How My Fibro Story Began

[Count as SECOND BLOG]

People with Fibromyalgia seem to have a genetic tendency for it, but not everyone with this tendency will get it. No one knows why one person in a family will get it and another will not, or why women are more likely to be diagnosed with it than men. It does seem to have certain triggers. 

My trigger was extreme stress. I was under such stress I was loosing my hair, I could hardly stand up, I couldn’t remember if I ate, and didn’t care if I did or didn’t. 

The summer I was 18, I came back from a Mexico missions trip with 2nd degree sunburn. I remember the sunburn, and the following tan that lasted through the next summer because I don’t really tan. 

That summer I lost both my grandfathers 3 months to the day apart. I had never lost anyone that close to me. The first loss was to an “accident” in a nursing home and the other to leukemia. Both were viewed in the same funeral home, same room for the service, buried about 20 feet apart. The first was my PawPaw and I lived my entire life next to him until he went into the nursing home. Then I visited him every day. The other GrandPa lived 5 miles down the road and I visited him every Sunday of my life. 

I remember standing halfway between my Grandfather’s graves not knowing which one to look at and hearing one of my cousins ask something about why wasn’t I over there with them at that one Grandpa’s grave and one of my Aunts say, “Oh yeah, she lost her other Grandpa a while back too. I had forgotten that.” 

Also during my 18th summer I lost my job (and wasn’t paid for work I done). I remember more about the job and how badly I was treated there.

I remember my best friend telling me to my face that she had a boyfriend now and didn’t need me anymore. Actually I think she was worried because the guy had showed interest in me first but I turned him down, but whatever, She was gone from my life and telling lies on me “to see if people would believe it” she told me later. 

My fiancé cheated on me and we broke up. I had loved him since I was in 3ed grade. 

I remember finding a lot of hair after a bath and wondering why. I remember showing my Mom because I was puzzled and she said “Yes, you are too worried about things. You need to quit stressing.” I asked her how, with what I was going through, did I do that, but she didn’t know.


This is about the limit of all I remember about the summer I was 18. 


Thing is, I remember being 20 and saying something about pain, when my manager at work said, “You hurt a lot don’t you?” I said, “No more than anybody else. Everybody hurts somewhere all the time,” (shrugging it off as common place, because to me it was). He looked at me oddly. He said, “No, they don’t. Most people never hurt.” Well, it was my turn to be shocked. I was speechless! I had hurt so long that by age 20 pain was just a normal state of being.