-less and -ful

Author's edit:  I added a comment below.  In typical foggy fashion, I sorta forgot to mention what spurred this post on in the first place.  Please read and commiserate.

The past 24 hours for me have contained many words with both -less and -ful as their suffix.  A random smattering, as pulled from my fibrofog-addled brain may go something like:

Worth-less
Use-less
Pain-ful
Hope-less
Hope-ful
End-less

....other things start to creep in like, "I can't move," to, "Am I going to have to start the fight for disability at 28 years old?"


Fibromyalgia is an insidious disease that hits you on every level -- physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.  I had a breakdown today, when I sobbed with my wife, trying to explain what it's like.  God bless her, she's still trying to understand.  It's an added burden for us fibromites when we realize that the disease not only happens to us, but also to those close to us.  Many of us go on to lose friends and family because they just can't handle or understand what's happened to us.  We scarcely understand it ourselves.

We live in an age where diseases are easily detected, diagnosed, prescribed, treated, and cured.  Yet fibromyalgia meets none of those criteria.

[I pause, chuckling to myself as I see that not even the spell checker recognizes the word "fibromyalgia."  Such is our fate.]

The government has recently set and modified a set of diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, which I will cover in a later post.  But it's not easily detected.  Often, it is confused with other diseases.  In fact, the full name is Fibromyalgia Syndrome, or FMS.

A Syndrome is defined as "a group of symptoms that togetherare characteristic of a specific disorder, disease, or the like." -- Thanks, Dictionary.com ;)


The diagnostic window for FMS is generally two years.  It's a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning they have to figure out what it's not before they can figure out what it is.  All the while, the person, the human being at the center of it, is suffering.


Once we have a diagnosis, we're ecstatic -- we're not crazy!  We know what it is!  But the euphoria is short-lived once we begin to realize -- unlike every other disease -- it can't be cured, and at best, can only be managed.  Sometimes, not even that.


So we sit (painfully), and wait (exhaustedly). We let go of the person we used to be in favor of the person we now are.  We say goodbye to all the things we could do in favor of all the things we can't do.


And we watch as this damned disease potentially robs us of our very lives.  Not necessarily kill us, but rob of us the things we always wanted to do.

Before you preach, know you're preaching to the wrong choir.  Everything you could say, we've already heard and/or thought of.  FMS is insidious in that it's like no other disease, even any other chronic disease.  I used to try and imagine what is was like, based on my own experiences and empathy. [and may I say, I have a very strong sense of empathy]  Yet I didn't know until I began manifesting the symptoms -- and worse, they began burgeoning and flaring -- what it was all about.  

Unless you have the disease, you truly, truly cannot imagine what it's like to live with.


Every minute.  Every second.  Every day.  

For. The. Rest. Of. Your. Life.

BUT! that's why I'm writing this blog.  To educate.  To bring understanding and awareness.  To pull back the curtain on the ugly, pulsating thing, shambling about in the darkness, and say, "This.  This is what it is.  This is what it can do.  Please understand.  Please show compassion.  Please help."


As we have compassion for others, so we must have compassion for ourselves.


Think about it.