Hello everyone. I found this place while looking for support groups about the many health/mental problems I’m living with.
I would like to share my story with you…I’m a 31 year old single mother of an 11 year old boy. I have been battling severe depression for the past 16 or 17 years. Now that I think about it, it may have been the beginnings of fibromyalgia even back then. Over time, things have gotten worse and worse for me. After I graduated high school, I attempted to attend my local community college in the fall. That winter, my whole life went downhill. My car blew up, my uncle passed away, I lost my job and my fiance, and I got so far behind in my studies that I ended up dropping out of college altogether. The only option I was left with was joining the Army, so I did. It turned out to be one of my greatest regrets.
Basic training was a complete nightmare for me. After multiple injuries and illnesses, I barely graduated. The worst one was during what they call the “Confidence Course”. There was an obstacle in which each recruit had to vault over a huge log after a running start. The idea was to hit the log along your belly and let it roll you over to the other side, where you would land in a somersault and continue running as soon as you were on your feet again. On my turn, I jumped an instant too soon and hit the log at chest level, causing my right knee to slam up into the bottom of the log. I ended up rolling the opposite way and landed on my back in the dirt. The trauma to my knee had me on crutches for the entire final month of training, in which completion of nearly every activity done was mandatory for graduation. Injured as I was, I was not allowed to participate in any of them, not for my lack of trying anyway, which earned me many instances of verbal discipline from my drill sergeants.
Due to my extreme determination to participate in every event I knew I was not allowed to partake in, I earned myself the opportunity to graduate with honors pending completion of a private final physical training test. The day after I was cleared to get off the crutches, I took my private test and passed with flying colors. The physical exertion that day was, I believe, the beginning of the downfall of my health. I remember standing in formation the next day, ready to graduate, catching dirty looks from the soldier next to me. Fed up with the glares, I turned to him demanding to know what his problem was. I will never forget his words. “You didn’t go through half of what the rest of us did. You don’t deserve to be here at all.” I’m sure you can imagine what that did to my confidence.
After that, my physical health continued to decline. During the next phase of my training, my hips began popping painfully with nearly every movement. Still determined and remembering the words of my fellow soldier weeks before, however, I dealt with the pain in silence and completed that training as well, finishing at the top of my class. I went home proud, and still suffering through the pain silently.
After a month at home for Christmas, I was stationed to Fort Polk, Louisiana for 2 years. I didn’t last even a full year, due to a night of drinking and subsequent dumb choices barely 24 hours after my arrival. A month later, I found out that I was pregnant. In the Army, pregnant women are given a choice. Continue to serve after the baby is born and risk deployment after 12 weeks of maternity leave, or accept a general discharge under honorable conditions. Not knowing anyone else well enough in that area to give my child to for the first year of his life, I chose the latter. Through the next 6 months, I was ridiculed, shamed, discriminated against, and taken advantage of before I finally left in late August of 2005. That day, my senior NCO pulled me aside, told me that I was a worthless piece of s**t, evidenced by my being “fired” from the Army (although it had been my own choice to leave), and that my baby would die within a year with me as his mother. My own mother drove me home in tears 3 days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall right where I had just been.
With my physical and mental health still declining, and with considerable emotional trauma continuing to plague me, I gave birth via emergency Cesarean to a very LARGE healthy baby boy in October. Postpartum depression hit me hard, with the constant pain only making it worse, even though at the time I still didn’t understand why I was hurting so badly all the time. Without the help of my parents, I doubt I would have lasted long without a complete breakdown.
As my son grew, so did the pain, the depression, the anxiety I had just started to experience, and the confusion as to why it was so difficult for me to remember things. It wasn’t until roughly 2011 or 2012, after trial and error of a few attempts to treat my depression, that I started to look into possible causes of my pain. My doctor ran me through tests for everything under the sun, to include even Lyme disease, which all came back negative. During that time, I stumbled across a website describing Fibromyalgia. I continued to research this new discovery, and everything that I had been experiencing started to make sense.
