Came across an article. Here’s what I learned from it. Bought the book mentioned in it and am reading on Kindle Cloud Reader. I love Amazon. Really, I do. Anyway:
“Research on fibromyalgia has lagged far behind other diseases, bogged down by controversy and a century of arguments about whether it’s a “real” illness.
This changed in 2002, when a groundbreaking study showed abnormalities in how the brain processes pain in fibromyalgia.
A much bigger factor is a stress (or danger) response that has gone haywire and is constantly on “red alert,” leading to a chain reaction that results in fatigue, brain fog, and muscle pain.
fibromyalgia is in many ways a sleep disorder, a state of chronic deep sleep deprivation. Studies have demonstrated over and over that patients experience inadequate deep sleep that is frequently interrupted by “wakeful” brain waves. This deep-sleep starvation contributes to the fatigue, muscle pain, and foggy thinking characteristic of the condition.
Treating sleep is the key to treating fibromyalgia, and it’s where I see the most benefit in reducing pain, fatigue, and brain fog. Sleep must always be improved before any other treatment will work, so it’s vital to address this with your health care provider to treat hidden sleep problems like obstructive sleep apnea and then add medications and supplements to help restore normal deep sleep.”
The sleep thing. I am dramatically better when I get enough unbroken sleep. Fewer hours or more broken sleep means more pain the next day. I’ve also finally connected weather to pain, because it got noticeably more humid the last two or three days, and I have been in a LOT of pain that pain meds aren’t helping with. In spite of rainy and showery days recently, the humidity stayed below 50%, and as soon as it went above that, ow. Major ow.
I so far am not nearly as fatigued as I was before the surgery, as well as a great deal of the time since I first got this eighteen years ago. Feeling hopeful that when the trazadone really kicks in I will sleep even more and better and have less pain. We’ll see how that goes. I try not to look ahead ever, but sometimes that little spark of hope starts burning.
That’s it for now. Just got started into the book, so if I learn any good stuff, I’ll post it here.
strangely peculiar 