CHAPTER TWO OF MY FMS JOURNAL
So, naturally I didn't want my nerves servered, I'd heard that mas a very risky operation. I just didn't go back to the doctor for awhile.
In the next three years I had two surgeries. One was a gallbladder removal the other, latter, was a hysterectomy. Because of my refusal to admit I was sick, neither problem was correctly recognised and therefore were almost emergency operations by the time I would admit I was so sick.
I remember laying in the hospital bed in agony with my aching back and with the pain of the operation not knowing how to get comfortable. I couldn't begin to tell the nurses just how uncomfortable I was for fear they would think I was imagining things or worse still, making it up for sympathy. So, I suffered in silence.
After I had recovered from my surgeries I was still having the pains. I found it more and more difficult to sleep and to function at work. the only palce it seems I could have a relatively painfree sleep was on the living room sofa but I couldn't spend the rest of my nights on there.
I found that if I propped myself up with pillows to an almost sitting position I could lessen the pain in my ribs in the morning. I had a great idea.
I had a small "dressing room" that was connected to ouor bedroom by a walk-through closet. In there I had a desk, a dresser and a big old comfy papsan chair, you knwo, the kind that's like a big tub. Well, I decided to try it out for a night. It was hard to get into and even harder to get out of but because of the near sitting position I slept in I was virtual painfree in the morning. WOW~!!!! It was great! I would put a chair beside it to prop my legs on so they would dangle and I'd postion my pillow just right and have a good nights sleep finally after all these years. I had found a piece of heaven!
I slept in that chair for nearly a year. Then slowly it wasn't as comfy as it had been. The pain slowly krept back. So, I moved into our spare bedroom. I propped up several pillows so that my near sitting position was still there. It never was totally confortable because for some reason the body requires to be laying out flat and during the night my body would slip down from the pillows and stretch out. In the morning i needed help to get up.
I would wake at around 6 AM and I needed the time till around 8:30 to get my body working again. I'd go to work and around 11 AM the silver dollar pain would begin. Slowly at first till it was almost unbearable. I would struggle through the day and then have to make dinner and so all the household chores besides. I didn't think I would make it some days.
Of course there were good day in between the bad. And I used those to the fullest. My husband and I had joined a square dancing club and we dance two nights a week. Some nights I was ok, then on others I had to drag myself through the evening. I wouldn't admit I couldn't do it. No one would understand. After all I didn't look sick. Even I didn't believe I had anything REALLY wrong with me.
So, life onctinued like this for some time. The doctor sent me to a physiotherapist, hoping to help my pain. It made things worse. Then I was sent to message therapy. Nothing. So, in desperation I started to go to a chiropractor. I went several times a month and paid out a fortune adn in the end I quit because I was getting worse ot better. He didn't seem to know what was wrong either.
Someone, somewhere had the idea that what I needed was acupuncture. So, another fortune later I was feeling even worse than before. BUT one thing the acupunturist did for me was give what was wrong with a NAME. Fibromyalgia! When I asked him what that was he told me it was complicated and to look it up at the library.
Now, at least "IT" had a name! FIBROMYALGIA.
I never did go to the library, but my daughter looked it up on the internet. I was amazed at what was out there. And I wasn't alone with this thing. Other's suffered from it also.