So. A Fibro-flare is when your fibromyalgia symptoms get amped up to OVERDRIVE. I've been in this state for a couple weeks now, but instead of taking things easy I decided to take a (really amazingly fun) trip for a week. The thing is, if I hadn't taken that trip I wouldn't have had the impetus to research Fibromyalgia, I wouldn't know what FM really was, and I wouldn't know anything about Fibro-flares, so it's a bit of a mixed blessing.

My "baseline", the way I'm feeling on a "normal" day, is pain and weakness in my left side, a pressure headache where it feels like my brain is too large for my noggin, and general fatigue. The past several weeks it's more like these have all had a hair trigger, if I do things just wrong, they all drop off the deep end.

Yesterday, after four hours of sleep I went with my friend to court, where she was granted the legal use of her name. We had planed a day out, but wound up going home because I forgot my Soma there, and she napped while I played videogames. Had I slept, I would not have been able to get up for the bus ride home. The bus ride was as nice as it could be, it was a double-decker rig, so the bottom had two tables available where two chairs had been turned around so that four chairs could be facing these small tables. This let me stretch out my leg, since I have trouble sitting with my feet on the floor. The road was not so accommodating, and the last twenty minutes or so of the ride were pretty painful.

Once we arrived, I found that the temperature had dropped somewhat more than I was expecting, so I was out in the cold, then I realized that Tin, who was coming to pick me up, gets off from work a half hour later than I had thought when I was buying the ticket, and the bus driver had managed to get us to Chicago almost half an hour ahead of schedule. Thus I wound up sitting on the cold concrete of a planter wall for about an hour. Today I read that cold is a really bad thing for FMers, it causes our muscles to stiffen and makes more problems. The practical application of this is that, once my muscles had warmed up, I dropped into exquisite pain. That's pain so bad that your body dopes you up on endorphins so you become euphoric, but no less in pain. I was unable to move for about forty minutes before it tripped the switch and dumped the endorphins, but at least at that point I was able to sit up enough to take a double dose of my Soma, and once they took effect dropped off to double doped dormancy.

Today my plan is to try and work hard on resting :p