I get the sense I should be achieving more and doing more. I am not disabled, after all.
...Pain and fatigue are messages: they signal for you to stop moving, to rest after injury or infection, 'but in people with fibromyalgia that only makes the problem much worse,' [the doctor] says. I think she means: I could cause myself real damage if I listened to my body, if I stopped to rest when it was screaming in pain.
'How old are you, thirty-one?' she says, looking down at her notes. 'You're still young, you should be able to do what you want to do.' She means: don't write yourself off yet. I almost agree with her... What does she say to the women in their fifties, or the man in his sixties who she saw before me?
...At the specialist outpatient clinic, I do not say: But I am disabled. Or: the thing is, I should not have to do what I don't want to do.
...'You need to build up how much you exercise,' the physio advises. 'So, if you walk for thirty minutes a day, start increasing it by ten percent, which isn't really that much.'
In a few months time, before a hydrotherapy session, the same woman will say: 'Getting up in the morning and going to work might not seem like a goal, because it's not something we even think about really.' A woman in the group will respond, calmly: 'You would if you had fibromyalgia.'
