I really don't understand

[arwhat]

I signed up for this forum when I was feeling a bit lousy. Not really as bad as I can be sometimes, just sort of struggling but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel kind of emotion.

Then I felt better for a time, so I didn't come around too often, but at this moment, I feel pretty miserable, and I guessI just need somewhere and some way to vent about it.

I'm not anxious all the time. There are parts of my life where I am genuinely stressfree and carefree and happy, where a small setback is just a small setback, and I am able to easily overcome it. There are times when I am stressed and I can figure out a way to balance things out, where the stress doesn't get too bad, and I feel okay. When something bad happens in the family, I'm he one who keeps their wits and answers questions for the medics and keeps everyone informed, and I've had that position since before I was about 12. I tend to be very level headed and usually I can see things from other people's perspectives very easily. I'm not the most emotionally available person ever, but I'm reliable for getting things done for those who need me and I have a bit of a reputation for being normal, sane, and having reasonable advice.

That just makes it that much harder to deal with when I don't feel good.

I will feel absolutely normal for a while and then one morning, I'll wake up and I won't. Sometimes it'll be because I am a little stressed. Other times, there's no reason at all. And then I feel miserable. Sometimes I can still do whatever for whoever, but most of the time I can't get myself to leave my room. I will feel absolutely miserable. I don't have a better word for it than that. I'm not irritable, or totally depressed (at that point), I just feel so tired, and every ache and breath and thought will weigh on me. I won't want to do anything, because I can't think, and I'll screw it up if I do it... and so I take a day off from whatever, and that's what seals my fate.

The next day I won't be energized and relaxed and over whatever. I'll be upset and nervous and disgusted with myself for staying in. I'll think I messed up by missing whatever and now I can't recover whatever I didn't do. I get so upset and guilty and frustrated that my stomach will go off and I hide away in my room again and try to sleep so I don't have to keep thinking about what I've done. And the cycle continues.

Sometimes I try to find a distraction, and sometimes that'll work enough to get me out of the loop. Other times I won't let myself find a distraction, because I don't want to continue the cycle of avoidance... but then I just do nothing but feel worse.

Then the less I end up in contact with people, the more I become convinced they probably hate me now, for not staying connected, or for not hanging out, or for a favor I forgot to do them. Normally, getting dragged back into the fold is what snaps me out of it. Having someone tell me they care in some way makes me feel a little less like a failure, and I find my way back to normal pretty quickly afterwords.

But I guess I just don't understand why this happens. I feel like if I just tried harder I could fight past how awful I feel, but part of me feels like maybe it's something more.

I worry about my health a lot. Honestly, I often hope that something will turn out to be wrong, to justify all the wasted time, and the sudden miserable feelings, and explain to me why I just suddenly feel so bad. It always starts off feeling totally physical before it turns into a mental self-beating. And I do feel physically unwell, and I'm pretty sure that it can't all be in my head. I know I have PCOS and a thyroid condition, but beyond that, I do think there is something else wrong that no one has managed to figure out, because I've had some physical symptoms that I can't just brush off and say were in my head.

But when I feel good, I don't complain and I forget about them, and when I feel bad, I brush them into the "probably my fault" pile.

I don't really know what I'm trying to ask here, or talk about. I just needed to try to get out some of this somehow. I tried seeing a therapist once, but I couldn't manage to really open up. I answered the questions the way I felt I should, and it helped when she acknowledged some of my little life stressors as being genuinely stressful, it made me feel a bit less like a whiny idiot, but ultimately it didn't help and I couldn't afford to keep going and saying nothing useful.


I don't know... I just felt kind f miserable today, and I needed to get it out there. Sorry about how long this is. I don't feel quite as miserable right now, now that it's out there.

[STEVYWUNDER]

Ever heard of the condition Fybromyalgia you may have it, i do. Look it up
And I have suffered with anxiety, circumstance depression, social phobia.
I take a med that helps, or at lest keeps both conditions under control, so that one can live a normal life.

[arwhat]

Parts of the fibromyalgia description sound right, but other parts not really. I should clarify that I pretty much always feel physically unwell. It's very rare that my back doesn't hurt, that my joints don't feel stiff, that I have anything resembling an appetite, that my stomach doesn't feel like it's a single trigger away from taking a wrecking ball to my system... the problem is just suddenly waking up and not being able to ignore it. I'll just wake up and feel so tired and exhausted and drained that I can't function. Some days I'll try to and when I do, nothing seems to really process except that I'm failing badly at whatever I'm trying. Either way, the depression and anxiety end up calling me up very quickly afterwords.

[STEVYWUNDER]

How old are you , and where do you live , what do you do for living? You maybe giving up on yourself but I won,t let you do this to yourself .Trust me I,ve been there. First go to your family doctor and get a physical , tell him or her all the physical symptoms you have. Five years ago I went to the doctor complaining of a lot of physical symptoms like you have. He ordered up a barrage of test , even ordered a cat scan. Results came back negative on everything . I asked the doctor how is it possible to feel so bad but have nothing wrong with me? He was at a loss too. So i carried on the best i could. But first we have to be sure you don,t have a physical underlying problem that maybe overlooked. I was so bad at one point i didn't think i could work anymore.
Anyway do this for me please
Oh one more thing i bet you feel the worst in the morning after getting out of bed , like you have been beaten up right. I,m pretty sure you have Fybro. my friend .That first post you put up was a red flag for me. Also do you suffer from as it might be describe as a "mental fog".
What is PCOS stand for?

