No shit sherlock. I look a little tired? But otherwise, I’m fine, right?
Look, I normally don’t like to moan too much about my illness. It’s boring for me, it’s boring for you, but sometimes, if I don’t share how I feel, I’ll explode in a ball of stressed, angry, raging pain.
This fibro flare has lasted for a month now and came right after a month of chest infection/flu type thing.
I am exhausted, tired in a way that sleep (when it comes) is totally ineffectual. I wake up in the morning every bit as tired as when I fell asleep which might have been at midnight, 02:00, 03:00 or even 05:00. Just because I’m tired doesn’t mean I’ll sleep. Cos that’s part of the condition, you see. Taunted like Tantalus I reach for sleep only to have it denied.
And then there’s the pain, the fucking never-ending, debilitating pain. My hips, my legs, my back, my shoulders, my neck, my hands, my feet, my fingers… The pain around where my knicker elastic sits is so severe that the water from the shower hitting against it brings forth tears.
Pain relief is ineffectual. I’m currently on 2 30/500 tabs of co-codamol and 5mg of diazepam. If I’m lucky, it will take the edge off it. Other days, I’d be as well swallowing Smarties.
This is why I’ve closed down my business, Meldrum Media. I don’t have the energy to be reliable. And I’m left with nothing for myself. Even stopping working for others, I’m achieving next to nothing for myself. I force myself to take a short walk most days and take my smaller camera with me. I sit and edit photos I took years ago. Some evenings, I manage to knit. But write? My head is too filled with fibro fog for me to find the words and at times I feel like I’ve totally lost the plot.
I’m sad, I’m despondent, but more than that I’m fucking angry. Angry that I’m living as an invalid at a relatively young age, angry that my illness doesn’t qualify for any welfare help and fucking angry that people still tell me I just look a little tired.
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