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After a long and tearful conversation with Barry this morning, we’ve decided I can’t hold out any longer. He’s getting more and more frustrated with my refusal to seek medical care because it’s really hard for him to watch me experience all of this, which is understandable. I wouldn’t like to see him going through something like this. It is hard to describe what I’m feeling right now. To know that I’m giving in and admitting that I can’t manage this beast any longer is healthy in a sense, but there’s a piece of me that is terrified by this realization.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m not in control of it — or maybe I’m having to finally accept the fact that I never really was. My way of dealing with it before was ignoring it as best as I could. That was my coping mechanism: to ignore it, and to ignore my own needs.

I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia back in 1992 (when I was 9) at the Shriner’s Hospital in Shreveport, LA about a year after having a bone rumor removed from my left tibia. Over the years, I learned to manage without meds because I was so used to the pain — I have been in some type of consistent pain since I was 6 years old and after having other doctors tell me things like I was imagining it or that Fibromyalgia wasn’t a “real” disorder, I was discouraged and felt like no one believed how I felt so I stopped expressing it and just learned to suffer in silence. Through my adolescence, I went through periods of depression but I always refused medication because I’d been told so many times that all of my symptoms were in my head and I didn’t want to take pills for something I kept being told was nonexistent.