Can I ask those of you you have fibromyalgia a long time to tell me if you think I have had it long before my first flare up this month. Firstly I was in a car crash in 2005. That damaged my neck , upper back movements, and particularly my left shoulder and took me three years to get my left arm and hand functional in any useful way down to fingers that would not drop anything I tried to pick up and weak arm exhaustion just carrying my head around etc etc... I have always had to be cautious since.
But since that crash, I got used to tiring easily, getting chronically tired, unable to think clearly often, and at times sleeping for hours in the daytime... one year when I had a bit of a cough, cold, whatever, never any fever.. I basically slept for days, only surfacing in a drugged like state because my body and brain needed food and water.. I would shovel in the easiest food to hand, down a few cups of tea and fall back to bed to sleep for another five-7 hours.
I laid all this wreckedness down to the crash as it was tiring having a weakened upper to back and shoulders etc and for the first six of those years I was a full-time 24 /7 carer... By the end of which I was just into my 60s so the body isn't getting any younger and I'm doing a fair bit of physical work and maybe overdid it..
Friends would often say...would you not take up some sociable hobbies/ activities in the evenings... My response would be that by the evening chances were total fatigue would be dropping from my eyes and the thought of having made an advance commitment would be a stress as by evening I couldn't tell in advance if I could stand or think straight until the actual time... this past year was the worst for being tired and not able to think half the time, and I could see more and more jobs around the house just never getting done.. but I laid that down to the whammy of losing a best friend quite suddenly last autumn who I really really miss.. and the long rural winter of her not being around etc.
But one friend often said down the years how that crash had totally changed my life... how I never physically got back to how I was before it... She also would say that I always laid my fatigue and any symptoms etc down to the crash but was I sure there was nothing else going on.. by mid 60's there can be... but my bloods and blood pressure we're normal.. and it seemed to me that I was just lucky to not have had more serious injuries but unlucky that the damaged muscles often caused me to be knackered ever since! I never really thought about it... Just did loads of stuff when I could, wasn't into taking meds.. and I thought it actually handy that when real fatigue hit, I could just sleep through it instead.. knowing the next day, or two...or three.. I would resurface and feel sorta normal again!
Now since last month when it began with what I thought was a frozen shoulder but spread to the other, and then my lower back and hips to the point where to get up up the bed or a chair was a mind over matter excruciatingly painful achievement.... I'm wondering if all that fatigue and sleeping it off the past years was actually fibromyalgia being headed off by my body, shutting everything down as a self saving emergency action? And perhaps the death of my friend in the midst of the covid lockdowns etc was the catalyst that blew the lid off?
Did any of you with no other health issues have any sort of similar experience background like that before having your first flare up? Like... Just chronic fatigue and brain fog regularly which you could justifiably attribute to some other event as I did to my car crash? That you now think could have be a pre fibromyalgia thing you had instead?
BIG HUGS AND BIG THANKYOU :) :)
EULAR Guidelines for Fibromyalgia July 2016
Recently diagnosed. 
Glandular Fever
