Fibro And Fabulous ™

I remember my friends and I joking about being 40 in middle school.  I was a pretty clumsy kid and everyone, including myself, thought I'd be in a wheelchair by the time I hit 40 because of how accident-prone I was.  I know now that most of my clumsiness was due to having Fibromyalgia.  I just didn't know that at the time.  The big 4, O is coming up for me in early May, and though I'm not as agile as I used to be, I'm not, thankfully, in a wheelchair as was once predicted for my future. 

Still, 40 used to be this big deal when I was growing up.  I remember all of these women who were my mother's age talking about how they still felt young, even though half of their life was supposedly over.  About a decade or so ago, 50 and 60 became the new 40. Everyone from Oprah and Cher to Madonna was weighing in on that young age.

I personally remember 30 being a big deal to me.  I felt old, but not the kind of old that you may think.  I felt wise, both spiritually and mental…

A cord struck with me when I was surfing today and I feel a huge need to post this.  I'd like to apologize to my avid readers because a good part of this post will reiterate things I've said in the past on this blog, and in my books, but after all the current talk about a recent study on Fibromyalgia, and it possibly being a Psychosomatic disorder, I have to rehash this along with a few other things that are new to you.

In the past 40 years of my life I have seen 1 pediatrician, 1 family doctor, and 4 general practitioners as my regular care physicians.  Some of them were very good, some of them were okay, and some of them had such a horrible bed-side manner that they would put House to shame.  To be honest, 50% of the doctors I've seen on a regular basis believed that Fibromyalgia was an actual illness with actual symptoms and 50% of the doctors I saw thought I had some type of Psychosomatic disorder. 

I literally had a doctor tell me that my blinding headaches were "…