I’ve been feeling a fair bit better the last couple of weeks, there’s been a definite change, less pain over-all by far.

I had a follow up with my family Dr. last week and the results from my bloodwork though not entirely normal, didn’t point to anything more than my fibromyalgia. I had some things come in as abnormal, but they were not far from the normal range.  It seems my immune system is a little over-reactive but not enough so to diagnose me with lupus or another autoimmune disorder above and beyond the fibromyalgia.

I still have an appt. for follow up with the rheumatologist in Oct. as well as with the neurologist at the MS clinic.

I also was given a referral for a physiotherapist to help with the exercise. I know I have to keep up with it, but when I was at the worst point of my flare-up, lasting for a couple of months where it was just getting worse and worse, exercise was unbearable. I know that as much as possible I need to push through and cope with the recovery pain I get even from gentle swimming. All the research shows that as painfull as it can be in the moment, that it will decrease over-all pain in the long run compared to people who don’t exercise.

The result is yesterday I was in the pool again after my long break from it. I managed half an hour of very leisurely laps, I had to break it down into two 15 minute sets with a break of 10 minutes inbetween. The worst part is trying to get out of the pool, my muscles are not happy to encounter gravity again when climbing the pool ladder. Today I’m really feeling it, I’m going to try to go every other day for a while, and not yet daily. I have a lot of recovery pain today, the muscles react as if I’d been doing 2 hours of intense martial arts and not 30 minutes of leisurely swimming. Unfortunately exaggerated muscle recovery pain is normal for many people with fibromyalgia and just something I will need to cope with.

I’m hoping the phsyiotherapist has experience with fibromyalgia and can help me work through some of my issues with pain and weakness in exercise.

Now that I have less pain, I’m not fighting to try to get to sleep at night, and I’m not waking up with pain throughout the night, or unable to get back to sleep again because of pain. Getting a regular nights sleep is such a phenomenal feeling when you’ve been without it for a while. I’ve also found my craving for sugar and caffiene is a lot less.

I had put my weight loss completely on the back burner while dealing with the increasing pain and symptoms I had throughout the summer. I had gotten down to around 180, but put 10lbs back on and have been hovering around 190. Now that I’m not so consumed with pain and pain management, I feel like I’m ready and able to focus again more on diet as well as exercise and go back to my previous goal and continue to bring my weight down.

I’ve got my fitday program back up and running, it’s a phenomenally helpful little software program that is an extension of what is offered at fitday I find keeping a record of my diet and exercise helps keep me on track.

Hopefully this slight remission will remain, or even better, hopefully things will continue to improve. It’s nice not to have pain screaming at me all the time, I still have constant pain but nothing compared to even a few weeks ago.

I’ve been writing a lot more too, here, and elsewhere, which is nice, but my wrists and hands are screaming at me for it now, so it’s time for bed.

Are you a kinky person? are you on Fetlife? if so, find me there too, my nick is Katt.

Thanks for those of you sending me ’spoons’ they must be helping.