Tag: fibromyalgia

Take Your Meds

Bones

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I’ve had a couple of seriously stupid days.  I’m laughing about it, because nothing bad really happened, but it could have.

I have alarms I’ve set on my phone with comical noises as a reminder to take my fluoxetine in the morning, and my amitriptyline in the evening.  I would forget my own head if it wasn’t screwed on, so this is a sensible precaution.

Except when it goes off and I don’t immediately take my medication, and then I forget about it.  Like I did yesterday morning.  And yesterday evening.  And this morning.

It was only when I was lying in bed wondering why I was in so much pain and also not trembling that I realised whoops, I hadn’t taken my amitrip the night before!  It wasn’t until 9.30am that I realised I’d forgotten to take my fluoxetine that morning, and it was through a process of thinking ‘now these symptoms are a bit severe for missing one dose, I don’t usually feel this bad when I wake up late’ that I realised I’d also forgotten my fluoxetine the morning before.

The good thing is I can now say with certainty that the amitriptyline really helps.  The bad thing is I now know that I ignore my alarm!  So, on the suggestion of a friend, I got the app called ‘Medisafe’.  This post isn’t sponsored in any way, shape, or form, I just genuinely think it’s a neat app.  You plug in the medication, you select the dosage, and then you select the external presentation of your particular medication (because they vary considerably).  You tell it when you take it, how many you take, and what you take it for, and it then proceeds to piss you right off when you need to take it.  You have to go in and say you took it (which I will only ever do once I’ve actually taken my medication), so hopefully I won’t have any really daft days like the last couple.

Like I say, I’m laughing and making light out of it, but if I hadn’t run home at morning tea and taken my fluoxetine, it probably would have been a different story.  Moral of the story:  take your meds!

The Diagnosis

Bones

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The bloods all came back clean, so for all intents I have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

I don’t know what I’m feeling right now.  It hasn’t begun to sink in, I think.  It’s just a word.  Life goes on as it always does.

Fibromyalgia is more than a word.  It’s a name for what has been plaguing me for years.  It’s a set of symptoms that can be linked back to a thing with a name, a thing that exists, a thing that’s not just in my head.

There’s a certain amount of relief in that.

There’s also the realisation that this is a thing and it’s not just in my head.  This is a thing.  It exists, it’s real, and it means I can’t just harden the fuck up and plow on through, or stop being lazy.  It exists, and it has an impact on my body and on my life, and I must now change my life to take that into consideration.  I can’t keep on going as I have done.

I’m also realising just how little support there is in the public health system for people experiencing chronic pain.  Where I live there is nothing.  Which is mildly problematic, but optimistically speaking I only have another 2 or so years here, and then we can move.  I’m already eyeballing areas that have public health chronic pain clinics, which are fortunately in areas we are interested in moving to.

For now I guess it’s just truck on as usual and deal with the doom and gloom when it all catches up with me.  But at least I have an answer now.  It’s not all in my head.

The Aches And Shakes

Bones

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The last few weeks have been interesting to say the least.

I appear to have developed an essential tremor in all of its forms – internal, kinetic, and postural.  I am in fact off work today with the aches and shakes!

It seems to mostly appear when I have ‘done too much’ – typically beginning lightly on Thursday and coming in a bit more solidly on Friday, and then slowly receding over a weekend of rest.  This weekend just past wasn’t particularly restful, so I was shaking myself to pieces yesterday at work.

This morning I had the ‘roaming aches’, where one joint would feel incredibly painful, then that would go away, and another would start feeling incredibly painful.  On top of that, I have my usual overly exhausted body aches in my hips, lower back, all down my legs, and around my shoulders and neck.  Fortunately I’ve got my physio appointment today, so that should ameliorate at least some of those aches.

So I’m not entirely sure if the shakes relate directly to the fibro, or more to the amitriptyline, as postural tremors are associated with both.  Although I notice mine most as a kinetic tremor, I lose my fine motor skills, and simple tasks like leafing through paper or putting a paperclip on are surprisingly challenging.

I’ll raise this with my doctor on Thursday, who will hopefully have all the blood results back by then, and I can get a properly tentative answer as to what this all is.  In the meantime, it’s nap time.

Fibromyalgia and the Sequelae of Stress

Bones

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Two days ago I had a very stressful day.

It was an intensely busy day at work, with a very short turnaround on the preparation of some complex documentation to finalise an urgent process the next day.  This is what I’m best at.  I cut my eyeteeth in one of the busiest teams in my first firm in one of the busiest times they’ve ever seen before or since.  I excel at very quickly grasping the scope of the procedure, understanding the interconnectedness of the parties, and logically organising and processing multi-party documents.  The way I work also results in me being prompted to cross-check the information several times before the documentation goes to the person / people I’m working for and so improves accuracy while saving time.  My brain goes a mile a second, checking and cross checking, tracking progress on each party’s bundle, planning two steps ahead so the second I’ve finished one, it’s off for checking and onto the next, and constantly finding ways to optimise the process.

