Understand Fibromyalgia flares, their symptoms, common triggers, and effective strategies to manage and reduce flare-ups for a better quality of life.
Stress makes mess Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a super spectacular stress free holiday season. So sorry that I disappeared but it’s been a rather extended round of not quite major and not quite minor flares… hmm maybe I’ll call it a “round” of flares. No, I’ve got it! The spinning wheel of stress n’ pain; spin it while you sleep, and wake up in the morning to a stressful, painful SURPRISE. Click…
Venturing out of my abode got me thinking about fickle fibromyalgia pain. Recently I have been thinking about the variety of FM symptoms because some of them overlap with chronic migraine symptoms such that I don’t know which is the cause… such as vertigo; migraine-associated vertigo or FM-related vertigo, or the balance problems and even the sensitivity to sound and light. The thing is FM came first and migraines later and then chronic migraines so…
Fibromyalgia is a chronic syndrome defined by widespread muscle pain, fatigue, sleep dysfunction, and cognitive dysfunction. Fibromyalgia pain dysfunction involves increased sensitivity to pain known as hyperalgesia. People with Fibromyalgia can experience what is referred to as ‘flares’ where their symptoms get more severe. The flare study A survey in Pain Medicine recently looked into the nature of flares to ask people with Fibromyalgia the nature of these flares. They asked open-ended questions to determine…
Brain fog is a symptom of many chronic illnesses and chronic pain. Just seems that when we get ill and our bodies get fatigued or are fighting pain, or both, add in some lack of sleep… you get brain fog. Symptoms include: I listed some of them there but really there can be more. For example, transposing numbers is also transposing letters so we can spell words wrong frequently. As well as of course forgetting…
The Flare-up (see here for my article on it) is one of the worst fibromyalgia experiences. I fell into it sometime last night and woke up with the most unpleasant pains. In the hips, shoulders, and back, not to mention all over aches. I was very fatigued yesterday and perhaps that was some prediction of impending doom. Here is the thing we can pace and moderate but we cannot avoid all flares. Sometimes they just…
I have been struggling with work lately. And by lately I mean always. Always struggling to function through the pain. Always not quite doing it. My psychologist said well I cannot compare apples to oranges. I cannot compare myself to people doing the same job perfectly healthy. Nor to myself when I was healthy-er. And it did occur to me that this job I am now doing wouldn’t even be a challenge to me when…
The Spanish study in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology called “Cognitive complaints in women with fibromyalgia: Are they due to depression or to objective cognitive dysfunction?” recurited105 women with fibromyalgia for their analysis. Fibromyalgia is characterized by widespread pain, cognitive dysfunction, sleep dysfunction and fatigue. However, the cognitive dysfunction of fibrofog with its concentration issues has not always been thought of to be from the FM. Studies have shown it is from the…
Last week I found myself in the worst flare of my life. After a month of mounting stress, marital grumblings, and the sheer psychosis of living chronically ill I hit bottom. Bottom when you have Fibromyalgia really hurts. So I proceeded to walk around stooped over like a little old lady holding my lower back, wailing and crying and gnashing my teeth over how absolutely awful everything was. Then the anger I try so hard…
” So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us”, Gaston Bachelard A flare-up, a word for an acute attack of fibromyalgia, can be very alarming if it seems to come out of the air without warning. Even after years of living with fibromyalgia I can become overwhelmed with anxiety about an episode that I can’t account for. Sometimes the flare-up is in a localized area of my body, for example, this…
Fibro-Rash! Is this really a thing you ask? Yes, apparently it is a thing. If you have trouble with any kind of rash all over your body and you have Fibromyalgia, you could also have Fibro-Rash. I just visited my dermatologist because my rheumatologist wanted me to rule out psoriatic arthritis. I have had itchy skin for many years and just thought it was my dry skin. It turns out that it is really folliculitis,…