hey guys, I finally have some news to share about my whole chronic illness thing! I’ve been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, which is a condition that causes chronic pain and chronic fatigue, amongst other things like nausea, headaches, dizziness and brain fog. I’ve been dealing with it for years but haven’t felt able to talk about it that much (especially recently) as I didn’t know why I’m in pain or exhausted most of the time, and it’s hard to talk about something and deal with questions and suggestions when you don’t even know what it is or understand it yourself.
Getting a diagnosis has been difficult - it’s not something that shows up on tests and it’s not a very well understood condition from a medical perspective either. It’s also tricky as some of the symptoms could also have been explained by (and/or amplified by) being autistic and having anxiety and depression, like brain fog and sensory overload, so separating everything out and assigning things accurately isn’t straightforward. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition and there’s no cure, but different people recover from it to different extents, so there are things that you can try to manage how the symptoms affect you. If you’re curious about it, Arthritis Research UK has great information booklet about Fibromyalgia that you can download as a pdf from their website https://www.arthritisresearchuk.org/arthritis-information/conditions/fibromyalgia.aspx i’m so relieved to finally understand what’s going on and have access to medical support now the doctors have taken note of it too, and I’ll likely be talking about it a lot more now as it’s a huge part of my life! One of the harder parts of invisible disabilities (along with, y’know, actually having them) is that people can’t understand how you’re affected by them (or even that you’re affected at all) just by looking at you, and i’d like to be braver about not hiding things or pretending that they’re not there. Thank you for all the support so far! <3 ✨
