I cried, tiredly. Mary, the social worker who was assigned to me, sat in front of me with tissues and a sympathetic face.
I grab a tissue and nearly explode.
“She can’t grab me by my shoulders! And squeeze me like that! Not when she’s angry! I’m not a child anymore...she cannot do that to me when I need her right now. Especially here! Of all places! In front of everyone, I just...”
I can’t keep speaking. I’ve lost my breath to what has now become a panic attack. My throat swells and I have to sit for a minute. Mary sits too. Patiently. I soon feel calmed by her presence. We talk about my Mom triggering a response from childhood abuse by grabbing me really hard after I said something she didn’t want to hear. She proved my point, really.
I tell her I have fibromyalgia. I tell her that I feel hopeless about the diagnosis after only a year of struggling to treat it. I cry harder, trying to recall how badly I was treated by the nurse who did my inpatient arrival meeting. For needing to increase my dose of tramodol by one pill to accommodate the lose of treatment I’d have inside of the hospital without access to medical marijuana. I was treated like I’d been treated by every doctor or nurse I told I smoked marijuana to. Regardless of them knowing the pain I was in or not.
Mary continued to validate me. I have a feeling her heart was hurting too.
“Jillian, have you experienced a lot of trauma in your life?” she asks hesitantly. I trust her, so I tell her.
“I’m the daughter of not two, but four alcoholic parents. I was molested by someone I cannot clearly recall as a child and have scars to prove it. My grandmother died when I was three, so I wasn’t a priority those few years before and after. I was given to my sister to care for. Whose Father died of a cocaine overdose on New Years day when she was sixteen. Caring for me turned into victimizing me. Blackmailing me for five years. Over catching me doing what I thought was sex, which I now believe to be learned from being molested, with a neighbor boy I was best friends with. We weren’t having sex, but I thought we were for many years. My sisters friends, told their siblings, who told the entire school. I was a joke for the remainder of my time in school before switching towns to start new in high school. The person I lost my virginity pressured me into doing it, I bled for eight hours afterwords and thought it was my cherry popping. I got into three car accidents, all rear ending me. I was raped while unconscious at a festival, after being trapped between the front bar and a random “gay” man who rubbed himself against me forcibly until he came. I had bruises on my hips. Another boy lured me to his house to drop off a birthday cake, asked me to come in, and threw himself on top of me. When he unbuttoned his pants and held my hands to the side I kneed him so hard he fell off me. He took me home, and he harassed me for weeks for being a whore. A couple of years later I woke up to my then best friend of five years sticking his penis inside of my mouth after we both fell asleep together on a hammock outside of a party we were drinking at together. Another friend brought me to her boyfriends house, which I later find is her sugar daddy, and ignores him trying to flirt with me all night. Hug me. Massage me. To top it all off, my body also developed endometriosis and hypothyroidism. So, I guess...I guess yeah. I’ve seen a lot of fucking shit for twenty three”
Mary gives me a look I only see when I tell people this story. A look of stifled shock, sadness and seriousness. She sighed and it’s the kind of a sigh I bet only a social worker could muster. A telling sign that she’s heard this all before and she’s tired of hearing it all again. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because her job never ends. And in a perfect world, it would end.
“You know, Jillian, when you experience a lot of trauma in your life, your body feels it as much as your brain does. In fact, some people argue that this is what causes fibromyalgia. This, I believe, is your cause. I think you have been so hurt. So, neglected and unloved. And all by the most important people in your life! As well as horrible assaults that were not your fault. It is no wonder your body is in pain. Going under that much stress, and so young, is enough to cause this pain easily.”
And that is when I started to understand my case of fibromyalgia. Not everyone’s is like this, sometimes it can be linked to a medical event that was traumatic enough to shock your system. Some are car accidents. Some are all of the above, like me. Doctors hear my story and insist I have fibromyalgia, no matter how many other things it could be. Because of the list I read above...they just know. And I couldn’t trust it until someone sat me down and explained that this is a real thing that happens.
