Sunday, February 6, 2011

Begin at the Beginning

So, if I am to share my journey with Fibro with (hopefully) a broader audience, I need to begin at the beginning. I would say...and then when I could to the end, stop (a la Winnie The Pooh), but the end is my end, so there really isn't an end. Not currently right now anyway. Medicine doesn't completely understand Fibromyalgia, so it can't be cured yet. 
I have an extremely sensitive system. I always have. If I have a food allergy or sensitivity, I get sick quickly. Just like food poisoning will put me down in no time. As a child, I had migraines and a sun sensitivity. I probably was not much fun. I don't know if the issues I have are genetic or the result of trauma during childhood. Not the 'I fell out of a tree when I was 8' trauma, but the trauma of having parents that were addicts.
I also have hip dysplasia, and the extremely rare fortune of it not being diagnosed until well into my twenties, resulting in a new hip for my 34th birthday. I have spent plenty of time wondering if I was not predisposed to eventually having Fibro because of the strain that the lack of left hip socket put on my body for so many years, but the general consensus is that my Fibro, like most cases, is the result of physical or psychological trauma. I have a very good friend who has Fibromyalgia as the result of a car accident that put her in a wheelchair for a period of time, but how my case came about isn't as easily explained.
In 2001, my husband and I decided to try for our third and final child. I miscarried at 4 weeks in January, and got pregnant again in March. I had an extremely difficult pregnancy with Angelina, ending up in the hospital at 12 weeks or so for hyper emesis, otherwise known as the inability to keep anything down. Right after this hospitalization, my husband was transferred from Hawaii to Florida. So in the middle of being very sick and pregnant, we moved.
Once I got to Florida, I started to have contractions and bleeding and eventually ended up back in the hospital. The short of it is: my placenta had lifted off the uterine wall, causing contractions, breaking my water, leading to a very, very bad infection and I was roughly 12 hours from becoming septic and was losing a lot of blood. Angelina Gabrielle was delivered at 18 weeks and 5 days on Tuesday, July 17, 2001. To save me.
These days, it is generally accepted that was the line in the sand for me. Within a month I started having pain in my arms that couldn't be explained, and symptoms that made no sense then, but now fall under Fibromyalgia. I went on to have one more child (a miracle on these hips) a year and a half later, and a hip replacement in 2007, before finally receiving a diagnosis of Fibro. 
Was I always predisposed? Is this the result of Angelina's pregnancy? I guess I'll never know. What do you think?

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