Fibromyalgia
I’m a relatively healthy guy. Most of the aches and pains I experience are from doing stupid things in my youth, that are now showing up as I get older.
My wife Bonnie and I just celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary. To look at her you’d think, first, she doesn’t look her age (52) and second, she looks positively healthy. In fact for most of our lives together we’ve been very outgoing and outdoorsy people. Hiking and camping were regular activities along with swimming and other sports. But within the last 5 years things changed quite a bit. She was no longer able to do long hikes when we went camping. During our travels around the country visiting cities that we love, she couldn’t handle walking around and sight-seeing for very long. Then she began to come home from work, exhausted and would say that she needed to take a short nap, which began to turn into naps that lasted until the next morning, or if she didn’t have to work the following day, a two day nap.
After many doctor visits and testing by specialists and quite a few mis-diagnoses including Irritable Bowel Syndrome, possible Crohn’s Disease, maybe Lupus maybe not, it was confirmed she has fibromyalgia. So now we were at least able to put a name to the symptoms and problems that she was having and that had changed her life so dramatically.
And on top of all this, she has started menopause, so she now has a double whammy and additional symptoms to deal with on a daily basis. Hot flashes and constant pain don’t go very well together.
It’s not an easy condition to deal with and I know it’s horrible for her, and sometimes all you can do is just listen. Even the myriad of medications she is on are only able to ease her symptoms, but they don’t effectively fix anything and we don’t know if they ever will. So for now she has good days and bad days, and I had to realize that I can’t fix her, all I can do is love her and try to comfort her as best I can and try not to think selfishly about not being able to do certain things with her any longer.
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