Getting Honest about Chronic Pain – Part II

Fibromyalgia is like being in an abusive relationship. You are forced to share your life with a beast that throws all kinds of punches at you until you are battered and bruised. You feel isolated, and like you cannot get out – trapped and doomed. Every now and then, it lets up a little, and you think you can have a stable relationship that is perhaps not ideal, but tolerable. But then it comes back with double the force and knocks you back down again. Eventually you realize that you will never be able to have a fully stable relationship, and you live under the fear of the next pain storm. Slowly, the fear creeps into your very being, and kills you from the inside – while this whole time, outwardly, you look perfectly fine.

Chronic pain doesn’t just screw your body up, it also messes with the mind. Regardless of how much I believe in positive thinking, it is hard for me to keep a cheery face and be positive all the time. It’s hard to keep that chin up always when you are at the mercy of something as unpredictable and changeable as the weather. I am afraid to hope for anything now, especially the future. And it doesn’t help that I feel disconnected from my past.

I believe that everybody has their place in the world, in terms of what contribution they could make to it. For me, that was science. It was a job I loved, and I put my heart and soul into it. But now, becoming a “respectable” scientist feels like a distant hope to me.

If fibromyalgia had struck me twenty years from now, when I was an established professor, I may not have been so frustrated regarding my career, because I would have had others to do the hard labor for me. But it struck me at a time when I am expected to put in long hours and work hard and work fast. So now that I cannot perform at the level that I am expected to, I have been practically disowned. Even my boss of five years – who once praised my enthusiasm for science, saw how hard I worked for little to no pay, and admired my work ethic – told me he wouldn’t hire me in my current position. This is despite the fact that I am trying to make up for less work time with better efficiency and task delegation. (I guess I can kiss any hopes of a good recommendation letter goodbye!) It is clear that science (at least, academia as I know it) has no place for slowed-down cripples like me.

I know I can find other ways to contribute with my science training, but my self-confidence has taken a serious beating since I haven’t been able to stay out of bed longer than few hours each day. At one time, I felt I could touch the stars if I wanted to and worked hard enough to get there. Now I feel like I’d just burn my hands if I tried. I don’t know what I am even capable of anymore. In many ways, I feel like I am losing my mind and important pieces of my identity.

Most days I am able to pick up the pieces and move on to forge new paths for myself. But on days when I am both physically and mentally exhausted, I feel like I do not have it in me to carry the burden and just keep trudging. Sometimes I just feel like stopping in my tracks and weeping – allowing myself to feel the loss of a life that could have been. And other times, I simply struggle to stay afloat when I feel everything around me is sinking.

On that note, I am desperately grateful to have a real person to share my life with who can be the sole reason that I fight through the storm to stay afloat. When I am getting beat up by fibromyalgia, the invisible brute in our lives, my husband is always there to tend to the wounds. Some days I feel guilty for perhaps not being a good enough wife to him (though he always insists that I am more than he could ever have asked for). And that guilt, which is nothing but a sullying mark on a beautiful thing, is also a reality of living with chronic pain. As is his feeling of helplessness at not being able to do enough to help me in practical ways.

Yet, chronic pain is also what brought us closer together in a very special way. So in many ways, I am thankful to fibromyalgia for that. And that – finding reasons to be thankful for the thing that ruined the life you dreamed of – that too, is a reality of keeping afloat with chronic pain.

Love,

Fibronacci