The Beat Down, Defeated, Flu Feelin' Fibro Blues

That moment when every. single. muscle. in your body hurts.  When you're sitting perfectly still, yet you get sharp stabbing pain in random places.  It leaves as quickly as it comes, yet when it comes it makes you wince.  The time when it feels as if there are weights attached to your hands ...you can actually feel the heaviness and pain in your shoulders, as if your arms are being tugged downward.  

A time when you're hungry, so hungry, that you actually feel nauseous, yet there is no way you have the energy to go fix something to eat and you know that even if you could muster the energy to spread some peanut butter on bread, or throw something into the microwave, that the pain that would come with it isn't even worth satisfying the hunger. A time when your joints ache, and your skin burns, and you feel like you have a fever ....you're sure you probably have a fever until you grab the thermometer and see that you don't. 

Your joints hurt to move them.  You have a headache.  Your skin is sore to the touch.  You're achy.  You feel like you have the flu, but you know that you don't.  

You're entire body from head to toe, feels like you met a monster in a dark alley, that took a huge club and beat you with it.  Slamming it down over and over while you curl up in fetal position, praying you'll live.  Then you realize that a monster is beating you down in a dark alley.  The monster has a name, which is Fibromyalgia.  It even has a couple of nicknames.  One being Fibro.  Another, even shorter yet, is FMS. 

After searching high and low to find something to defeat this monster with, you realize that there isn't anything.  Nothing known to man can beat this monster.  You realize that there isn't anything you can do, to defend yourself.  It's going to follow you for the rest of your life, and when you least expect it, it's going to start beating you again and again.  Over and over until you wonder if you'll survive.  At times, you'll even wish you wouldn't survive, so that you could finally escape the wrath of pain and fatigue.  So that you wouldn't have countless endless days ahead of you, feeling like this.  

A lot of people don't believe in monsters.  They tell you that it's all in your head.  The Fibromyalgia monster is no different.  Some people don't think it exists.  They tell you that it's all in your head.  That makes it even scarier.  It gives the monster power over those that it's attacking.   

All of this combined wears a person down.  Slowly but surely, you start to feel sad and depressed.  You feel defeated.  You feel like a failure in life, due to the many limitations that this monster imposes on you.  It steals your friends.  In some cases, it steals your family.  It takes away jobs which takes away self-worth and self-esteem.  This my friends, is what I call "the beat down, defeated, flu feelin' Fibro blues".  This is where I'm at tonight.  Cowering from the monster.