As a very active mother of 3 having spent most of my years running around with an unending list of things to do, I was horrified when my body began to work against me in a seemingly evil effort to drag me down. At first, I kept thinking that I was getting the flu. I would wake up with every cell in my body hurting. It hurt to even put my feet on the ground. After I mangaged to drag myself to the bathroom, I would get back into bed and spend all day there just waiting to feel better. The next day if I felt better, I would decide that my immune system must have done its job to fight off a horrible bug that I was getting. This kept happening over and over. It got to where I was having good days and bad days, but as time passed, the bad days began to out number the good ones. When I went to see a doctor, he tested me for things like lupus, lyme disease and rheumatioid arthritis. When all of these tests came back negative, he was stumped and just wrote me a prescription for tylenol 3. As time passed I became more and more inactive. More often than not I spent the day in bed. I gained wieght and didn’t even care because I was so depressed I wanted to die. To me, this kind of life was not even worth living. My husband, desperate to find help for me, made me an appointment with another doctor. After my 3rd visit with him, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I was so happy to at least have a diagnoses. I was prescribed Lyrica for the widespread pain. That medication gave me little or no relief. Next the doctor put me on Cymbalta. After taking that for a few weeks, it did help somewhat, but even with my insurance it cost $250/month! I spent almost 2 years struggling to pay for a medication that only helped enough to allow me to be up and moving about 3 days a week. However, I was still depressed and still overweight.
Desperate to get back to living, I began to learn everything I could about fibromyalgia. There were really no difinitive answers, just hundreds of studies and hypotheses about this debilitating syndrome. One thing that I kept coming across was that exercise was key to helping fibromyagia patients feel better. I bought a treadmill and began to walk. I started off with little ten minute walks every day. Even on the days that I felt terrible, I would force myself to get out of bed and walk my ten minutes then go back to bed. After a couple of weeks I increased my walking time to 15 minutes….then 20 minutes. Three months into my walking routine I had worked my way up to walking 45 minutes, 5 days a week. I began to notice a huge improvement in my pain. My good days way out numbered my bad days. I added some stretching to my daily routine. This also made a huge difference in the way I felt. I continued this activity for 6 months and my body started to feel so good that I decided to train for a 10K race. Three months after that, I was triumphantly crossing the finish line of the Crescent City Classic with my family all there to cheer me on. It was one of the proudest moments of my life!
Today although I still have fibromyalgia, it is only an afterthought. I never let it drag me down. On the days when I wake up in pain, I get out of bed and go right over to my treadmill and do my 45 minutes. I always feel better by the time I am finished. I am back to my healthy weight and more importantly, back to my active lifestylye. I love living again!