Over the past few years, I’ve been visiting my doctor on and off for assorted weird and frustrating issues, from emotional issues (anxiety and mild depression, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping) to physical ones, including near-constant pain in my head, neck, jaw, shoulders, upper and lower back, knees, shins, ankles, and the tops of my feet (WTF, really? Yes.). I always brought up these problems one at a time, because at any given time, only one of them was generally so bad that I couldn’t deal with it on my own.
We always assumed these were related to my weight, and expected them to more or less go away when I had my gastric bypass surgery just over three years ago. To everyone’s surprise, it didn’t get better, and, in fact, continued to get worse.
Over time, I’ve wound up on a number of medications trying to control these symptoms, without us ever figuring out what the deal is. I’ve had CAT scans, X-rays, been poked by rheumatologists and orthodontists, and wandered from medication to medication, trying to find something that works. At best, we’ve managed to make things a little bit better.
Since late last year, the pain has been steadily worsening, to the point where I can’t ignore it anymore like I had gotten used to doing, and finally last week I made an appointment to see my doctor and brought along a list of all my symptoms, instead of just complaining about one thing. He looked at the list, and the list of things we’d tried, and the list of things we’d ruled out, and decided we’d start treating me for fibromyalgia.
The medication I’m going to be taking for this, however, conflicts with pretty much all the medications I’m currently on to try to individually treat the symptoms, so I’m in the process of weaning myself off those medications in order to begin taking the new stuff.
Net result: I’m sort of a mess at the moment. Between coming off my anxiety medication and the stuff I was taking to try to stave off the head and leg pain, I feel kind of lousy these days. Hopefully once I start taking the new meds in a couple of weeks I’ll start improving, but in the meantime, don’t be surprised if my throughput is down a bit. I might also be a little crankier than usual. I apologize in advance.
The timing, from a Mozilla standpoint, is not awesome. From a personal standpoint, however, if this works, it’s been a long time coming, and for the first time in a while, I feel like I might just see the light at the end of the tunnel.
