I think I’ve only touched on my health condition with a glancing blow here, so I thought I’d elaborate it a little bit more. Part of the reason why I’m a stay-at-home-mum is my health. I have a chronic health condition called fibromyalgia syndrome. FMS is aggravated by stress, lack of sleep, the weather, stress and many other things varying from person to person. The big ones for me I listed.
My job was pretty stressful. There was a lof sniping, bickering and general unhealthy environment created by some of my co-workers who refused to be pro-active about making things better, preferring instead to just sit and whinge. The further along I got in my pregnancy the worse my symptoms were aggravated. My husband and I had discussed me staying home after the munchkin was born, because of the insane cost of daycare in our area and in the end, with the urging of my OB-GYN I left work two months before he was born, and stayed home.
So, I’ve been a stay-at-home person a little over a year now, as my last day at work was February 3rd.
Fibromyalgia is a condition which affects your muscles. The easiest way I know how to describe it is that during the day because of normal wear and tear of moving around, fetching, carrying, walking and so on your body gets little tiny tears in the muscles, this is a natural occurence and normally when you sleep your body repairs those tears so you can wake up the next day none the wiser, but in someone with FMS this doesn’t happen. Why? Because we don’t sleep properly, doctors aren’t sure why at the moment, but they’re working on it. They don’t know if it’s something wrong with our sleep so we don’t heal and that causes the pain, or there’s something wrong elsewhere which causes the pain and disrupts the sleep. Either way we’re stuck in a Catch-22, you need to sleep to repair the muscle damage, but you can’t sleep because the muscles are damaged and it hurts.
There’s a laundry-list of symptoms that those of us with FMS get, partially caused by the pain and partially because of the disrupted sleep. Sleep is very important to replenish chemicals, digest food properly, lose weight and just generally function like a normal human being rather than a zombie. Like other chronic health conditions you have days where you flare and it’s much harder to do things than other days. When I was working I used to go through these at least once a week, since I’ve been home the first day I had a really, really bad flare was yesterday, so I think I’ve made a good choice not just for the munchkin’s well-being but also my own.
