The symbol most associated with fibromyalgia is the butterfly, as well as the purple ribbon, since a butterfly despite being almost weightless can cause pain if it landed on a person with fibromyalgia.
Fibromyalgia (fibro) is a chronic and highly stigmatised condition that presents as pain throughout the body - often inconsistent both in strength and location as well as resistant to pain medication - along with a slew of other symptoms - mainly intense fatigue and cognitive dysfunction, in addition to headaches, abdominal pains and cramps, depression, insomnia and general hypersensitivity both to touch as well as the other senses.
These pains can be a draining inconvenience, or so crippling it robs the person of the ability to walk or function.
Due to lack of research, it's believed that anywhere between 2-6% of the population suffers from it.
Many people suffering from fibro will say they often wake up more tired and in more pain than they were in when they went to bed. Experts often describe it as the brain losing its ability filter out pains the human body constantly experiences throughout the day.
One thing known for certain is that it's triggered by stress. It can be something as simple as a bad divorce, or a surgery, or a bout of illness, to trauma (either microtrauma over time or one definitive event). Fibro patients will say it's as if their brain finally had enough and started striking. Unfortunately there's no going back once that happens, as there is no cure, and fibro is likely to progress and worsen over time.
It's an illness that can't be proven through samples or x-rays, but rather it's diagnosed when no other cause can be found, and all other treatments have proven unhelpful.
We have records dating all the way to ancient Greece about people whose symptoms today are assumed by experts to be caused by fibro, though it wasn't until the 1900s that the illness got its own name and field of study. That's about all it's gotten, however.
Unfortunately most people with the diagnosis are AFAB, which means the illness is subject to sexism and is often ignored in the medical field, resulting in little research and funding, little knowledge, and a lot of challenges for people suffering from it. Recent numbers suggest that the gender disproportion is far smaller than presumed, however, likely due to other factors such as social stigma keeping men from seeking help.
Interestingly there looks to be a large overlap between fibro symptoms and long covid, which has in recent years caught the interest of researchers, so it's likely that the world will understand the illness more in the future, which will hopefully help people with fibro sometime down the line.
If nothing else, it might finally be recognised as the life changing illness it is, for currently there are still doctors who claim it's not real, and refuse to diagnose and treat it, instead claiming people with fibro are just lazy and overly sensitive.
It's because of these things that global awareness days are so important.
Increasing awareness about this barely understood and largely unknown disease, makes life easier for those who suffer from fibromyalgia both directly through general knowledge and understanding from people around them, to a larger scale where funding and research is vital to perhaps one day find a medication or cure. Or at least find an indisputable way to diagnose it.
Please consider sharing this in order to help with just that. 💜 May your day be as painless as possible.
