coffeebarconfessions

The first step in getting my fibromyalgia managed was to start sleeping. Between the pain and my racing brain, this was no simple task. While I was certainly still popping my share of pills, doping myself into a slumber stupor stopped working years before and wasn't a lifetime solution to cure my ever-worsening insomnia. But I had no clue what was. Sleep hygiene, meditation, supplements, positive thinking, desperate freak-outs, none of them worked. What did? Drinking fresh vegetable juice. Shortly after Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead inspired me to start juicing regularly, I started sleeping. It was glorious! Not every night, but with increasing regularity I would wake up refreshed, well-rested, and a tiny bit more stabilized than I was the night before.  In hindsight, I can see this was the first building block that got me back to living. Not walking around like a zombie trudging through quicksand for the majority of my days did wonders for my ability to engage in this frivolous littl...

I know myself very well at this point in my life. I know my behaviors, my triggers, my illnesses, and all that is required to make life happen so I can get out of bed in the morning and live it. Believe you me, it's been no easy feat gleaning all this knowledge, but now that I own it, it's mine. So did I expect to totally freak out and work myself into an incorrigible tizzy over last week's blow-up with my boss? Well...I hoped I wouldn't. I mean, nobody can control my reactions to life but me, right? I certainly tried not to, especially once the boils started breaking out on my face and the all-consuming anger signaling a monster flare reared its ugly head. Sadly, in this instance, mind over matter didn't win. Especially when I woke up "healthy-people" sick. After six nights of little to no sleep, my ability to cope flew out the window. There was no way in hell I could override all the forces pecking at my resolve, so I succumbed. Violent conversations wit...

Well, the inevitable finally happened. A confrontation with my boss which completely caught me off guard and went horribly wrong. Last night at 9:30, when she informed me I had to attend a mandatory 9 a.m. meeting on Sunday, it was the first I was hearing about said meeting. In my effort to be a flexible and accommodating employee, I said, "Great, but I'm off Sunday so I'll need to work that day, because I can only work four days a week. So you have to take me off of another one of my shifts." Of course, she wasn't willing to do that, and had no clue why attending a two-hour breakfast meeting would constitute an entire day of work for me. That's when the conversation went off the rails. I began stammering about having to go the gym and my back seizing up. Next thing I know, I'm looking at my schedule with my boss, and she's pointing out all the other times I'm available to go to the gym that week. Sigh. Thanks, lady, but I'm 39 years old, and d...

Originally published by the Community Pain Center. Please click this link to view. One fateful day in 2011 I stood before my bathroom mirror and watched myself descend into a full-fledged rage attack. My mere thirty-four years of existence had hit me pretty hard. I was one hundred pounds overweight, riddled with pain, ravaged by illness, and utterly incapable of participating in my own life. Although I had narrowly escaped death and was technically lucky to be alive, it sure didn’t feel that way. I had absolutely no idea how to pick up the shattered pieces of my reality and move forward, but knew I had to do something to curtail the uncontrollable fury gobbling up my sanity. My at-home yoga practice clearly wasn’t doing the trick, so I decided to start running. But that’s the most misleading way to phrase it. Because I was so out of shape and in so much pain, all I could do was shuffle at a fast trot for five out of every ninety steps. Literally. So that’s what I did, every other day w...

A little over three months ago I started back to regular, part-time employment. While returning to retail cosmetics has certainly presented me with many challenges, I have to admit the experience is going overwhelmingly well. During the first month, my determination to be successful put me on my best behavior. In an effort to convince my boss hiring a double-stroke survivor with chronic illness and a four-year gap in work history was a wise move, I knew I had to show up every single day with a smile on my face and a fire lit under my bum. To coax such uncharacteristic behavior out of my moody little self, I set some strict parameters.  First and foremost, I vowed to juice two days worth of fresh veggie juice every other day without fail, convinced it would keep my immune system boosted enough that I wouldn't descend into a devil-woman viral flare. Shock and awe, it worked. Although a good night's sleep and decent workout at the gym quickly became a distant memory, I felt good. ...

Friends of ours in Phoenix got married on April 4th. The date sticks out in my mind because it was the 16th anniversary of the day I started dating my husband. I got their wedding invitation the standard 6-8 weeks out, although I knew about the occasion well in advance. Since I started my job at the end of March, and immediately went right into a big three-week-long promotion, it was all I could do to scribble my fondest regrets on the back of the RSVP card and send it back a week before the wedding. In a pen that was running out of ink. Classy, I'm well aware. Resuming employment threw me into such a tailspin (although far less of one than in the past), it took two months for me to catch my breath. Just a couple weeks ago I finally started sleeping at night again, which allowed me to get through a workout at the gym without cursing my compromised immune system, delve deeply into finishing my book, and catch mostly up on the laundry. Also, when I was buying Mother's Day cards,...

The guts to go public with this blog didn't come easy. It required high-doses of Prednisone, to be exact. The year was 2010, and it was an infinitely simpler time in the world of social media. Or so my naivete thought. My Prednisone-high made me so empowered to bring awareness to this horrible illness, it inspired me to rip out my guts and spew them all over the pages of this blog. I figured I'd been through living hell and survived, so maybe my words could help someone. Hindsight is such a bittersweet lover, seeing as I was knee deep in the middle of my second waltz through Hades, but was too fucked up to realize it.  But, back in the beginning I didn't just pen this blog. In order to get people to read it, I tapped into the fibromyalgia community on Facebook and started promoting my writing. Much to my surprise, not only did people read my blog, but the feedback I got was incredible! Suddenly, my feelings of total estrangement from normal society lessened a little as I st...