Fibromyalgia
If you are living with fibromyalgia pain, be assured that we understand and empathize with the challenges that you face every single day. The question of how you feel today is a multidimensional, multifaceted thing for fibromyalgia sufferers.
The morning could start off perfect, but in the back of your mind you know that it is at any given point that the pain could kick in, and you literally feel like you are falling apart.
Fibromyalgia pain may make you feel like others view you as unreliable or untrustworthy. This is because the unpredictable nature of the pain may cause you to frequently cancel appointments at the last minute. Fibromyalgia pain makes family relationships difficult. You may worry that your wife or that your husband no longer sees you as an enjoyable partner to be with but instead as a burden. There is the fear that your children do not see you as a source of strength or someone that they can have confidence in, but instead they see you as a mother or a father who is not like other moms or dads.One of the most emotionally taxing aspects of fibromyalgia pain is how it makes you feel like a prisoner inside of your own body.
Whether you are at work, out in public, watching a movie at a theater, or dining with friends, the sudden onset of pain can be so intense that you feel like you are going to explode, and yet there’s nothing you can do about it.
Many fibromyalgia sufferers have had the disheartening experience of talking about their condition with doctors and other medical professionals only to be branded as a complainer or as an attention seeking hypochondriac.
Fibromyalgia pain can leave you feeling like you can’t finish anything. You have a dinner that is halfway made, an art project that just started, laundry piling up around the house, and you constantly feel like you live your life dropping the ball. This is what fibromyalgia pain is.
What Is Fibromyalgia Related Pain?
As a fibromyalgia sufferer, you know what fibromyalgia pain feels like. Your body has multiple tender points. These tender points result in you having:
- Deep Muscle Pain
- Constant Back Pain
- Excruciating Headaches
- Relentless Neck Pain
Fibromyalgia pain is a unique form of pain that non-fibromyalgia sufferers cannot understand. You go through life feeling like you have just completed the most intense workout imaginable, even though you have not set foot in a gym.
Your muscles burn, they will twitch, and they will betray you with a deep stabbing pain. Your joints hurt, your back hurts, your hips hurt. Fibromyalgia pain makes sleeping and exercising difficult, if not impossible. So, what happens? Because of the pain, you cannot sleep, you become irritable, and you lash out at your friends, family members, and coworkers. They think it’s because you’re grumpy.
Even when your fibromyalgia pain allows you to sleep, the disease itself creates fatigue. It is not uncommon for fibromyalgia sufferers to have restless leg syndrome and sleep apnea.
Fibromyalgia pain can block your cognitive abilities. It is referred to as fibro fog. It becomes difficult to focus on menial tasks.
What Causes Fibromyalgia?
This is the question that every single fibromyalgia pain sufferer will ask at least once in their life. Why did this happen to me? The honest answer is that doctors do not completely know what causes fibromyalgia. However, they believe that there are three key factors that might contribute to it. They are:
- Genetics. It appears that fibromyalgia runs in the family. So there may be some genetic mutation that makes you more prone to the disease.
- Infections. Doctors have noticed that individuals with prolonged infections run a higher risk of developing, triggering, or aggravating fibromyalgia.
- Trauma Physical/Emotional. PTSD has been linked to cases of fibromyalgia.
Why Does Fibromyalgia Hurt so Bad?
Undoubtedly, you’ve asked yourself this question as well. Here’s what researchers know about fibromyalgia pain. The repeated nerve stimulation caused by fibromyalgia has changed the way your brain perceives and reacts to pain.
Researchers think that part of the change is an abnormal increase in neurotransmitters. Additionally, it seems like some pain receptors in the brain of fibromyalgia sufferers develop a pain memory, so they become sensitive to pain and overreact to pain signals.
What We Can Do
The very first thing that we do when you walk into one of our clinic locations, is listen to you. You have likely visited doctor after doctor who has either tried to minimize the pain you are experiencing, say that the pain is your imagination, or conclude that you are a hypochondriac. That will not happen with us.
We know that all pain is real. You will never need to be afraid to confide in us what you are going through.
Once we have listened to your symptoms and we’ve heard about your medical history, we are going to work with you to create a pain management system designed to provide short-term and long-term relief.
Although we have seen many fibromyalgia sufferers, we know clear well that your pain is uniquely yours. We will not treat you like you are one of many patients, but instead, we will create a treatment plan that works for you.
When you walk out of our clinic, you are going to have a clear plan laid out in front of you. You will know what we are going to do to help you in the short-term and to provide long-term pain management or pain relief.
Living with fibromyalgia is painful. Let us use our expertise to help remove that pain and get you back to living the life you deserve.