30 Day Chronic Illness Challenge: Day 12

Briefly explain to a healthy person what it is like to live with this illness.

I've actually have a lot of experience with this because I had to make a presentation about fibro on fibromyalgia awareness day and present it to my class. So, this would be easy:

Fibromyalgia is a chronic illness that can either come out of nowhere (like with me) or result from an accident or another illness or whatever. You feel general pain in your entire body, fatigue, insomnia and many many more symptoms that varies from person to person. How I feel the pain and the symptoms I have aren't the same as another person with the same condition. It's very subjective and it honestly depends on the person, so you cannot (AND SHOULD NOT) compare other people's pain to yours; it will never be exactly the same, I can assure you of that.

Living with it is hard. Extremely hard sometimes, especially when I'm under loads of stress like at school. It's hard because people don't understand it because they think it's "convenient" for me to have pain when I have to do work. It's not convenient and I feel extremely guilty. I just can't control. 

The pain was very bad for me (still is sometimes) and I can describe it in different ways. 

• There is one sort of pain that is like someone is crunching your bones and pulling them. (usually in the legs or arms)
• The one that feels like a car is running over you or you feel as if you were missing a limb. 
• The one that feels like something is crushing your bones to the point of breaking it (usually in my fingers and ribs).
• And the one that feels like someone is stabbing you with millions of knives. 

So, basically... it's not pretty. At all.

It hurts, both physically and emotionally. People don't believe you and you have to learn to deal with that fact very quickly. Your doctors aren't always understanding and neither are your teachers, parents or any other authority figure.

It sucks. 

But, it wasn't the end of the world. It was extremely hard not to breakdown (and I did sometimes) but I pulled through. 

Hopefully, I will continue feeling better for the new year of school... 

xoxo,

- Merzy