My Experience with Fibromyalgia

I was very young when I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, only 16, and I thought that it was the end of the world. I have to admit it is a lonely disease. Even today, many people still think that it isn’t a real disease and will just think that you are being lazy and not wanting to participate in your own life. I had most of my family and doctors believe that I was lying or faking. One doctor called it “High Schooler’s Disease”. As if I wanted to miss out on my high school days. If it wasn’t for my mother I don’t truly know what I would have done….

For those of you that don’t really know what Fibromyalgia is, it is a chronic condition with symptoms that include but are not limited to extensive pain in the muscles, tendons, & ligaments, fatigue, and tender points on the body. Other common indicators include Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), anxiety, depression, numbness or tingling in the hands and feet, poor concentration, un-refreshed sleep, sensitivity to lights, noises, and touch, painful periods, and restless leg syndrome. Doctors think that it is most likely an environmentally triggered disease. That means that most likely we have the predisposition for it but pollution and other environmental elements can trigger this disease. There is approximately 3-6 million people affected by this disease in the Untied States today and it is most common in women between 30-60 years of age.

With my personal experience, unfortunately I had most of the symptoms listed above and the most prominent was the painful muscles. After going from doctor to doctor and years of testing with no one finding anything actually wrong with me, I even started doubting myself. The way I was finally diagnosed was that my pediatrician had me write down all my symptoms, when they happened and what I ate for 2 weeks, then he sent it to the CDC to see if they would be able to find anything that matched up. A week later they came back with Fibromyalgia. I was so happy to have a name to go with my symptoms, but now what do we do? This was back in 1996 and there was not much research on fibromyalgia yet. Then after of months of still going from doctor to doctor I happen to stumble a cross a Naturopathic doctor at a book store of all places that suggested a few things to help out my endometriosis (yes I suffer from that too!) and they actually worked! We decided to give him a try and see what he had to offer. We had tried everything else so what did we have to loose? We let him do the tests…blood work, hair samples, saliva samples, etc. We did not tell him that I was already diagnosed; we just wanted to see what he would come up with. The next appointment came with all the results from the testing and he told me that I had fibromyalgia, that I was deficient in magnesium, I was gluten intolerant, and that I had too much estrogen, iron, and zinc in my system among a few other things that I can’t remember at the moment. I was amazed! He started me immediately on a strict gluten free diet that had at least 40 grams of protein a day, (very hard to do I must admit), plus a regiment of vitamins, IV pushes and IV drips of Magnesium, Calcium, B complex, herbs and other vitamins and minerals that I lacked. I started my new diet and herb, vitamin routine April of 1997 after missing my entire junior year of high school and was feeling well enough to go 3/4 day for my senior year just a few short months later. I have officially been in remission for 10 years now, and I have to admit that I still have my ups and downs. Magnesium, a multivitamin, and B complex are still part of my daily regiment and it makes my bad days less often and less painful. I strongly suggest at lease the magnesium, multivitamin and B complex to anyone who has fibromyalgia, but the need to have proper testing to find out what exactly your body needs more or less of is very important. Thankfully, fibromyalgia is more understood and accepted as a disease then it was 10 years ago.

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