After more and more failures to find out exactly what was wrong with me, my doctor just decided to treat each of my symptoms separately and found a combination of Prozac, Voltaren, trazodone, and B12 vitamins that worked well for a long time. I was able to continue caring for my son (I wish I could rub that one in my ex-senior NCO’s face), working full-time at a prestigious child care facility, and maintaining the home I still shared with my father and youngest brother (my parents separated in 2007 not long after my other brother left for the Marines) in somewhat relative comfort. Unfortunately, that only lasted for a few years.
I began having extreme migraines in the winter of 2010. I had been working at the child care facility for nearly 2 years at the time. I started out getting bad headaches after I had gotten home from work almost every day for a few weeks. They would be almost gone when I woke up the next morning, so I was still able to get through the work day with minimal issues. Then, they got worse. I had to call out of work some mornings because the pain was just too much. I was getting dizzy and nauseous just trying to get out of bed. I would take a couple Excedrin, sleep a while longer, and the headache would taper off as the day went by. After a while, I would start getting a migraine while I was already at work, causing me to rush to the bathroom to avoid vomiting in my classroom. I had to be sent home multiple times. With the nausea, dizziness, and intense pain, I was terrified of dropping one of my precious toddlers if I needed to hold them. Not only would the poor child have ended up injured, it would have caused a nightmare of a lawsuit for the facility and I would have been fired on the spot. After a few weeks of this, I was brought to my supervisor’s office and instructed to take 2 weeks off to get my medical issues under control. I complied, and after brain scans and a consultation with a neurologist, I was put on another medication to prevent the migraines. It was only after I was ready to go back to work that I discovered I had been fired anyway.
After a short period of depression caused by being fired from a job that I loved, I decided to go back to school and be officially certified and licensed to work as a child care provider (I had gotten my job there because when I enrolled my son, I happened to mention that I had been having difficulty finding a job, and they took a chance on me. I will forever be grateful to them for the opportunity to discover my love of caring for children as a career). I completed my classes with a perfect 4.0 GPA. Unfortunately, I was unable to find another child care job even after months of searching. At the end of my rope, a close friend of mine pulled a few strings and got me a job running a gas station and convenience store just down the street from my house. I grew to love that job, too, until I was forced to transfer to another store half an hour away when my store was bought out and shut down. Making the same hourly wage working less hours at a store further away than I was comfortable driving, all while trying to pay the ever-rising rent at the apartment I had moved into with my son and my best friend and her fiance, I ended up quitting that job and going back to school again, this time at a trade school to become a pharmacy technician.
This time, after a few months into my classes, I began to experience increasing levels of all-over pain. I continued pushing through it, trying to keep my perfect attendance record and the second 4.0 GPA of my life, until I collapsed in my apartment one morning while trying to get ready for school. I had been feeling ill for a while, but thought nothing of it. After my close friend rushed me to the hospital, it was discovered that my appendix had been slowly but steadily leaking for a week. Emergency surgery only 2 hours after I arrived at the hospital was the only thing that saved my life. Once I recovered from that, although I couldn’t understand why I continued to hurt all over, I hit the ground running again, catching up to my classmates in record time and working harder than ever to finish school. I continuously ignored the consistent pain, physical fatigue, and mental exhaustion, working my way back up the the head of my class. About a month before my final exam, I had a routine visit to my doctor in which I was given a normal tetanus booster shot. Of course, as my luck goes, the injection site became increasingly sore and began forming a small lump in my arm. I went to 3 doctors, who told me, in order, “You may just be a bit more sensitive to injections than most people, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much”, “You’re overreacting, get over it”, “Looks like you might actually have an infection, I’ll give you a prescription for some antibiotics”. After that last one, I went home, took the first dose of the antibiotic, and within 2 hours I was being rushed to the hospital by my brother. I had spiked a high fever, I was extremely nauseous and shaky, and I had passed out a couple of times. It turned out that I had gotten an infection soon after my tetanus shot, and after a couple of weeks of going back and forth to different doctors, it had begun spreading up through my right shoulder and was on its way to my brain. I barely understood the ER doctors mentioning shock trauma, possible amputation and/or death. After rapid scans and testing, it was found that the infection wasn’t quite at that level yet, so I spent a week in the hospital on multiple strong antibiotics and heavy pain medications. By the 4th day, the infection hadn’t cleared up as much as they had hoped, so I was sent down to surgery to remove the abscess that had formed in my muscle. It took me nearly 2 months to fully recover. Much to my displeasure, the week I had spent in the hospital was also the week of my final exam in school. I ended up taking a 6-week leave of absence and completed my exam at the end of it. I still graduated that June with a GPA of 3.57. I was finally a state-certified pharmacy technician. It was also around that time that my doctor and I finally came to an agreement on why I was always in so much pain. Fibromyalgia. We began experimenting with different medication regimens to find out what worked best for me.