It’s exciting.

The next day?  Not so.  I woke up and my legs didn’t quite want to work right.  My hips and knees had poor stability – I had to walk slowly and carefully to ensure each step was solid and my hips wouldn’t suddenly go whoop out to one side and cause me to fall or slam into something.  I could have walked normally, but that would have involved a massive amount of effort, and I did not have that kind of energy.

Getting my food from my plate to my face was hard.  Every movement I made was shaky and jerky, like my muscles would do one tiny portion of the movement and then stop for a microsecond and then do the next tiny portion of the movement, and so on.

I went to work.

I struggled with putting paperclips on paper.  My arms, hands and fingers were jerky and shaking, my fine motor movements inaccurate.  My entire body trembled.  I had a tiny muscle going tick tick tick tick in my right buttcheek.  I had to walk slowly and carefully and ease myself into and out of my chair.  When I re-stocked paper, I couldn’t crouch like I normally do.  Any bending over required additional support to make sure I didn’t topple, and I relied a lot more on counter-balance rather than on my muscles to hold me stable.

And it was a busy day that day, too!  Only have of the procedure was complete, and I had to finalise the other half, as well as finalising another urgent matter, and receiving (optimistic) instructions to start and finish another the same day (we said nope, that’ll be Monday if we’re lucky), on top of the usual end of the month wrap up.  I took no breaks, half my usual lunch time, and left late.

All the while fighting an extreme muscle weakness, nausea, exhaustion and entire body instability.  By the time I got home last night I was done.

This morning I’m still pretty unstable through the hips and legs, and my movements are still a bit jerky, but nowhere near as bad as they were yesterday.  The weather is pretty crap this weekend so it’s going to be snuggle up on the couch and nap most of the weekend away.  Hopefully I’ll have recovered enough by Monday to do it all again!

Amitriptyline – Two Weeks In

Bones

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I have now been on amitriptyline for two weeks.  Well, I will take my 14th pill tonight.  It hasn’t been quite the upheaval that beginning fluoxetine was, but it has been an interesting time.

I’m on amitriptyline while my doctor is awaiting my blood results to rule out other things that can cause fatigue and muscle pain in a similar manner to fibromyalgia.  It’s used to treat both nerve pain and to improve sleep – sleep being one of the more important factors in determining your ambient pain levels during the day.  It succeeded on both counts!  With some … interesting effects.

The first morning after I began taking amitrip it felt like all my muscles were limp noodles.  Walking was an interesting experience.  My hips swung wide and I caught myself on my dresser, on door frames, on couches …  and it was hard just getting my toast from the plate to my mouth.  Nothing quite wanted to cooperate.

I felt a little spaced out.  Not as much of a space cadet as fluoxetine, fortunately.  I didn’t feel like I was permanently lightly high.  I just felt … lighter.  The physical effects of amitrip definitely contributed to the overall light feeling.  I also slept really well.  For the first week at least.

The second week was a bit rougher.  My sleep became more interrupted.  It was harder to fall asleep on the couch at 8.  It didn’t help that I had a lot more commitments in the evening that week, so I wasn’t able to relax for a bit before dozing off.  I started to feel flat, like I wanted to do nothing and be an amorphous blob again.  I began having difficulties concentrating, my words jumbled up.  I felt sluggish.  My body felt heavy, I was sore.  I still had limp noodle muscles first thing in the morning.

Last night (for reasons I’ll blog about later) I had one of the best sleeps I’ve had in a long while and I am now out of a state of pure exhaustion and into a place of just normal tiredness.  The sluggishness, difficulties concentrating, and issues with words were mainly a result of the fact that I was utterly knackered.  Getting some seriously good sleep took that extreme edge off, leaving me with a more normal tiredness I know how to deal with.

The amitrip still makes my muscles noodles, and it’s lovely, because when I wake up in the morning I am not stiff and in pain.  It leaves me a bit wobbly for a few hours, but that is getting better with the exercises my physio has given me for stability.  I am also definitely sleeping better, although not as well as I did during the first week.  I still wake up during the night, just not as frequently.  I also really notice when I have and haven’t slept well the night before – I notice a huge increase in ambient pain levels through my hips and legs and up my back when I’ve slept poorly.  The amitrip only does so much for the pain.

All in all, it’s been an okay couple of weeks.  I’m hoping things continue to improve now that I’m getting better sleep, and the sluggishness goes away the better rested I get.