Tag: fibromyalgia

When You’re Tired – Rest

Bones

bench-carved-stones-cemetery-257360

I have been a mix of not quite exhausted but very tired this last week, with a mixture of no particular reason and plenty of good reason.

Earlier this week my heart ran a marathon without me, leaving me at first puzzled, then panicked, resulting in an 8 hour stay in the emergency ward and the trauma of an attempted catheterisation.  Fortunately we all concluded that the likely reason for this was the amitriptyline, and I haven’t experienced tachycardia like that since.

It’s phenomenal just how much that utterly wipes you out.  I went straight back into work the next day, so I didn’t take the time to rest and recover.  Work has been quiet the last couple of months (which has been amazing), however we’ve just started picking up in the last week.  There was a seminar that has produced even more leads, so now we’re well and truly under the pump.  Things really kick off when it gets to spring.  Which is good, but also not so good.  I stay busy and I don’t get bored, but I expend a lot more energy during work hours and so need to rest more in the evenings and weekends.

Which is exactly what I’ve been doing.  I’ve been doing as little as humanly possible after work and feeding the menagerie, which basically involves lying on the couch and being sat on by a cat until I fall asleep.  I have to say, it does feel like the amitriptyline is helping – I’m able to get to sleep a lot quicker, and it feels less interrupted.  I still wake up to shuffle when I’m having a flare up and I’m uncomfortable, but I wake up less during the night overall.

It’s important to listen to your body and do what it’s telling you to do.  Right now it’s saying ‘rest, rest, relax’, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do for as long as that’s what my body is saying.

Adding Amitiptyline

Bones

autumn-fall-forest-34001

Yesterday my doctor undertook the ‘prod test’ for fibromyalgia.  I reacted to some of the control points (I’m not surprised, my muscles are always tight) and really reacted to enough of the fibro points that he’s sent me off for bloods to rule anything else out.

There’s one point, 2cm caudal to the femoral trochanter that he only had to brush against and I was howling.  The other side, he didn’t so much find it because he knew where it was but because I would start yelping when he got there.

The upside is he’s given me amitriptyline, which has been identified as better than placebo in some trials with regard to fibromyalgia pain.  I’m now on fluoxetine in the morning, and amitriptyline in the evening.  Because they interact, I have to be careful of serotonin syndrome, which is a very serious problem involving too much serotonin.  Fortunately I am almost always around someone who knows what I’m taking, which is so important while my body gets used to the new balance.

So far it’s made me very sleepy in the evening, which is great, because sleep was one of the big problems I have been having.  Fluoxetine is a stimulant and has really taken my easy sleeping days and turned them upside down.  Add the discomfort from fibromyalgia and you’ve got me waking up 5-6 times a night, and that does not make for a happy bunny in the morning.

In the mornings, however, moving is hard.  My muscles don’t quite want to work.  They’d much rather remain in a relaxed state.  My legs wish to retain their noodly ways.  My balance is a little off.  My brain is sluggish and prone to going completely blank.  My reaction times feel a bit slower.  It’s similar to how I felt when I first started fluoxetine, just quite a bit less severe, so I’m interested to see how this progresses.

I had my blood taken today for testing, which is never a fun experience.  I’m very not okay about needles.  They always hurt, the sensation makes me want to jump out of my skin, and I’ll occasionally faint.  Today was no different, although hooray, there was no fainting.  I warned them I’m a sometimes fainter and sometimes puker, and they were very good about putting me on a bed and using the tiniest needle, and keeping me talking all throughout to distract me.  It still hurt quite badly, I still went very fuzzy (and would have fainted if I hadn’t been horizontal), and the site is still incredibly tender.  Because my body has realised it’s been ‘injured’, the rest of the elbow has also flared up and become somewhat painful.  The joys of being tender, I suppose.

Now I just sit tight and wait for a few weeks.  I’ll hopefully know whether or not I likely have fibro by about this time next month.  In the meantime, I get to adjust to amitriptyline!

 

The Possibility of Fibromyalgia

Bones

adorable-animal-baby-290164

It’s been a rollercoaster couple of weeks.  I mentioned to a friend – in passing – that I’d hurt my arm again (same site as an old injury) and of course now everything else hurt and she stopped me and said “that’s not normal”.

It was like a full set of black-out blinds had been lifted.  My body’s reactions to injury was not normal.  Nor was feeling achy all the time, or having stiff joints, or feeling like you’re constantly coming down with the flu.

I mentioned this to my GP when I saw him for more fluoxetine.  He mentioned that I may have fibromyalgia, and we talked it over, what the diagnostics was, what kinds of treatments there were, what it involved.

A lot of things suddenly make a lot of sense.

My muscles ache, despite them having no reason to ache.  My joints hurt.  Old injuries flare up.

I have no energy, despite how much rest I’m getting.  I sleep badly.  I feel utterly burnt out by the end of the week, and need to relax for the entire weekend to have enough energy for the following week, and even then sometimes it’s not enough.

I almost constantly feel like I’m coming down with the flu.

Noise is sometimes painful.  Some clothing is painful.  I can’t wear rings because some days they are too heavy to wear and physically hurt.  I dislike things around my wrist or my neck for the same reason.

I have issues with my memory.  Not that that’s exactly new, and I’ve worked around it by either doing a thing immediately or writing it down.  My rule at work is if it’s not written down I’m not going to do it.  I forget things I’ve recently done.  I forget names.  I forget nouns, or say completely different ones (which is more an aspie thing than anything else, and makes for amusing conversations).

I have heart palpitations, I have rush-of-blood-away-from-the-head on standing, I have large HR ranges from 100 when I stand to 64 when I’m sitting down.  I have IBS.

I’m sensitive to medication, I’m sensitive to food, I’m hypersensitive to needles (seriously, it’s painful).  Regardless of how much I relax I can never remove tension or pain from my shoulders and neck.  I have issues with thermoregulation.

I could go on for hours.  But the stupid thing is:  I thought this was all normal.

Because whenever I got ill frequently I was told to harden up and go to school or work anyway.  Whenever I ached I was told it was growing pains, or I hadn’t exercised enough, or I was sleeping too much.

So I just … stopped complaining.  And with that, I stopped thinking about the pain, because if I thought about it, it got worse, so clearly I’m just imagining it (isn’t it wonderful what backflips the brain does?).

Some days I couldn’t ignore the pain.  Some days I sat at my desk and thought ‘I can’t do that right now’ because doing that would involve standing up and moving around and right now, with my hips and legs in as much pain as they were in, that was just too much.  And I wondered and I marveled at all the other assistants who could hop up and run around and how on earth did they have that much energy, how could they keep going?

It never occurred to me that it was not normal.

I’m still adjusting to actually listening to what my body is saying.  It’s going to take me a long time to realise that when my body says ‘whoa’ I actually need to whoa, and not just ‘harden the fuck up’ and keep going.  I still want to tell myself to harden up and keep going even though I am exhausted to the bone.

I go in for diagnostics in a couple of weeks.  Just history taking and pressure points test and bloods to rule out anything else.  Once I get a diagnosis I’ll be able to start making progress, but for now I’ll sit in this mildly terrifying limbo.  Maybe I do.  Maybe I don’t.  The alternatives aren’t really much better.