After graduation, I was unable to find a pharmacy in my area willing to hire a newly graduated, inexperienced technician, so instead I went to work for my mother’s privately owned small business as an office assistant. That job lasted about 2 months, because I managed to break my foot by dropping a couch on it. Not one of my finer moments.
After my foot healed, I ended up moving in with my mother 45 minutes away from my childhood home due to the fact that she was able to find me a job at a pharmacy by her house. The pharmacy manager assured us that he would hire me on the spot if I lived close by, so I made the move and got the job right away. I worked at that pharmacy for almost a full year, all the while dealing with the increasing full-body pain that I now knew was caused by fibromyalgia, before my physical and mental health took a sharp turn for the worse. Only 2 days before Christmas 2015, I went to the hospital for extreme burning and pain in my…uh…private area. That day, I was diagnosed with genital herpes. Having been completely celibate for the last 7 or so years, that diagnosis came as a devastating shock. It was then that I learned HSV has been known to lie dormant in a person for up to 10 years before the first outbreak. I still have no idea who I got it from or when, and I’ve learned not to continue stressing myself trying to figure it out. I’ve come to accept it as a part of my life now, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
Not long after that extremely unpleasant surprise, I went to my doctor for a normal female examination, after which was discovered I was also positive for HPV. A trip to a GYN further discovered stage 0 cervical cancer, which led to a LEEP procedure to remove the infected tissue. Since then, I have been cancer free, but there have been repercussions from the procedure that I am continuing to find ways to handle, one of which was an attempt at birth control pills. Now, one of the side effects of BC is, of course, headaches. Considering my history of extreme migraines, I should have known (as should the doctor that prescribed them) that I would have that particular problem. My best friend spent a week with me around that time, and ended up having to care for me through days of horrendous migraines, weakness, and exhaustion so intense that I was unable to even stand without assistance. Needless to say, I stopped taking the pills.
Naturally, all of these things all at the same time caused a large amount of stress, which took an even further toll on my body. The pain and fatigue continued to worsen to the point where I had to start calling out of work again so that I could rest. Obviously that started causing more problems between me and my coworkers, and between me and my manager, which caused even more stress and had me fighting back the growing depression, despite the several medications I was already on to control it. I started seeing my doctor more often, and my medications were changed around and tweaked again and again to try and compensate.
This past August, I came home from work, incredibly sore and fatigued as usual, and out of nowhere I just started crying. I found myself wandering aimlessly around the house, the crying growing toward hysterics, until I finally locked myself in my bedroom and called my best friend, begging her to help me calm down and figure out what was wrong with me. She got me to calm down enough to drive over and see her, which usually will immediately make me feel better. So I got in the car with my son, who had just gotten home from school, and drove the 45 minutes to see her. While I was on my way, the small headache that I had from crying so much worsened into a full-blown migraine, the likes of which I hadn’t had since my time at the child care facility. Once I arrived at my destination, my son got out of the car to go spend time with a friend he hadn’t seen in a while, and my best friend came out to me and got in. I gave her the journal I had been writing in so that I wouldn’t have to verbally explain what was going on, and I reclined my seat all the way back to try and find relief from the migraine, crying harder again. After a few minutes of me writhing around in my seat clutching my head and nearly screaming, she ended up calling my mother to take me to the hospital. The doctors got my headache under control, and then decided to keep me overnight for a psych evaluation and observation. The next morning, I was sent to an inpatient mental health facility.
