Being chronically ill is hard. It’s hard to be in pain all day, every day – never having a single pain-free day or even an hour. It’s hard to have symptoms like fatigue, nausea, tender lymph nodes, IBS and thermoregulation issues without knowing if there is ever going to be an end to them. It’s hard not knowing how bad it will be when you wake up, or if anything is going to happen to make your symptoms worse.
It’s frustrating and annoying to not be able to be sure if you can make it to a function or appointment or even the shower on any given day. It’s embarrassing to lose your balance in public, forget your words, or completely forget what someone just told you 30 seconds ago.
It’s heartbreaking to do all the right things, eat right, take your supplements and/or medications, meditate, do yoga, do all the things that are supposed to help and then find that your symptoms are flaring up anyway. Or you do just one thing that a “normal person” could do and suddenly the FibroTroll is having a party and has invited all his friends.
When this happens, it’s easy to hate your body. You feel like it’s somehow letting you down. You compare yourself to all the other people in their late 30’s having kids and working and still managing a household and social life and you feel betrayed by your own body.
But I don’t hate my body. At least not anymore.
My body is amazing. Sure, it’s gotten a bit squishy since I haven’t been able to exercise as much, and I’ve lost a lost of muscle strength, and I could stand to lose a couple of kilos, but it’s still pretty amazing. If I cut myself, within seconds my body has started the process it needs to heal that cut. If I bruise myself, it will breakdown all of those escaped red blood cells and process them so that the bruise heals and fades with time. If I were to break a bone – the doctors and surgeons would set it and/or do surgery on it which would put the bone in the position where MY BODY would repair that bone back to (in most cases) full function.
So I choose to trust that my body is doing the best it can right now. No-one knows for certain what causes Fibromyalgia. There are lots of theories – autoimmune disorders, neurological disorders, peripheral nerve disorders to name a few. There may even be an as yet undiscovered virus, bacteria, parasite, fungus, prion or other type of organism that is causing it. Whatever the cause, my body is trying. It has a dysfunction of some form and it’s doing the best it can to function with the crap hand it got dealt.
I do what I can to help it along. I feed it good food (right now that means strictly following my Metabolic Balance plan), I meditate, I do yoga, I have regular Epsom salt baths, I get in my HBO2 chamber most days and I have recently started both a gratitude journal and positive affirmations. (I’ll write more about them later.) And when my body flares up in pain or any other symptoms, I try to give myself the compassion I would give to someone else.
I won’t lie. It’s a work in progress. It’s frustrating and difficult when I suddenly need to lie down on the floor because otherwise I’ll either vomit or fall down (or both), or suddenly being ridiculously cold to the point where I am shivering under an electric blanket, or my personal favourite – be achingly cold in the legs and nauseatingly hot in the upper body AT THE SAME TIME! At those times its very hard to stop the negative self-talk.
I am working on acceptance with my psychologist. I’m still struggling with separating acceptance and surrender. I refuse to give up trying to get well, but over time I am reaching the point where I can acknowledge that my body is fighting an invader that I can’t identify and that it needs my help – not my hate – to get through whatever symptom my body is throwing out. So instead of allowing that internal voice that says I hate my body when it’s flaring, I’m thanking it for trying and assessing what I need to do to help it right now.
And on this cold, rainy day, it’s telling me I need to go have a bath. So that’s what I’ll do!
