Imagine you have no physical conditioning. You never run or jog. You don’t have strength or endurance. Now imagine you haven’t had anything to eat or drink in 2 days. Then somebody forces you to run a marathon. How are you going to make it? What if you don’t want to? You would instantly feel it is a horrifying experience. You would have no clue how you are going to make it. That’s how I feel when I wake up most days. I have no endurance or mental energy to deal with the pain and the fibromyalgia flare ups. The first thing I feel when I wake up is horror. I couldn’t even move this morning. The only thing I could think was “How the fuck am I going to make it through the day today?” And that was at 7am.
Every day for a chronic pain patient feels like being forced to run a marathon. Right when you wake up, you feel that sense of dread. Pain that feels like someone jabbed 2 chef’s knives into your spine. The hangover-like feeling of the fibromyalgia making you feel foggy and painful in a completely different way. The feeling that your whole body is on fire from the fibromyalgia flare up. The best word I can think of to describe this is “horrifying”. It happens every day. You have no choice but to run. There is no way to make it stop.
When you wake up feeling nothing other than horror, you have no headroom to use to help you get by. There is no wiggle room to work with. You wake up in pure survival mode, and you spend the rest of the day there. You hang onto your bed our couch for dear life and count the minutes until the day is over. Then you hope and pray you’re medications will actually be able to knock you out so you can get some sleep.
Sleep is always elusive, and when you do get it, it is fractured and tedious. I wake up every 10 minutes or so, scream, then roll over and hope I fall back to sleep. Repeat this all through the night, and I wake up feeling like I just went 15 rounds in a heavyweight fight. This is supposed to be the restoration and recovery phase of your day. Imagine the above marathon example, but instead of waking up and being forced to run, you just finished a marathon, grabbed 10 minutes of sleep, then you are forced to run another marathon.
Now add in the fact this happens every day. Maybe you get a day or two of recovery every two weeks, but the marathon continues. You think you’re making progress. You think you’re making your way to the finish line, but the finish line never comes. There is no end to it. The forced running never stops. The pain never stops. The horror never stops. The cycle of not sleeping, waking up exhausted and feeling horrified, and being forced to go do the whole thing again continues every day. Now you are in a dissociative, psychotic loop. You think you’re making progress. You think you have gained distance. You think you are approaching the finish, but you aren’t. You are still standing in place at the start line, exhausted and horrified.
This is the life of someone with chronic pain and fibromyalgia. Every. Single. Day. There are days where you feel you are making progress, but you aren’t. You are still stuck in place. Most days you can’t even think far enough ahead to think about what you will eat for dinner. How can you worry about tomorrow when you can’t even fathom how you will get through the next 5 minutes? Oh yeah, you still have to pay rent and utilities, get to the store to somehow feed yourself, bathe and dress yourself. How do you do that when you can’t move because of the pain? I am rapidly approaching bankruptcy because of it. And after all that, now go run that marathon. There won’t be anybody to help you. No food or water along the way. You have no choice but to run. And nobody cares you are going through this. Welcome to chronic pain life.
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