After a week there and more changes to my medications, I was sent home to learn how to cope with my new level of depression and extreme anxiety, with the help of the therapists and psychiatrists I had been referred to. I had to resign from my job because even pulling into the parking lot with my mother to pick up my new medications would send me into an anxiety attack. I’ve now been out of work for 7 months, and as of now, it looks like I may not be able to work again.
Three weeks ago, I woke up to experience the worst fibromyalgia flare that I’ve ever had. Every last inch of my skin felt electrified. The slightest touch from anything sent shock-waves of pain through my whole body. Even a hug from my son had me cringing and biting my lip to keep from crying out. Since then, I’ve spent multiple days at a time confined to my bed because the smallest movement is too painful for me to handle. My poor boy has had to take care of me more than ever. Bringing me things to eat and drink, checking to make sure I’m warm enough or if I need anything, going to get my mother to help me to and from the bathroom or to the couch in the living room if I just can’t stand being in my room anymore. Because of all of this and the knowledge that I’m currently unable to help out around the house, wash dishes, get laundry done, or even make my own food, the depression has hit an all-time low. My mother has been carting me back and forth to more doctor appointments because it hurts too much to drive or even walk by myself. Three days ago, my medications were changed again. Yesterday I went back to the doctor AGAIN because of another HSV outbreak (go figure, because I finally finished another 2-week-long period), and an extremely sore throat, which turned out to be STREP. Like I really needed THAT right now.
So the current situation is this…a fibro flare, HSV outbreak, strep throat, and a horrible depression period. All at the same time. I have cried multiple times a day, every day, for a full week now. I feel awful that my mother and my son have to care for me like I’m an invalid. I should be the one taking care of my boy, not the other way around. My poor mother has a multitude of her own health issues to deal with, as well as running her business and making sure the house is kept up. At 31 years old, I shouldn’t even be living with her in the first place. I should have been on my own years ago, with a job and an apartment of my own, if not a house. I should be self-sufficient and teaching my son to be the same. Instead, here I am. A burden on my mom, bringing another person with me for her to care for while I’m stuck in one spot for days at a time.
Not one of my friends or family members has the same health problems that I do. None of them completely understands what it means to suffer from this pain every single day. They don’t understand just how much the pain intensifies the depression, the anxiety. How sometimes remembering things or even being able to pay attention is so difficult that it’s frustrating to the point of crying. To have to try so hard to think of something that you end up giving yourself a headache. I have days where I can hardly remember what I had for breakfast, let alone a conversation that I had with someone a week ago. They don’t understand how it feels to have to use a rolly-cart at the store because it hurts too much to walk, and have people glare at you because there’s nothing visibly wrong to explain your use of those carts meant for the elderly and disabled. The feelings of shame when you’re forced to ask someone to do something for you that you used to be able to on your own. That you SHOULD be able to do on your own.
Sometimes I feel like everyone around me would be better off if I just wasn’t here. I feel like all I’m doing is taking up space in a house where there isn’t much to spare. Like I’m taking up precious time in someone’s life that they could be using to do something else. Like I’m limiting someone else’s options because I’m unable to care for myself. I feel like I’m a burden on society. I’m using up precious state resources that someone else needs more than I do to survive. I should be able to “suck it up and get over it” the way my father has always shouted at me to do. He forces his way through his own pain, so I should be able to do the same. All of my friends are moving on, living their lives, making things better for themselves and their families…and here I am, relying solely on my mother and state benefits to care for me and my son. No job. No home of my own. No sign of moving forward anytime in the near future. I’m just stuck in one place, hardly able to move. Hopeless. Hopeless and all alone in my suffering.
So…now that I’ve exhausted myself yet again…any words of encouragement would be appreciated immensely. I do want to apologize to anyone who has found my (extremely long winded) story to be irritating or too selfish and woe-is-me compared to the things that all of you are going through and have been through yourselves. I sincerely apologize, I just REALLY needed to get all of that out. I needed to share my story with someone, because keeping everything to myself for so many years has done nothing but eat me alive inside. I hope that I haven’t wasted anyone’s time.