[arwhat]

PCOS stands for polycystic ovarian syndrome, aka "well something is wrong with them but damned if we know exactly what have some birth control" itis. It actually describes a set of symptoms and is related to the development of cysts on the ovaries, but that isn't required for the diagnosis, and I have yet to have any, but the intense pain I get sometimes makes me think I may have finally developed one.

I just went to my doctor for a checkup and with a concern last week. I had black lines under my nails, called splinter hemorrhages, and when I googled them out of curiosity, I saw that they're kind of a red flag for different things, but my doctor dismissed it as nail trauma, because I keep my nails long (never mind that it was on different, alternating nails and happened only that once, all at once, after years of keeping them long).

I'm 23 years old, and right now I live at home. Not currently employed. I was going to school for it for a few years, but I started having trouble, generally getting up. I would wake up with severe back and stomach pain, sometimes my other joints too but I usually can ignore those, and if I got up and forced myself to do my morning routine I would end up having to run to the bathroom for about an hour of pain, and miss class. I discovered at one point that if I didn't sleep and stayed up for my early classes I could usually make them, but this was obviously a bad method to keep up. So sometimes I would wake up much earlier and have a few hours before class to prepare myself, but then my stomach would usually get upset again still, and I discovered that not eating anything lessened the pain and the problems. So I wouldn't eat until the end of the day, and that worked to keep my stomach from getting triggered. But I was scared to eat anything that had set it off previously, so my diet went even narrower than it already was and I was basically living off of soup.

I would end up too weak to carry all my supplies to class and give up halfway through the walk through campus. I was constantly tired and every time I missed a class or felt too sick to work on my work,the stress would start mounting and I wouldn't be able to concentrate, and I would get so upset and anxious that I literally couldn't focus on anything.

One night when I was feeling a lot better than usual, I decided to take a nice relaxing walk. About a year before I started getting like this, I would walk a lot because music+movement=my happy place. So I decided to do a mile on the school's track. I can't run. I'm a bit overweight but even when I was little, running laps would end in me choking and spitting out, but I'm a very fast walker and I take long strides. I enjoyed the walk and finally felt much better than I had...

Until I couldn't stand up the next morning. My muscles in my legs wouldn't stop twitching, and I had to stand in a very specific position to be able to support my weight without intense pain. It was the weekend, so I couldn't go to the school clinic. I tried to force myself to walk around on it, blaming it on my being out of shape, when though ust 8 or so months before I could walk 6 miles without any kind of pain. The twitching and pain lasted a few days, but when I finally got to the school clinic, they blamed my shoes and said they must have justbeen bad to walk in. The same sandals I used to walk 6 miles in.

I dropped out because of medical issues after that. I want to finish up school so badly, but I haven't gotten a clear answer on what went wrong. Irritable Bowel is the guess, but that doesn't explain how tired I am, how much I ache, and I've worked up so much anxiety over this whole thing, that I don't know what to do. I get extremely anxious and upset when I fail or think I failed, and the idea of restarting that cycle is enough to mentally paralyze me. I start feeling like it's my fault that things went wrong with me. No doctor has ever explained to me why I woke up one morning and couldn't stand, the best guess I can come up with is my terrible diet I had to avoid my stomach going haywire lead to it... but I don't know.

[STEVYWUNDER]

Has any of your doctors suggested Fibromyalgia?
Oh and what I meant by, where do you live, what country or city?
I,m from Ontario Canada.
Ok I,m no doctor but I have researched the shit out of the condition Fibromyalgia, pardon my French.
And Irritable Bowel syndrome is a symptom too of Fibro. I should know I have it too . The product you need to get is "ALIGN" it should help, once you get that under control , you should be able to eat better, you cant live on soup forever . The other product is BOOST a liquid supplement for your strength . You can get this stuff at the local pharmacy off the shelf, just ask for it . These two items are expensive , but you must use them despite that . Try this stuff for 1 month.1 months supply of Align cost 40 dollars and the Boost another 100 bucks. If you need financial assistance for the product I can help there too, let me know ok. My brother in law manages a Shoppers Drug Mart , I can get a discount.
Now the body pain med. you need prescription for that, but it can wait.It will help both body and mind.
In the mean time you need to learn all you can about Fibromyalgia. I will find the proper web site for that and let you know what it is soon. So do as I say please. And like I said I,v been down this road before I know it well, let me guide you. Just hang in there. Knowing what you are dealing with is half the battle.

[arwhat]

I live in Pennsylvania. Now that I'm home and not at school my diet is a little more varied and it has helped being able to eat what I feel like I need rather than the only thing that doesn't hurt, but my diet is still fairly poor and I lost my appetite a long time ago during this mess. Now if I don't remember to eat my cue to eat is when I start to feel nauseous.

None of my doctors have suggested fibromyalgia, but I have an appointment coming up next month and I'll talk to them then, and I'll look into ALIGN. Hopefully that will help!

[STEVYWUNDER]

Ok that sounds good, I believe your going in the right direction now. When I went to my family doctor, I was amazed but not surprised that he did not know much about Fibro. He sent me to a specialist, that confirmed my suspicions.
I will send the Fibro website and the type of prescription medication you must get from your doctor or specialist tomorrow ok.
You have made a very important decision to seek help,you are a fighter!! Don't let this beat you, stay strong, your tougher than you think, I know you can do it !!
Your friend Steve
Oh one more thing getting a good night sleep is very important . Problem is you cant right? There is a med that will solve that, for the short term. But once you get feeling better you will be able to sleep on your own naturally.