It's All In Your Head

Fibromyalgia noun

A syndrome characterized by chronic pain in any of various muscles and surrounding soft tissues (such as tendons and ligaments), point tenderness at specific sites in the body, and fatigue. Inflammation is absent, and the cause is unknown*.

-Dictionary.com

*Really? I am SO shocked!!!!!

I pulled my headphones off from the mix I was working on and heard my wife crying downstairs. I ran down calling to her as I was going, but she didn’t answer. She was on the couch, curled up in a ball trying to wipe her face so I wouldn’t see the smudge marks left from her tears.

“What’s going on Bu?” I knelt down side her. “Are you okay?”

She smiled and sat up, “Nothing. I’m fine.” She had to be the strong one. She always had the stiff upper lip.

“Bullshit!” I said. “I could hear you from the studio.”

“It just hurts. That’s all.”

For the last few years my wife had experienced chronic phantom pain throughout her body though mostly it occurred in her legs and feet. At first we thought it was stress. Then we thought she needed more rest. Maybe it was an allergy? Or even possibly a chemical imbalance? We didn’t know.

We took her to doctor after doctor after doctor and none of them could find anything that might be causing it either. They ran tests for spinal nerve problems, Planter Fasciitis, Mono, Photophobia, Pregnancy and everything else you could possibly think of. Of course the results always told us nothing. So the doctor’s all came to the same conclusion. All of these highly educated people with thousands of dollars spent on educations at prominent medical schools as well as decades of actual practicing medicine under their belts came to the exact same diagnoses.
It was all in her head.

Well, they have run every test imaginable so she MUST be making it all up. When she hurts so bad that her cries don’t make any sound and she tries to make it up the stairs by crawling… When I have to carry her to the bedroom because it’s gotten so bad that she passes out… When she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night begging me to cut her feet off because the pain is so intense… Yeah. She’s just making that stuff up.

Doctor’s just don’t seem to be able to comprehend anything that isn’t written down in a book. If it hasn’t been regularly diagnosed by them personally, it just can’t be real. I understand that for the most part it takes a certain type of personality to want to pursue a career in medicine. And I do know that there are some good doctor’s out there. It unfortunately appears that the majority of them refuse to actually listen to their real, living and breathing patients. They know everything, and we know nothing. So we should just submit to their infinite wisdom and swallow the pills they give us. After all, they know what’s best for us right?

SO having eliminated all possible causes including West Nile Virus and S.A.R.S., we finally found a doctor who determined that it might just possibly be Fibromyalgia. After all, it sure wasn’t anything else. He started her on a new course of medication and after almost three years of constant pain with no relief, it actually started to help. It wasn’t a complete cure, but the wonderful woman that I knew was hiding in there started to reappear from behind the clouds of agony.

And there was much rejoicing!!!

Now I am a big guy. If you don’t know me, I might even be a bit frightening to you. Shaved head, Van Dyke goatee, tattoos and for the most part I wear a scowl on my face. I used to have big earrings too. I appear to be pretty tough. But next to my wife and what she went through, I am like a little girl. I have mentioned before that I enjoy complaining right? Well if I had had to deal with what she struggled through almost silently, I would have been screaming so loud that the residents of the International Space Station would have been asking me to turn it down.

I don’t know if they ran before we found out and I just never noticed them, but it seemed like as soon as she was diagnosed with firbromyalgia there was this entire new crop of commercials for medicines developed just specifically for that disorder. The commercials were all over the place! Every time I turned on the television or opened a magazine there was an ad. It was very encouraging and very frustrating at the same time.

While I am extremely happy that there are now treatments available that will help, wouldn’t you think that doctors might have received some kind of information on this problem before the advertisers did? Don’t they get monthly medical journals that list new procedures and results from clinical trials? Why did every major television network and magazine have details about what fibromyalgia was and yet every doctor we saw told us that it was all make believe pain? That she should se a therapist because she was making herself sick?

I really wish that it felt better to say I told you so to the doctors. But that only feels good when you’re under the age of sixteen. Right?

I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!

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