptoms that evolve from that disorder. But recently I met with an internist who held my hand’s palms upward and told me she would have known I had fibromyalgia just by looking at my palms which are pink! I have…
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”, Leonard Cohen–Anthem Cannabinophobia has resulted in a frenzy of political, medical, social, and cultural chaos for generations in spite of the fact that this herb has been around for 38 million years. Prohibition against cannabis usage has resulted in billions of dollars spent trying to stop its usage; hundreds of lives have been destroyed because of arrests, labeling them as criminals while governments have wasted their…