How the common cold effects Fibromyalgia

Today the neuralgia (? if thats what this is) combined with the fibromyalgia and have stolen my energy. The night before was long and painful as I was up crying, and holding all the parts that hurt. The electric flares up and down my spine shooting to my ears, head, hands, feet, back, and chest. It was one of those nights when the pain is so bad that you can't fight tears and fears at the same time and so they both rush you and flood your systems. After getting 4 hours of sleep between the crying, the shooting pains and coughing. It wasn't till later when I was reminded that the endocrinologist I just waited 2months to see was sick last week when I saw her. Most likely, I have ironically caught a cold from my Dr.... Colds are different for people like me though, they affect all my systems. 

                         

A cold for someone with fibromyalgia, is like a child in a room full of buttons and being told not to push them. The curiosity over comes them, turning the pain nob up and pushing the thyroid leaver back and forth, twisting the temperature up and down, seeing what happens when nerve buttons are played with like a whack-a-mole game. You get the picture..... its not fun. When a cold hits its best to rest, realize limitations and give your body the extra care it needs. 

I had big plans for today, I was going to go to class, write 2 papers, go to my volunteer hours with Victim Services, and help train a new volunteer. I had big plans...its date night too...yet I am confined within my body and plans will have to wait. I will sit in this pain today and ride out the storm as that is all that one can do. But on another note, while in this pain I wonder where is the line I should not cross? How will I know when it gets to bad and I should go in to the Dr and seek medical help? The trouble with being in this kind of pain is that I didn't feel my gallbladder when it got bad enough to go in, I am in a constant state of pain that I no longer recognize when I should seek help. I went into a emerge after the pain became unbearable, they drugged me, and after a couple of hours of blood tests  (and five different needles) they concluded that the flu/ sinus infection had aggravated the already inflamed trigeminal nerve and fibromyalgia. I was sent home with stronger pain killers and no resolution. This is the risk of going in, because when its chronic they have difficult ruling out symptoms as it more often than not all comes on at once with no key answer.
All I know is that today is a rough day, when the shirt I am wearing hurts my skin, everything hurts intensely and I am at a 9.5/10 and my normal is 7 so I wait. With high hopes of it subsiding and going on with my day. Until then, I shall alternate between knitting, and curling into a ball to cry. 

While I'm like this I like to distract myself with hilarious things that I find amusing. I find that laughter is the best medicine for pain, as just because I am stuck in this body does not mean my mind is trapped too. Your mind can be a powerful tool which allows you freedoms you may not be able to reach just yet. However you can still learn new skills while your body is in pain, if you allow it to. Languages, knitting, crochet, courses on any number of things, and of course TED Talks, your brain can be used to learn breathing techniques to deal with the pain better. And on days when you are not sick you may have a new language to try out, or a scarf to keep you warm when you finally get out and about. Its easy to get depressed about your situation when sickness hits someone already dealing with chronic illness, its hard to get back up but I promise you you can. I have fallen many times but gotten back up, at the moment I'm wiped out by a tiny flu bug and will continue to fight to get back up. The flu can send someone with chronic conditions into the hospital as there are more risks involved. While I am down I work hard on essays for classes, and focus on what I can do, thats the hard part. Our brains naturally focus on what we lost, or are losing, but challenge yourself to get back up, to look at what is still possible. I feel as though my motto for life is like this picture these days:

~ElysiaB

P.S.    A few pictures I found funny:

Blood Work Advancements

Advancements in blood work analysis excites me, because I've been a glorified lab rat or chronic pain patient, with multiple things that need routine checking. (such as various thyroid levels, iron levels, crp, ana, ena etc.) I've had to learn what different lab results mean, through wikipedia, and other medical research websites. But at the end of the long medical jargon definitions and explanation of numbers I am almost always left asking what are my tests really telling me?

Its great that there have been ways like www.myehealth.ca to find out online what my new test results are, but there may be an easier way to understand what they mean. It's one thing to have it accessible but its even better to have it legible and understandable. It's like having a book thats been translated from Arabic to English. Go read this article about Blood Tests getting a makeover and becoming more readable to the average joe. I just read it, and it excites me because it could be a large medical advancement causing patients to understand results in a simple way.

It means I can now make sense of the numbers in a way that I understand without having to spend hours reading up on a tiny test. Or trying to understand what the Dr said with his big words. At the end of which I would have wasted hours trying to interpret inconclusive results. All in all, its definitely worth checking it out for yourself, cause this is pretty awesome! When your done looking come back and let me know what are your thoughts are on it all? Below I've posted some of the pictures and feel free to use them and interpret your own tests, with the help of them. Also a handy tool to use in this discovery process is a converter to understand your levels in the right measurements. For example my levels of HDL were in mmol/l but with this handy converter I could type in my results and get it converted to mg/dl which is what these charts are in.  

"The Basic Workup : The standard blood workup takes more than 30 measurements and can go on for more than four pages. All sorts of things can turn up in the report; the challenge for physician and patient alike is to find the signal within the noise."

"The Heart Disease Test

Alongside cholesterol tests and high-blood-pressure monitoring, the c-reactive protein, or CRP, test is widely used to spot people at risk for heart disease, the leading cause of death in the US."

"The Prostate Test

Short for prostate-specific antigen, the PSA test is one of the most common workups for men over 40—even though its reliability as a predictor of prostate cancer is controversial."

There is an article here about making this a reality.
The man behind the ideas company is here.
~ElysiaB