Welcome post

Welcome to my new blog.
 
This is for everyone who suffers from fibromyalgia, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, M.E. or Hughes Syndrome (Antiphospholipid Syndrome). Or any syndromes with similar symptoms? Please feel free to comment and let me know!

So many of the symptoms are similar, the pain, the total exhaustion, the weakness. There seem to be so many groups and sites which involve people moaning about living with these conditions and I understand that we all need a good moan every now and then, but this is not the place for a moan. Positive Fibromyalgia Life is the title and that is what it will include. How to learn to live with these conditions and what we can do to take responsibility for ourselves and do the most we can to cope in this fast paced modern world.

My name is April. I was diagnosed with Lupus, Fibromyalgia and Hughes Syndrome last year (2011) at the age of 46. But I believe that have been suffering from autoimmune diseases since puberty. When I was 14 I experienced mad crazy rashes, followed by appendicitus, more mad crazy rashes with severe knee joint pain, a blood condition called ITP which means that my platelet count was through the floor and I ended up (after steroids stopped working) having my spleen removed.

Then followed years of one illness after another as my immune system had been turned upside down. Bouts of severe depression, low thyroid for which I have been taking anti depressants and thyroxine for fifteen years. My tonsils were the next  to go!

Learning reflexology and having regular treatments helped to build me up slowly for a few years but in 2011 I was suddenly hit by sheer exhaustion, arm pain, liver pain and a mish mash of other crazy symptoms. I had every test under the sun, cameras up, cameras down, scans, blood tests, tablets galore. Eventually the blood tests revealed mild lupus, fibromyalgia triggers and antiphospholipid syndrome (which basically means sticky blood and causes many of the same symptoms of tiredness, blurred vision, joint pain).

With all the tablets, being double the weight I should be (yes I did say double), I was a confused miserable mess. Very slowly I have managed to pull some sort of order out of that chaos. It is an on going process which is what I intend to blog about here.

What I do know is that talking to other people with any of the aforementioned conditions, they all have similar stories. One illness, operation after another. Lives in and out of hospital and specialists and doctors. These illnesses are often so hard to diagnose and the medical world's understanding of them is only just begining to work out ways of diagnosing and helping.

I have been a holistic therapist for the last nine years and now realise that my journey into this world, which has been so rewarding as a career, has really been to teach me ways of helping myself. It is strange how these paths work, how I have been lead and guided to be able to help myself start to make sense of learning to live with my illnesses. I hope that I can share some of that journey, that knowledge and my positivity here.

So welcome, thank you for reading