But Not Yet

On March 6, I was at the local ER, in the waiting room, and I was crying. I had just left a pain management clinic, and was told that there were no therapies to help me, besides the ones I was already taking (namely, the Cymbalta and the gabapentin). I asked the pain management specialist how I could handle my pain now, when it was enough to keep me from attending class. The woman, a PA, just stared at me, unsympathetically like I was one more bother in her day. I mean, cancer patients are lining up outside, the elderly with severe arthritis, but who can look at a thirty-four-year old woman complaining of moderate-to-severe pain? I'm just not sick enough.

In the ER, I was put in the hallway, and the nurse came to me, and asked why I was there. I explained that I was having a flare up of fibromyalgia, and I need some relief. She asked what had worked in the past, and I replied honestly that morphine helped. She was ready to give me the shot when the ER physician vetoed it. She and another nurse asked again, and again, the ER doctor told them no.

Doctors and staff alike keep telling me that nothing serious is going on, my MRI show some degenerative changes, but then again, most people's do. As the ER doctor put it, my back pain was not "life threatening."

The bouncing around from doctor to doctor, and even ending up in the ER due to pain is not an unusual experience for women. And there is a gender difference in how doctors treat pain. I've read the suffering of women, especially with endometriosis, a pain that honestly, male doctors cannot relate to nor do most of them have a firm grasp just how horrible it is. We're just expected to deal with it. It's not uncommon for women to say that menstrual cramps put them in bed for a few days every single month.

I've been told (and read) a great many things about fibromyalgia, and every single doctor whom I met with at Stanford Pain Management Clinic asked me what I thought causes fibromyalgia, like I was being tested at a medical school oral exam. To answer, I simply summarized what I had heard Dr. Sean Mackey, MD, PhD say about it. One doctor recited a rather old theory, that fibromyalgia is a muscular and ligament condition, in which normal activity produces micro-tears in the tissue. We know (or at least Dr. Mackey knows) that fibromyalgia affects the central nervous system because people with the disorder experience brain atrophy over time, a condition of the disorder that I'm not looking forward to.

This morning, the pain woke me up. It was a solid seven out of ten on the scale. I took some Norco, and then attempted to go back to sleep, but something about being in bed made the pain worse. So, I made coffee and wandered around the house, waiting for the pills to take effect.

I'm asked to lose weight, go to the gym five days a week, go to yoga class, maintain A's in my academic classes, go to Stanford a couple times a month (missing school), and on top of it, manage two chronic conditions. At times, it seems all a bit too much. I'm a self-improvement project. Someone who will get there someday. But not yet.