Who Is The Boss? You Or Fibromyalgia?

If I asked the question “who is boss? You or Fibromyalgia” to the general public, who is the boss between you and fibromyalgia? The positive thinking, well-intentioned people would likely say, “you are.” If you have Fibromyalgia then you know there are days when fibro is boss. Just as sure as the sky is blue, fibro is the boss during fibro flare ups and during bad weather or during a cycle.

So I ask again, to my fellow fibromites, who is boss, you or fibro? I would like to know from fibromites who have this illness what they think about this question? Here is my answer to the question.

Let’s compare fibromyalgia to a long season sport like basketball or baseball. The season is long and it requires a lot of management from the personal player’s standpoint all the way up to the manager or coach of the team. They both are endurance games and seasons. As a coach, you know that players are going to have a bad game every so often, but you don’t bench him on that alone. You look at effort and overall contribution to the team. You cut the player some slack during a down period, and give him some special attention or training needed to get past the dry spells.

You can’t judge the season by the performance of a week here or there, you have to take it in its entirety.

So what I am getting too is the Fibromyalgia is a situation that needs to be managed as opposed to an illness to beat. Try all you want with your pharmaceuticals, diet, sleep, therapies, exercise, and positive attitude, there will be times that, in spite all of that you have done managing your chronic illness, a flare will come. It may be in a few days, a few weeks or if you’re lucky, it might not come for several months. But that flare up will come as sure as the sun rises each day, the flare up will come.

There may be times when you feel like you’re winning and there are times when you feel like you’re losing. But if you keep the managers’ mind-set in the battle against fibro, you can enjoy the good times more and pass through the bad times easier.

It’s not easy to manage something as complex as fibromyalgia, especially if you have fibro fog. I wouldn’t say I am the best manager of the illness but I’ll tell you what I do to try and manage my illness.

I have advocated in a few of my articles the use of a journal. I am not the best example of journal writing but I have done it, I am doing it currently, and I’ve done it enough to know that it works quite well. Journaling helps you remember what your symptoms were on a given day. It reminds you what the doctor said. It reminds you about lessons learned by trying various activities.

There are a lot of things we can’t do with fibro and there are a lot of things we shouldn’t do with fibro, but everyone is different. I still want to live as much as I can so I do things, not crazy things, but I do them knowing I will pay for it in the coming days or even maybe weeks. I know I am going to be sore and sick anyway, why not have some fun on the rare chances that come my way to do something out of the boring, ordinary daily grind. I record what I did and how I paid for it. I forget a lot of things because of fibro. I try to record weather conditions and how I felt when certain weather comes along. I use my journal to keep track of certain medicines.

Journaling is fantastic emotional therapy because you can usually express yourself to a journal better than to anyone else. With a journal you can look up in the past and see what you did and how you paid for it with an increase of symptoms or you can compare weather patterns and how it affects you. Best of all, you can remember your past in as much detail as you put into your journal writing. You can also use your journal for keeping track of questions for health care professionals and their answers.

I tend to ramble on in my posts so I will wrap this one up as an introduction to how to manager Fibromyalgia. In this case using a journal is a great way to manage Fibromyalgia. There are several other ways to manage this sickening illness we know as fibromyalgia and chronic pain. Let me know by way of comments to this post what ways or what methods you use to manage your fibro.

Dealing with the question, of “who is the boss? You or fibromyalgia?” I don’t think it is a good approach to think of dealing with a chronic illness in terms of winning or losing but rather think of the battle with fibro as something to be managed.

Troy Wagstaff © Copyrighted

Look for at least three or more posts on how to manage fibro in the near future.

Filed under: Fibromyalgia - Fbro Awareness | Tagged: chronic illness, fibro awareness, fibro fog, fibro pain, fibromites, fibromyalgia, manage, Who Is The Boss? You Or Fibromyalgia? | 1 Comment »