I was recently talking with Tony about how sleep affects Fibromyalgia. Specifically, lack of sleep. I thought I might make a post of it to see if anyone else feels the same way.
If I don't get enough time to sleep off the medications and recuperate from the prior day's pain, I wake up with severe med-fog that I have to fight through for the first hour or two that I'm awake. I can feel my body communicating with me, saying - "Well, you're going to have a bad day right from the start because you didn't get enough sleep last night."
What sleep does for me is bury the pain. No, it's never gone completely. I wake up in pain. But, the sleep buries it under layers. The more sleep I get, the deeper the pain is buried. It doesn't have those sharp edges, it's not as horrible. It's down there lurking though. As each hour goes by, another layer is gone and the pain gets closer to the surface.
It's like.. fingers coming out of that deep place where it was buried, extending to the surface, catching hold to pull itself up and out and then it just sits there, crouching, watching me and waiting. I sometimes imagine the pain stretching, yawning, waking up. It begins building and getting stronger as the day goes by. More fierce and violent. And as the pain does that, my body gets weaker.
My body cowers before the pain, it trembles and tries to hide, shut down. Sleep put the pain under those layers and now my body wants to go to that place to save itself. I become more and more exhausted as the day wears on, just from suffering.
If I do not get enough sleep to bury the pain under those layers, it needs less time to find the surface and take over. And then I have a bad day, all day. I'm not in control at all, it is.
*As a sidenote, Tony said I should write horror stories because it sounded like one.
*The picture above was taken from a very good article on a similar subject: http://www.prohealth.com/fibromyalgia/library/showArticle.cfm?libid=17249
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