In the beginning

These are my memories of growing up, of becoming an adult, a mother, a wife, a soulmate and tracking back where my fibro symptoms came from or my earliest recollection of when they started.

Coming from an abusive background, I always experienced pain in one form or another. With 20/20 hindsight I can now see that fibro was my unwelcome travel companion for most of my life.

My father was abusive. He had been raised in one of the many residential schools after his mother's death and my grandfather's inability to care for him. He came out brainwashed and confused about his heritage. When things did not go well on the farm, he would stalk to the house and take out his frustrations on us. I lived in fear of hearing the back door slam since it meant it was him and he was angry. I knew the pain of beatings, kicks and slaps from a very early age. After the birth of each successive child, I would end up caring for them never mind that I was a child myself. Once they got old enough that my father would start beating them as well, I decided that I would not allow them to be hit like he did to me. So I turned myself into the shield for my brothers and sister. Anyone who heard the back door slam would instantly galvanize the rest of the children and squirrel them away in closets, out the window, or just plain flee out the front door and I would stand my ground waiting for the pain to start. As the years went by and the beatings became more and more serious, I stopped seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and just wanted death to take me away from the pain. I sank into depression so deeply that I barely remember grade 12. I couldn't remember which classes I had from one day to the next, where my locker was or the combination to open it. I was lucky I could learn fast since I needed to pass an admissions exam for college which I passed. My only light during that year was my boyfriend. He always wondered what caused the various bruises on my body but I never explained and he didn't push. I think he knew, but that was mostly because I think that he was also abused as a child. I bruised very easily and took longer than most to heal.

I was always sickly as a child, I had aches and pains that some days I had no clue why I was having them therefore accepted them as normal and on other days, knew the provenance but did my best to ignore the cause. I would miss weeks on end during school years for various illnesses.

As a child I suffered from extremely painful bouts of belly pain that turned me into a weak kitten, followed by nausea and more insane cramping. I always thought that it was caused by my mother's attempts at stretching what food we had by slicing off the bad parts of vegetables and using what was still "good". But that wouldn't explain why my siblings, all 3 of them, didn't have the same affliction as a recurring nightmare. Now fast forward to 1995, and the family doctor informs me that the insane bouts of cramping, diarrhoea and rock solid stools  are known as IBS. Wonderful...

I began my period at 14. From day 1, I was racked with pain each time I had my period. A flow that felt like I was hemorrhaging that lasted for 7 to 10 days accompanied by a most unpleasant odour that I dared not mention to anyone, least of all my mother. She relied on me reading about all these things in books and finding my answers there because she was too embarrassed to discuss anything least of all female things.

Around the age of 15, I was involved in a car crash, I was the ever unpopular geek and belonged to the library club. The librarian had organized a school trip for the club to go and visit the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal. It was an awesome day until we got rear ended on the Jacques Cartier bridge. Because it was a small group, the librarian had used her own car for the trip to save money. She had a station wagon with a rumble seat in the back facing backwards. That's where 3 of us were sitting when we got rear ended. I was knocked out, woke up feeling like I couldn't breathe and gasping for air. Every part of my body was tingling badly worst of all my face and lips. I was taken to the hospital and treated. The doctor explained that I just had a panic attack. I'd never had anything that hurt that bad before in my life and I was no stranger to pain. What I found disconcerting is that once I started having these panic attacks, they wouldn't stop happening. Usually triggered by instances of high stress, emotions, fear, just about anything would trigger them. I started carrying a brown paper bag with me to help stop them but I did end up in ER more than once because of these.Three years later, this type of panic attack had receded into my past and I was glad they were gone.

At the same time that this was all happening, I had met a wonderful man my age who loved to dance, worked on his beautiful talent for drawing and painting and we had a great time together. We had plans for the future which we intended to spend together once I was done with college and he university. The fall I left for college, he was lobotomized in a motorcycle accident. He was on his way home from work at 2 am on his motorcycle when a speeding car struck him from behind. When he regained consciousness 3 months later, he didn't recognise anyone and the accident left him unable to feel any emotions. He had to relearn to speak, walk, eat, dress himself. He looked at me like he'd never known me and I finally put an end to the one sided relationship and wished him nothing but good for the rest of his life. Watching him trying to figure out why I was upset and what did I mean by love just broke my heart and the doctor's prognosis was not encouraging. They were hoping that he would at least be able to dress, wash and feed himself within the next few years. Today he resides in an assisted living home and spends his days painting childlike pictures.

