I should probably work all of this out in therapy, but that’s expensive and time consuming and I don’t know if my insurance even covers it.

When the pain first started, I was bitter that it had happened to me but then I got pretty decent treatments that helped manage it well and at the time, I could still keep up with most of my hobbies like triathlons and knitting and I was just training for my first half-marathon.

When the fibromyalgia started, it was subtle at first and then suddenly I could barely get out of bed for days at a time because of the muscle pain and fatigue. And with it came the loss of all of the activities that kept me sane dealing with constant, unrelenting pain. I couldn’t do the marathon or triathlon training because walks around the block would leave me fatigued for the rest of the day.

I remember one weekend where I went to training, before I had a definitive diagnosis, and after completing an eight-mile walk/run I couldn’t get out of bed for almost a week due to the fatigue.

Now when I knit my hands and arms tire quickly and the pain sets in almost immediately. I’ve completed only a handful of projects in there four years since I was officially diagnosed.

Losing all of these activities along with the fact that even household chores leave me in extra pain and fatigue makes me angry. For the rest of my life and my kids’ lives we will never be the same because I can’t do all the things I used to do.

And it didn’t have to be this way. With the appropriate workplace accommodations I would have been better able to manage the existing pain so it didn’t have to develop into fibro.

Patients with an existing pain condition are more likely to develop fibro because their neural pathways are already screwed up.

One in fifty Americans have fibro. One in four suffers from chronic pain and it is the most common cause for those going on disability. More people have chronic pain than cancer, diabetes and heart disease combined.

We have a lot to be angry about. There aren’t many effective treatments for pain other than opioid pain medication and it’s not very trendy for research dollars.