Fibromyalgia in a nutshell

I have been asked to write a blog post to explain what Fibromyalgia is so that those of you who have not had any experience with it would have more information and I will attempt to do that now.

There is no "black and white" description of Fibromyalgia which is why for years many people, including Doctors, did not believe it actually existed. I will go so far as to say that there are folks who still don't believe it exist (my husband would fall into that category, in my opinion). Although every person that is diagnosed with Fibromyalgia is sure to have different symptoms and experiences, one thing is common to all; chronic, unexplained pain and fatigue (meaning we are tired and we hurt all the time with no medical reason). There are also these "tender points" that Dr's. check for pain and tenderness before diagnosis and I think you have to have like 11 out of the 18 known "tender points" to "qualify". The image at the top of this blog shows where the tender points are (shown by the dots).

I guess the reason why people did not believe that this was a real condition for so long is that there is no medical explanation for the symptoms, I went for every test known to man with no abnormal results before a final diagnosis was made. From a Doctors point of view, I can see how this would be quite perplexing, but to the patient, it is just plain frustrating!

I know people have heard about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Chroic Pain Syndrome, Depression, Sleep Disorders/Disturbances, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and I could go on and on but I won't. Fibromyalgia is like having all of those things going on at the same time with no refief in sight.

I am going to include a link to WebMD because they have everything that is known about this condition on there and like I said before, not every person has every symptom. http://www.webmd.com/fibromyalgia/default.htm

Here is a youtube video that I share with all of the folks that don't want to believe this is real or that think people just make it up or think they know what I need to do to "fix" myself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyK2KjO3jok

I will do a separate post to give you my background, my story of how it all started for me, etc.