Fibromyalgia for a day
first of all, let me say i am impressed beyond words by your all’s ability to live and sometimes even thrive with this condition because just one taste of it for me absolutely broke me, and i normally have a fairly high pain tolerance. salutes to all you troopers.
i recently had an experience caused by the TDAP vaccine recovery. it was possibly the most physical agony i have been through in my life. i was normal for like 12 hours after the vaccine but at 3am that night i woke up in full-body seering pain. i chronically experience insomnia, but i’m confident the reason i woke up this time was the physical pain mostly by itself. it was impossible to ignore and it got even worse over the course of the next 6-8 hours so god knows i didn’t get a wink of sleep after i woke up that night. all throughout the early morning, all i could do was seethe and writhe in pain and cry in my bed. it hurt to move, but it hurt to sit still, and it hurt to be touched, in any capacity, it just hurt to exist, i kept feeling the need to turn over or adjust myself or move so i just kept doing that and in hindsight that probably made it a lot worse but i wasn’t thinking straight and i have adhd anyway and i’m not medicated so it felt like the only thing i was capable of doing for those hours was thinking about active ways to cope and attempting to cope.
it was straight up impossible to function for the rest of that day, and still pretty difficult during the next day. coincidentally, i had a doctor’s appointment a couple days after this happened, so i told my doctor about it and he said he’s never heard of a reaction like that to the tdap vaccine. i’ve never had abnormal reactions to vaccines, either.
i do research into chronic illness all the time because i am chronically ill but have almost never been taken seriously about it and don’t have easy access to diagnosis-providing services, so i’ve learned to live with self-diagnosing, and i was just reading about fibromyalgia and it sounded exactly like what i experienced that day. it’s never been anywhere near that severe, but i have experienced milder versions of this pain-to-touch state of being in the past when i’m sick with a cold. i normally have excessive muscle weakness and pain/strain in response to exertion, which i believe comes from my POTS, but it’s not like it hurts just by existing.
is that what it’s like every/most days for some of you fibromyalgia havers, feeling like your entire suit of skin is one big awful bruise? do you think it’s possible i have fibromyalgia and haven’t realized or maybe some weird “dormant” form of it that comes out when my immune system is weakened in certain ways? figured this is the best place to come for some quick advice and anecdotal information