Patty Ann was a healthy 34-year-old sky instructor- an athletic person, always the first to suggest a bike ride, a sky trip, or a bumpy Jeep trek to a jungle archeological site. Further, she had been health-conscious years before it was fashionable, cutting out saturated fat and red meat, making sure to stretch properly before and after exercise.
Her body was more than her friend. Its strength, grace, and health was a central component of her identity. She had taken her health for granted since she was a young girl, serving as the captain of the soccer team.
And then it happened: pain. Pain that cut through her back and legs like a molten spear. Pain that turned her into a different person-someone who was fearful, no longer the natural optimist in control of her world.
The pain cut beyond her muscles, tendons and nerves. It attacked her soul. She felt betrayed. She had spent all her life in service to her body; had nurtured it, challenged it, developed it. She had protected it from pollutants, shielded it from injury. Now it had turned on her, breaking its half of the commitment.
Like many with this confounding affliction, it began during a time of stress. Patty’s father was recovering from heart surgery when she began to experience numbness down the back of her left thigh after the daily half hour drive to and from the hospital. Following pronouncement by an internist, and the other doctors of physical rehabilitative medicine that it was a bulging spinal disc, the numbness turned to pains, which coursed down both legs to her toes. It took seven months of hits and misses before she was given a diagnosis that she was certain was correct: fibromyalgia, sometimes known as fibrositis.
Fibromyalgia is a rheumatic condition that causes pain and spasms in tendons, ligaments and muscles, sometimes creating enough irritation to inflame nerves. The condition is usually accompanied by insomnia that robs the body of rest, thereby blocking it from healing itself. In fact, recent research indicates that the sleep disorder might actually cause the tissue irritation. Five million Americans, 80 percent of them women between 25 and 50, hae fibromyalgia. Although doctors have chronicled the symptoms of fibromyalgia since 1904,and it was the most common cause of non-combat disability for soldiers during World War II.
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By: Frank Diez
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