By Rebecca Miller, fibromyalgia patient since 1994
It feels like the bones are coming through the bottoms of your feet, but they’re not. You’re just walking a block.
It feels like there are creepy-crawly bugs under the skin of your legs, but there aren’t.
It feels like your fingers are twice their normal sizes, but they’re just that stiff.
It feels like your bra is a medieval torture device - a hair-shirt! But it’s not.
It feels like your tailbone has popped out to become your own private painful prop, but it hasn’t.
It feels like you’ve run a marathon – your legs are screaming with pain. But you’ve just climbed a flight of stairs.
It feels like your ankles and calves have been cast in concrete, but they haven’t.
It feels like you have feelers extending two inches out of every pore of your skin, wafting and sending signals back with the slightest puff of air.
It feels like the ceiling fan, the air conditioner, the furnace are all there to make you miserable, to dry your eyeballs out and brush your skin with a glacial or burning wind.
It feels like the vacuum cleaner noise is a buzz-saw in your head, grinding through your eardrums, but it’s just in the next room.
It seems like the aroma of the janitor’s pine-scented cleaning bucket is a torment meant just for you – the scent clings and cloys and makes you want to vomit. You escape to the outdoors, and shake off the odor that is almost tangible, almost visible as it clings in your hair, on your clothes, in your nostrils. Likewise with the free perfume samples that come in magazines, in catalogs, and in the mail. They must be detected early and must stay outside with the trash – they may not come near you. Rubber items, too.
It feels like you can detect smog with the surface of your eyeballs – driving into the city they remind you, stinging, stinging, “Danger, danger!”
It feels like you have sand and cotton filaments in your eyes all of the time, but they’re not.
It feels like your eyes are so dry that that your eyelids will stick to your eyeballs, and you’re right.
It feels like your lips are so dry that they’ll crack and bleed at the corners, and they do.
In the space of a half hour, you get such a bad bellyache you’re bent double, gasping, sweating, and thinking you may pass out onto the floor of a cold tiled public restroom, and that’s possible.
It feels like you could sleep for days, and you do – missing all of the birthday parties, family reunions, loved ones’ funerals, and vacations of your life.
It feels like the skin on your forearms has been flayed, but it hasn’t.
It feels like your back is on fire, but it’s not.
It feels like you want to die, but you don’t.
It feels like you’re insane, but you’re not.
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