Today’s the day

If there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t know what fibromyalgia is, I was once like you.
Sadly I became aware of it in 2005, when my daughter was diagnosed with it. We were on holiday in Surfer’s Paradise in Australia, and had just celebrated her seventeenth birthday at a pizza restaurant. On the walk back to the hotel, she developed such bad chest pains that we thought she must be having a heart attack.
She’d been troubled by pain for a while, but the GP told her it was muscular and caused by the Taekwondo that she’d recently started.
The lovely Māori doctor in the Surfer’s Paradise hospital  reassured her that her heart was fine, but added that he thought that she probably had fibromyalgia.
Back home, tests showed that he was right. She had begun a life with constant pain, disturbed sleep and ‘ fibro fog ‘ cognitive impairment.
There’s no cure, just pain management.
I just hope one day an effective treatment can be found, to let people with it live a normal life again.