by Michelle Valiukenas

Created on: January 02, 2010

My fiancee comes in to give me a kiss good morning and as I stretch to say hi, I'm hit with a deep stiffness and pain in every inch of my body.  All I can think is oh, dear God, not again.  Please let it be that today is a good day, a day when I can maybe feel like a normal 27-year-old. 

I roll back over in bed thinking that maybe if I just let my body have a little more sleep, maybe it'll be good to me when I do get out of bed and get moving.  Sleep never comes though, which has become part of my life.

I have fibromyalgia and have likely had it all of my life.  Until I was diagnosed with it at 17, I always thought I was weird, that I just wasn’t like everyone else.  There were days when I wondered if I was dying because of how I felt. 

I always remember just hurting, I remember having headaches and body aches that my friends and peers never seemed to have.  I remember lying in bed, just waiting for sleep to come, being so exhausted that I wouldn't have been able to concentrate on anything else but sleep, yet not being able to actually fall asleep.  And then, when I finally did fall asleep, I woke up feeling completely unrefreshed as if I had not slept at all.

This is my life and my world.  I've had this for long enough to have adapted, to have realized what I needed to do and not to do to stop this pain from attacking my life.  I managed to do a lot while living with this.  I graduated from college, law school, passed the bar, and now work full time with this.  Most of the time, people don't even know I have anything.  Because the thing is this disease doesn't have any outside, physical deformities, most people can go through life without strangers ever being able to tell what they have.  I live a normal life for the most part.  But, then there are those horrible days when getting out of bed is a struggle, when your body hurts from head to toe, when holding your head up zaps all of your energy, and when the slightest change of temperature can leave you completely ice cold or sweating buckets.  Those are the days that make it hard.

Sometimes, I think I’ve “beat” the disease.  I will have a few days where I feel good, where I begin to feel “normal.”  And then, in an ironic twist of fate, I have a day where I can barely get out of bed.

Imagine if you will the feeling that you get after a good, intense workout.  Those lunges that left you with a pretty good pain in your calves, that long run that left your hips aching, the weight lifting that left you with sharp pains in your back.  You probably felt pretty good realizing that those pains meant you had been successful in whatever goals your workout was designed for.  Now imagine if those pains you felt never went away and if they were not caused by an intense workout, but just by living your life.  Imagine lying awake, being so exhausted that you cannot move, yet not being able to fall asleep.  Imagine waking up from that sleep and feeling as if you did not sleep at all.

Those of us who suffer from fibromyalgia may not wear anything outside that shows what we are suffering from, but we all share a silent suffering, a feeling that nothing seems to help.

Learn more about this author, Michelle Valiukenas.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.