New! Improved! Fibro-Flare! 30% more effective!

"New Improved Elvis! Now with less drug habits!"

I decided I really should write down when I'm in one of these amazing "flares" that join me on this journey through Fibromyalgia-land. Then, when it is over and I am in the land of simply Constant-Nagging-Aches-and-Fatigue, I would feel like the Luckiest (old) Girl Alive! (Insert picture of me dancing Sound of Music style--and try not to laugh.)

Oddly, I had just gotten on the computer to write this joyful saga, and the first thing I saw was an update from Mary on Fibromy-Awesome, in the midst of her own crash. She's young, late 20's, and has been dealing with this Ball O' Fun since she was 9. Yikes. Anyway, it's so very strange to read what someone else wrote about how they are feeling while in your head you are saying things like, "ExACTly!" and "I hear ya little sister!" (Yup, it's weird in there.)

So, just so I can refer back to this when I feel so much better than I do now, I shall enumerate or at least e-bullet-point what this current Gigantor Flare feels like.

• I am sooo tiiiired I feel like everything I do is in that slooow the recooord doooown voice, which is the speed I can move and think. Not good for driving a car.
• Everything around me is brighter/louder/bigger/faster, and more startling, possibly due to everything IN me being duller/slower, and more easily startled.
• My usual non-morning-person self usually wakes around 7:30 or 8 a.m. and reads a while before I get out of bed while letting my body stiffness calm down, but in a flare I sleep for more like 12 hours at night, though I will wake several times, and have loads and loads of crazy dreams that stick to me and follow me around all day like dog poo caught in the treads of your shoe.
• Many naps are involved in the rest of the day.
• My head is all "brain-smoggy." It's really called "brain fog" but I find it a much nastier, dirtier substance, thus "smog." I can't quite understand, retain, or make sense of much of anything I try to read to pass the time,  and I will probably come back to this very post later and tell myself to never ever post anything again when I feel this way.
• My eyeballs hurt.
• My skin hurts.
• My head hurts.
• My hands feel swollen but are not, and they hurt. I clapped them at our barking dogs, and jolts of pain shot through me like the stars in cartoons when someone gets "boff!"ed.
• Every body part not mentioned above hurts in a "Shoot me with an elephant tranquilizer dart, please!" kind of way. It's a general pulsing, burning, aching sort of pain all along my skeleton.
• If I take enough medication to not feel the pain, I can feel little else and definitely cannot hold up my end of the conversation, since I may not even be able to feel my tongue.
• On Fibromy-Awesome, Mary mentions the sensitivity to sound and how it can make you yell things that sound like "you are on crazy-pills." I mostly yell the things in my head, and yes, it starts to sound crazy(er) in there. I find I have to just go away to my room and try to close out the world, otherwise the inside of my head starts to sound like a Porta-Potty looks when you mistakenly look down after dropping your "addition" in the hole.
• My brain feels too loose or too tight, just wrong.
• The last thing I want to do is exercise of any sort, and yet I need to.  I believe this is called a "Catch-22," a saying which comes from a book by that name which I have not read, but is in common use meaning a no-win situation. For example: to avoid a flare I need to exercise regularly, but if I get sick with a bad, month-long chest cold and canNOT exercise regularly, I will likely have a flare that will keep me from exercising regularly. See? Catch-22.
• I can possibly force myself to make dinner, if that dinner comes in plastic and needs only to be warmed in the microwave. Otherwise we have the magical dinner called "fending," as in, "Can you guys just fend for yourselves?"

I am going back to sleep now. Good night.