Chronic Illness Brain Fog, Part Two: What You Can Do To Cope
Updated April 19, 2021 Brainfog. It’s part of many people experience when they have a chronic illness. Yesterday, I discussed what brain fog is and what causes it. Today, let’s talk about how to cope. When you have brain fog, there are number of things you can do to reduce the density of the fog,…
Chronic Illness Brain Fog, Part One: What It Is
Updated April 19, 2021 Many people with chronic illness also experience the phenomenon colloquially known as brain fog. This includes symptoms related to problems with focusing and concentrating, memory problems, and basically your mind feeling less nimble than it used to. It can be a really big problem, but it doesn’t receive a lot of…
Patterns are Key with Chronic Illness Or The Mushrooms Did It
Updated April 14, 2021 When you live with an unpredictable chronic illness such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), fibromyalgia, migraines, or any of a multitude of conditions that play havoc with you every day, figuring out triggers — things that make your symptoms worse — can be an important part of improving your life. Also feel…
Marijuana for Pain: Does It Work?
I never smoked marijuana as a teenager. No, that’s not entirely true. Once, I took one puff, hardly inhaled, and called it quits. Fast-forward four years or so. By this time, we’d moved to Canada, I was in university and we lived in a wonderful house with a backyard adjacent to a ravine. The guy…
A Short Interruption
I’m beginning to wonder if the so far two-month long Fibro flare is going to be the new normal, at least (hopefully) for the duration of the winter. I’m not enjoying it. Aside from the really high pain levels and decimated energy, there is also the intensely excessive brain fog. I’m surprised I can remember…
A Flare so Bright It Lit the Sludge
Pain takes up a lot of room in your head. I will forever be grateful to the social worker from The Arthritis Society who told me that at a time when I thought I was losing my mind. I wasn’t. I was just having a lot of pain and it messed with my ability to…
Four Ways to Cope with Fibromyalgia Pain
In my July post for Mango Health, I wrote about four ways to cope with fibromyalgia pain: “I lived with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for almost 40 years before I experienced fibromyalgia. Having had RA since I was a child, I’d created a variety of coping mechanisms to deal with pain. I was…
Going to the Mattresses: My Quest for a New Bed to Help my Chronic Pain
I need a new bed. More specifically, I need a new mattress, and as my current bed frame is a double XL, and there isn’t a lot of choice in that category, I decided to go for a whole new bed. I had a couple of requirements: a double bed, no higher than 22 inches…
With and Without: Comparing Rheumatoid Arthritis and Fibromyalgia Pain
Updated June 16, 2021 Explaining the difference between rheumatoid arthritis (RA) pain and fibromyalgia pain isn’t easy. Articulating what pain feels like is extremely difficult to begin with, adding an attempt to differentiate different kinds of pain is even more of a challenge. I have both RA and Fibro, the latter adding on to the…
Is It Discomfort or Is It Pain?
Discomfort. It’s a word often used in the medical world when referring to procedures or experiences that could involve pain. And it bugs me. This latest rant began when I read an article about dental implants that referred to “post-surgery discomfort.” This discomfort was described as being akin to that which happens when you…
In Which I Get a Steroid Shot
“Will you shoot me up?” I asked. She said yes. Relief flooded over me like a wave. I`d explained how the bad flare had gotten much worse on the weekend. How my neck and shoulders were in a tight knot, every movement bringing a crunching of tendons, as well as screaming in pain. I had…