if Life is a Journey

My doctor is researching and fine tuning his research all the time, he gives us leeway,(with our meds,) he understands, because he has IT as well. He has written two books on Fibro availableat Amazon,

and his theory is that it is not our fault, but our body trained at birth to react a certain way to stress....for many us. our childhood sex/physical abandoned type stress,

but others are type A , couldn't ever do it good enough for mom sort of stuff, and some of us are all of the above.

His theory is that we can re-train our mind to not react to stress and slowly, (he says it takes about 5 years) retrain our mind so that much of our highly charged world around us really doesn't affect us and therefore doesn't hurt us...

Every three seconds our body sends out signals to the whole body checking in to see if there is any thing wrong...if the body is tense or uptight he sends messages to the adrenals, (funny little glands on top of the kidneys( which then send out adrenalin)

....adrenalin is the chemical that sets off our flight of fight system and puts us in Kick A$$ mode....Our heart starts beating faster, our lungs start pushing O2. (oxygen) out to the body so the legs and arms can get ready, we start building up lactic acid in our muscles, and everything about us is a tightly wound mass of modern womanhood, or modern maleness, looking for whatever it is we are suppose to take apart, or kill for dinner, ( my oh my that mastadon looks yummy)

But here is the problem. There really isn't any running you do, your are at the drive through window at Mikey D's and the only running you will be doing in the next 20 minutes is the drive home through lunch time traffic.

So, Lady, you have a whole bunch of adrenalin running through your body that did not get used and now your body is trying to go back into the relax it's Wenesday and the beach and the sun is looking mighty good. So you eat your Big Mac, drink your coke, which by the way has a eaby good jolt of caffine in it to wire tyou up

AND YOU TRY TO RELAX AND IT DAWNS ON YOU THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO REALAX.

You have worked on fast forward your whole life and your poor body is sick and tired of it and you do not know how to function without the daily rush....

But now you start having aches and pains that travel around and cannot be explain to the doctor , and he thinks you are nuts and so do your family and friends because you start calling in sick and canceling outings and you cannot remember the last Sunday you did not spend in jammies:

You have entered, FibroHell, and do not know how to get out of it. And no body can tell you anything because it really isn't being understood at the moment.

So; you think "maybe I better look into what is going wrong with my life."

And you start realizing that ..................causes your tummy to contract, and get tight,

and you also notice when your .............comes for a visit it feels wrong somehow.....

and then you go to the store to buy .............and you feel like the clerks great you like an old lady and they snicker at your music selection.

Then at home you are still feeling tense so you make a long island ice tea without an umbrella and think over how the day went and you realize you were upset, your stomach is tight, and you haven't been really breathing deeply and calmly....

So you take some Advil for your sore muscles and start breathing deeply and you realize as you do begining to get more oxygen into your lungs which gets it out to the rest of your body, and you wonder about your arms and legs relaxing and then to minutes later you notice your butt relaxing, and you forget about...........accusing you of having an affair with her boyfriend, and you forgot bout the twit in the store and you forgot about the cop that pulled you over just because he was worried about your aggressive driving....he didn't even give you a ticket because you realized that you were up tight and driving aggressively and that you could endanger other lives besides your own.

He was nice to you and you realize that this was the first time in weeks maybe months that anyone had been decent or civil to you and you suddenly start to cry because you didn't understand why you were always tight and hurt so bad and avoided people because they were always hurting you.

And as you finish your Long Island Ice Tea you decide to go to bed, without dinner because you are too sore to fix anything, but as you lie in your bed safe and secure you consider what has happened to you and you decide to put your life back together by going to your doctor and getting an appointment with your therapist whom you haven't seen in years. And while you contemplate what to tell your therapist you fall asleep feeling better than you have in years, and your last thought is that you like the way the cop treated you and you will, from now on, treat others with the same respect.

Posts: 1397 Group Leader Send a PM Give a Hug

So now what do you do? How do you change? You therapist hasn't a clue, she wants to work on why .... accuses you of having an affair with her husband. you did not of course, but when someone irrational gets and idea they hold on to it an irrationally long time. You go to a fibro doctor. He puts you on Cymbalta, Norco, and Neurontin......you are to stay on one Neurontin bid, Twice a day, and in a week 2 tablets bid. The Cymbalta is at night and the Norco is for break through pain, but he wants you to keep a diary of pain and when you have it and when you take the Norco. At first this really pi$$3$ you off.....but as you start putting entries in you begin to realize that there is a pattern, and you start highlighting the patterns....so that your dimwitted Rheumy can catch them, then after a couple of months you begin to realize that there should be a way to get rid of this FibroHell you find yourself in... You also see that your Rheumy is not the dim wit you thought he was. You see that a lot of you pain is bone pain, and make a note to ask for a full body xrys....but the other half of you pain is the fibro, muscle pain bouncing around, and spasms and cramps. You start taking magnesium and calcium especially one that has c3 in it...You throw in some glucosamine and chondroiten and an adult vitamin, you double up on the vitamin because you need to catch up.....then you elaborate your eating patterns, and think that you haven't been on the scale in months, if not years You learn you have gained 25 lbs. You are not obese, bit you figure you aren't getting any younger, so you decide to loose tht 25 lbs, and put your self on an eay to follow diet, and start swimming really early morning laps in the condo pool. You have instinctively chosen water as your primary exercise form not realizing it is the best thing you can do for your body. and someone comes out to join you and tells you the womens water aerobics class starts at 6:30, and invites you to stay. After class the ladies invite you to lunch, their treat. You learn that two other ladies have fibro too which is why they started the aerobics class. On the way home they share with you the things they have done for fibro and one tells you that she learned she needed to change her thinking and stop being mad at everything going on in the world. You asked how she did it and she told you that Her Rheumy had said that every three seconds she had a chance to change how she was thinking. Every three seconds she could breathe deep, shake herself loose, turn of the news, get up and do something. She said that at first it hurt, but she still did it. But she said, that as she kept at it she noticed she began to hurt less and less, she was almost to the point where she doesn't need to take her pain medications as much. She is finally believing that the time will come when she doesn't have fibro any more. If it can happen to her, it can happen to us!!! I intend to be the statistic that doesn't stay a statistic! How about you? I hope so, because I believe we can get there by understanding and we an understand better by sharing, and I really truly believe that this is not forever, and that we will come through the tunnel and out of fibro hell. I believe we can be just like Dorothy when shew was living in a black and white world and then she opened the door and suddenly her life is in color. Call my Dorothy, I want to live in full living Panavision color.