[BLOG FOUR]
Fatigue.
Sounds non-threatening doesn't it? After all, how can being tired hurt your life, everyone gets tired, right?
Well, there is a big difference between being tired at the end of a few days a month, or even nightly than being fatigued every moment of every night and day. No relief.
Then there is the extra fatigue that hit you like a BUS! and you crash and nothing much can keep you from sleeping because your body has had enough. You will sleep. You can try to fight it, but you will sleep.
And when you wake up you will be tired. Still. Every time you wake up.
Tired when walking, cooking, doing laundry, resting, watching tv, sleeping, waking up. At no moment is there a "not tired" moment.
Tired and Pain are both like Chinese water torture. It will wear you down and drive you crazy. Fibromyaliga is water torture using pain as the water. Once the pain and fatigue start, it never stops.
As non-life threatening as it may sound, it is more life threatening to those of us who have to deal with it on the daily basis. Think about it like this, someone who is hungover is more aware of WHY they feel the way they do. Someone with fatigue, does NOT know why. Someone who is hungover can simply rehydrate and feel better and get on with screwing their lives up. Someone with fatigue, can not just take an extra sip of gatorade and feel better. AND, when that fatigue builds up, it overflows in deadly ways, such as falling asleep while driving or falling down a flight of stairs from being over exhausted.
ReplyDeleteThis is so very true!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with it hitting you like a bus because that is what happens to me. There are times that I feel tired but it is more than I know because it affects my voice. If I talk on the phone to my sister, she will say you sound tired and when sometimes when I get home my husband will say you sound tired....not you look tired. A wave of fatigue will hit me and I have to rest and if I don't fibro fog, hypoglycemia, and/or slurred speech appear. I cannot sleep at night. If I am lucky to get to sleep, I may sleep about 45 minutes and my body thinks it was 8 hours. People who have no sleep issues have no idea what a person with fibromyalgia deals with on a daily basis. I have not shared my diagnosis with very many people because of the stigma still attached to it. Many people still think Fibromyalgia is a made up disease. Let them "try" to walk in my shoes for a month, I believe they would change their minds.
ReplyDeleteI agree!
ReplyDeleteSo many say Oh fibro, then you need to just push thru and exercise more" or they say "Just get up and walk" .
"Umm hello? Didn't I just say I was pacing the house in pain all the time? Or that I am EXHAUSTED?! Did you miss that part?"
If you haven't been **here**, don't tell me what to do!
I can only imagine what that combination of pain and fatigue is like. Your description calls to mind my experience following radiation therapy for thyroid cancer. I became more and more fatigued. Friends, coworkers, and family could hear it in my voice and they told me "You look like death."
ReplyDeleteA major difference is that I could sleep. In fact, I couldn't stay awake, but it didn't matter how much I slept. I was still exhausted.
Fatigue seems to drain the life from you. =(
ReplyDeleteGood explanation of your tired life. There are several punctuation errors. Try to keep those to a minimum.
ReplyDelete