By the time I hit 19, I was on birth control pills since I was in college and had finally gone to see a doctor for the first time on my own. I also had the problem that I never knew when they would strike as I was never regular, which issue was resolved by the birth control pills. I married my college sweetheart that same year and thought that life was pretty awesome considering ......

By the time I was 20, I was pregnant for my first child. She was born term and the pregnancy was mostly normal with only a few bouts of false labour, one at 7 months and one a day before I actually gave birth. There was what I assumed to be normal pregnancy behaviors like insane morning sickness, I actually lost 20 lbs during my pregnancy. The doctor prescribed some pills to stop the morning sickness since I was still having it well into my 3rd trimester. The pills worked, but also left me with no appetite. So more weight loss hehehe, I didn't mind :)

During this period of time, marriage felt "normal", husband would throw fits of anger over nonsensical things which always ended up with me crying picking up broken crockery, etc... and blaming myself for whatever made him angry since he did all the yelling. During my 7th month of pregnancy, his brother came to visit and they almost came to blows when one day my husband forgot his brother was in the house and started screaming obscenities at me and throwing things around the kitchen. That showed me that perhaps, this was not normal? I had only known pain up until now so why should things be any different....

This discovery that maybe life didn't have to involve pain and abusive language and no self esteem ended up pushed to the back burner since my daughter was born. She was gorgeous, perfect, and so sweet. With the experience of raising my two youngest siblings, I knew what to do with my darling daughter including protecting her from her Dad's outburts. I had vowed to myself that he would never put a finger on my children and kept to that vow in later years when things got worse.

Between the birth of my daughter and my son, there was another child but the pregnancy did not succeed. Mainly because we had to move and the people who said would help us move never showed up. So pregnant or not, we had to move which meant I had to help with all the heavy items like fridge, freezer, stove, washer/dryer, etc... By the end of the day, I was bleeding and that was the end of that pregnancy. My husband's abusive behavior had only grown worse. Now he had taken to playing the silence trick on me. He wouldn't speak to me for days. When I asked what was wrong, he'd answer me with "you know what it is" or "Think about it, you'll figure it out" and the silent treatment would continue. More days would go by and still no words from him until  I'd finally breakdown, pleading and begging him to tell me what I'd done wrong since I had no clue whatsoever. Strangely enough, I look back now and don't even remember what had offended him. There were so many of these episodes that they all blend into one long string of thinking I'm the bad one, the bitch, the lazy whore, the useless piece of shit he'd married.

I had returned to my original behavior of shielding the young ones from the abusive person, now it was my daughter and later my son that needed shielding from their father.

On the body front, I wasn't having my period every month. I would go for months with nothing and then get hit with the mother lode of all menses that would last 2 to 3 weeks. I had seen the doctor to see if there was a problem. I was told that I likely had adhesions in my uterus which caused the lack of menses. Today I understand better that what I experienced for 20 years was stress based amenorrhoea since adhesions occur after a D&C which I've never had. The longest I went without having a period was 9 months. I was seriously wondering if there was something actually wrong with me, but any time I mentioned it to a doctor I was told that I was working too hard. During that period of time I was raising 2 children, one of which is disabled, and in later years, caring for my mother in law who was disabled as well and that's on top of working 12+ hours a day alongside my husband on a cattle dealers farm and in later years our own farm.

By the time we owned our own farm, it was 1994. We moved to the farm which was a 8 hour drive from my family. Not like it mattered much since my mother had made it clear that whatever problems I had were my own and she did not want anything to do with them. She had her hands full taking care of my father who developed diabetes in 1979 and would not care for himself, his diet. He eventually lost both feet to gangrene, became blind and lost the use of his hands, and finally his heart was affected. He finally had a heart attack and passed away in his sleep in 1997. Fast forward to 2010 and this is what finally came out. My mother had failed to tell me until this year was that my father was diagnosed with fibro 10 years earlier. She only admitted to this after I started explaining what fibro was doing to me. Her reply was "that sounds like what your father was complaining of all the time" and finally, "the doctor told us he had fibromyalgia but he said there wasn't much to be done about it. And then she adds that my sister (who passed away last year from cancer) had also been diagnosed with fibro in 2001 when she had her first battle with

cancer. My maternal grandmother also had fibro but it was called a different name back then. Aarrrgh! So there's the genetic predisposition to developing fibro!