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Fibromyalgia/Chronic Fatigue

Pajaro Street Health and Wellness Editor, Deamer Dunn - My Long History with Fibromyalgia


In 1993 I was 35, working in the day remodeling houses, working in a restaurant at night, and playing the Northern California professional golfer's tour. This is when I started experiencing some excruciating pain, especially the morning after playing golf. I was disturbed because it came on too quickly to be just a matter of getting older. I tried to keep up my demanding schedule but as the bad mornings started to become more frequent it became clear that I was experiencing something beyond the aches and pains of living a very active physical life. At the time Fibomyalgia was a relatively new definition of malady and it took on average over 7 years for anyone to be diagnosed and a diagnosis of FMS only came by eliminating all other possibilities. I was actually very fortunate due to coming across another individual's exhaustive search and hooking up with a support group online. Regardless I spent a year and a lot of money only to hear there was nothing wrong with me. I had a very athletic youth and experienced all kinds of injuries and pain so I knew this was something different. Tragically, so many sufferers in those days believed the doctors who told them it was just in their heads.

Back then there was little the traditional medicine world could offer fibromyalgics. We were guinea pigs for whatever a doctor or alternative medical professional came up with. Some things gave me some relief, others made me feel worse. FMS gradually took over my body and I reluctantly began giving up some of my activities. I stopped playing golf competitively and within 7 years I retired from playing golf all together as well as any other athletic endeavors - including even running, jogging, riding a horse or walking very far. I could still perform pretty much any of them for short periods of time but then the FMS would begin to take over my body and I would start to feel like I was moving in quick sand. Most importantly, the joy of participating no longer outweighed the pain I would experience shortly thereafter and the even worse pain often followed the next day. Travel, driving or being confined in any way became progressively difficult. I began to make a number of lifestyle changes. I cut back on my restaurant work and then opened my own restaurant in hopes that I could perform better on a daily basis if I was in control. That worked for about 5 years. At that point I feared I would have to give up my restaurant because I was finding it progressively difficult to perform. That is when I made more radical changes.

Most people with FMS will tell you that it controls their life. Because it so dictates what we feel we can do and when we feel we can do it that we tend not only to avoid doing many things, but we tend to not even plan ahead anything that is not essential, since we are so uncertain how we will feel when the actual time comes.

Improving life quality through diet, sleep habits, exercise and changing priorities

I can now look back and state what works and what doesn't work in controlling the pain of Fibromyalgia. The worse thing I ever did was an aggressive cleanse. It so depleted my body strength that Fibro took control of my body. It took me 6 months to get back to how I felt before the cleanse. As I describe below, detoxing yourself of toxins is important for getting some control of Fibromyalgia, but like any endeavor, it is important to build into it with moderation. Any over indulgent or overly aggressive approach will make you feel worse. To improve your control over FMS you must strengthen your body, your mind and your spirit.

Diet:
I now believe diet to be the most powerful tool for fighting fibro's control over our body. This is a two-step process. First is limiting the things that put demands on our bodies and secondly we need to improve our nutrition. The more you limit sugar, simple carbohydrates, alcohol, caffeine, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, and the use of personal care items that contain chemicals, the better you will feel. Equally important is eating quality whole food, and a diet high in fruit and vegetables. It took me years to completely commit to such a strict diet, but it allowed me to take back my life.

The next level of nutrition:
After taking control of my diet I then took it to another level by adding supplementation. After a period of time I realized that even with my disciplined diet I was still coming up short in my body's nutritional needs. As a chef and a scientist of food I know how difficult it is to get quality food that is rich in nutrition. As a Fibromyalgic I've become extremely sensitive to what is going on in my body and I could feel my body needed more vitamins, antioxidants and cofactors to fight the degenerative quality of FMS and all the toxins with which we are exposed. My research educated me on how much difference there is in the quality of supplements. Basically I realized that supplements bought off the store shelves were not good enough quality to make a difference in my health. That led me to pharmaceutical grade supplements which offer the quality, absorbability and potency to really make a difference in our health. Adding supplements to my disciplined diet, changing priorities and daily exercise has improved my health to a point where I'm actually considering doing some things that I thought I would never do again.

Sleep: Getting enough quality sleep is difficult for Fibromyalgics. We suffer from the 'catch twenty-two' that our pain makes it difficult to sleep well and not sleeping well creates more pain. Like most who experience sleep issues I turned to pharmaceuticals for help. They helped to a degree, for they helped my body rest, but their use created undesirable side effects (as with the use of so many pharmaceutical drugs). Then I was fortunate enough to attend a sleep seminar at a health conference and learned that typical sleep aids knock you out but actually inhibit you from achieving restorative sleep. The doctor went on to describe how a melatonin supplement can help you retrain your body to obtain a more natural and effective sleep routine. The occasional use of this supplement, along with good habits, has greatly helped with the control of my FMS.

Exercise for a fibromyalgic is complicated in that anything excessive will only make you feel worse. What has worked for me is borrowing from all kinds of different types of exercise and creating a routine, which emphasizes stretching and then adds non-strenuous aerobic exercise and finally builds with strengthening. I hope to some day post videos online so others can see what I call “sectional aerobics.”

Priorities: Changing your lifestyle to accommodate having FMS can be difficult. For me, though sometimes frustrating, the journey has been actually a joy in discovering what matters most to me and what are worthy pursuits for me at this time in my life. Fibromyalgia can actually be a friend who wakes you up from an unhealthy sleep and helps guide you to a healthier, happier, more spiritual lifestyle.

I still feel the pain of fibromyalgia every second, of every minute, of every day but the strengthening of my body, mind and spirit has greatly improved how I feel overall and it has allowed me to achieve many things that myself and others thought no longer possible.

FMS now and the future:

So much of what is understood about Fibromyalgia is still incomplete and speculative. There is little agreement on what may cause it. We know that a lot more women than men have it and that most have suffered some sort of trauma before they became inflicted with FMS. There have been many discoveries of what fibromyalgics have in common. That is the good news. The bad news is that most of these things can only be measured very invasively, and looking at these things individually is expensive and in some cases dangerous. Over the last couple of years there have finally been some drugs approved for Fibromyalgia. The results have been good for some people but not for others. I continue to watch survey results on these drugs but I remain leery. Like so many drugs the side affects are sometimes worse than the underlying condition. Not to mention that prolonged use of a pharmaceutical often weakens or confuses our body strength and defenses.

There are so many theories such as our nervous system was damaged by some sort of virus, that it is a result of sleep apnea, or a restriction on blood getting to our brain. I have feelings about some of these things but what is actually true for my fellow FMS sufferers and myself is still a large mystery. What I do know is that the healthier we make our bodies, the more control we have over the inflictions of Fibromyalgia.