I think I felt the fibromyalgia flare up start breaking yesterday evening. I put on an ice pack yesterday that felt so cold. It totally froze my whole back, and that’s when the flare up started cracking. I took extra magnesium about an hour and a half prior to that also. That’s basically my reactive routine: Magnesium and ice packs. I use ice packs all day though, so I can’t exactly use 2 ice packs at the same time or something. Sometimes the ice packs seem to stop helping. I have to go without them for a little bit. Let the back warm up and let the pain come back strongly. Then the ice packs start working again. The last 2 days were so brutal. I have a couple of causes for this flare up. These are things I can avoid. I’m still not fully awake today yet, so I don’t know what the day will bring. I need some recovery from the last 2 days, so at best, this will be a recovery day. At worst the fibro is still here and will ramp up as I wake up more and more. Maybe in the middle is a kind of “aftershock” day where I don’t feel like I’m recovering, but it’s not a full on flare up. I certainly don’t feel like I’m experiencing any kind of recovery right now. I feel super wiped out. Exhausted. Burned out. It takes time to get over that. Usually proportional to the length of the flare up.
Yeah, I can feel it building up. Aftershocks at the very least. Not as bad as yesterday, but still rough. I’m so tired and exhausted. I feel like I need another 5 hours of sleep. If only I could. I need to keep up my good habits so this thing doesn’t tip back in the wrong direction. This is like trying to get up and live like a normal person when you haven’t had any sleep in 3 days. Or with the worst hangover of your life. It’s like pushing a train uphill. Brutally difficult. Except all this effort is so I can just survive the next 5 minutes. Nothing more than that. It’s so sad that it takes so much effort just to survive. There is no thriving, helping others, enjoying life, etc.
I didn’t need to go to the store today, but I did anyway just to get moving and to get out of the house. I feel better for it. I’m glad I did it. Now that I’m back home though, I’m shutting right back down. Spine pain is ridiculous. I took the ice pack off 10 minutes ago. I can’t go without an ice pack for any reasonable amount of time. This isn’t a recovery day, it’s a transition day. Tomorrow should be the recovery day. It’s better than a fibro day, but still not good. It’s a “flare-down” instead of a flare up, but still a flare.
Whew, I was dipping pretty far down between 5 and 6:00. I didn’t have an appetite and I felt like I needed to pass out. I got up and cooked some food and forced it down. Wow, was I hungry. I didn’t really eat much all day. I devoured everything. I feel a lot better for it. Days like this are always so hard. You think you’re out of the woods, but you’re not. It keeps pulling you back. It’s like the last day of the flu. You have to keep forcing it. Keep pushing. Push that train up the hill. I think it will pay off tomorrow. Tomorrow should be a recovery day, then we can move on.