Text post - Scared

Hi-ho!

This is going to be a bit of an offload-y post so please feel free to skip this one.

This week has been really hard on me and it's given me a look into my future. It's been a really stressful week, the kind of stress that puts knots in your tummy and gives you diarrhoea from worry. I mentioned briefly in my weekly photo update blog how I'd had problems with my memory this week. I'm scared shitless, to be honest.

The phrase I've said most this weekend is 'I can't remember.' From Tuesday to Thursday is a blur. I couldn't tell you what I did unless I've written it down in my blog. Not only has the day-to-day stuff disappeared from memory but I've completely forgotten how to get somewhere, even with the aid of Google maps on my phone. Imagine trying to go somewhere you've been dozens of times before and suddenly realising you don't know how to get there any more. It's frustrating, it's scary and it's horrible. When I couldn't find my way to Tesco with my mum and step dad on Friday, he kept saying 'Do I turn left or right here?' over and over again and I couldn't tell him. More than that, I couldn't get my bearings where we were at any given time. It was like I'd been dropped into a place I'd never been to before and expected to navigate. I've lived here for 8 bloody years!


More than that, I'm becoming more and more insular. Having Fibromyalgia is like having a hive of bees in your head. It feels like there's already so much noise in my head that the slightest distraction is too much to bear. If the tv is on and someone talks to me I can't keep track of what they're saying. This weekend has really highlighted things. My step dad is deaf in one ear so will start talking over everyone else and my mum is always talking (I wouldn't change her for the world!), so I can't keep up with all the conversation and it makes me feel as if I'm being rude or ignorant. The honest truth is people who talk a lot or people who talk all at once tire me out because the cogs in my brain don't seem to move fast enough. I used to be a right chatterbox but now there's so much noise in my head I'm usually silent. I often pause halfway through a sentence as I've forgotten what I said 4 words ago. I can't stand busy/noisy places any more because the noise builds up in and out of my head and makes me want to scream. I still want to be around people - I just feel like I need 5 quiet minutes to myself to decompress every now and then, which is awkward when I need to excuse myself from my own sofa!

When a time like this comes along - when the semblance of health I do have starts to slip further away from me - it scares the living shit out of me. What am I going to be like in 5 years? Will I be a gibbering wreck? Is it wrong for me to want to be a mum when my health is on a greased downward slide to hell?

I don't know what the answers are. I don't know what my future is. All I know is, being a person with invisible illnesses is tough to prove to the doubting fools, tough to prove to the medical profession, tough to explain to friends and family, and even tougher to live with.

Thanks for reading.