Welcome to the message board. :) I'm sorry to hear about your troubles and discomforts.

Fibro, unfortunately, comes in very many flavours and affects many parts of the body. This forum will show quite quickly how no two people have the same symptoms. On top of that, it's quite common to have more than one medical condition going on.

Almost all of my problems have always centred very, very strongly around my hips. I've had stomach and energy problems my whole life, started having chronic pain in my hips at 17 and was diagnosed with fibro at 22. I have middle/lower back problems, in part also due to scoliosis, knee problems, nagging ankles on a bad day and of course the aforementioned pain around my pelvis area. Chronic tenderness and soreness in all the muscles of my torso, but that's something I barely acknowledge, since it's much less troublesome than all my other symptoms.

A point of frustration for a lot of fibro patients is that there is no quick and easy test that can be done to easily diagnose fibro in someone. It's a diagnosis that's reached when all other possible afflictions are ruled out.

I would certainly advise you talk to your doctor, to hopefully get the (sometimes lengthy) process of elimination started. I sometimes find it easier to write down symptoms and the effect they're having on my daily life, since I always seem to forget a whole bunch of stuff and little details when I'm actually face to face with my GP. For them, too, it's best to have the most whole picture of all that's going on.

I wish you the best of luck and you're always free here to ask questions, or to just vent if you're having a bad day. :)

I see, I also have issues with those same areas that you mentioned. It's been that way since I was a teen and I'm in my 20s now. How did the conversation go between your doctor and you if you don't mind me asking? Did you just tell him/her your symptoms and they went through the possibilities? I'm just not wanting to be misdiagnosed or anything like that of course. I've been thinking about writing down my symptoms and what not, but I really tend to just get distracted, ( when it comes to pain it's sometimes for the best really) so I've never been too good at that.

Due to many reasons, it took quite a number of years for me to get a diagnosis. Because the most obvious tests yielded nothing, my surroundings were of the very firm opinion that it was probably nothing and that I should shut up and tough it out. Me ignoring everything had me swinging between unemployment and pushing myself to do 40 hours a week for several years.

After the initial complaints, I had x-rays done of my hips, which showed nothing. My then-GP said it must be a muscle thing and I had a few sessions of massages by a physiotherapist that didn't help any before my insurance couldn't cover any more.

I met someone who thought I might suffer from EDS, a genetic disorder that can cause a lot of chronic pain, so I saw a geneticist. Having read about it, I related to a lot of the symptoms. By that time, the pain and fatigue was so pervasive that I actually became emotional when they told me I didn't meet enough qualifiers to be considered an EDS patient. Seeing my distress at what I knew was good news, they referred me to a rheumatologist.

The rheumy asked for more x-rays and did blood tests. When she also told me that I displayed no signs of classic rheumatism, I was horrified at yet again not having an answer. At that, the rheumy performed a pressure point test on me, and with me indicating pain or heavy pain at every single point, she said that her diagnosis was fibromyalgia.

I followed a nine month program at one of the best chronic pain departments in the Netherlands (where I live), to come to grips with everything, get more fit again since that's important for my pain management, and to try and learn better how to live with chronic pain.

I'm very sorry that this ended up so long, hahaha. But, yeah, for a lot of people it isn't/wasn't easy to get the diagnosis, especially when it was even less known/less acknowledged.

Welcome! Get the rule-out dxs. Please. People get trash-canned into FM, and it's RA or MS and by the time that becomes clear, they've worsened. So keep pushing for clarity, until at least *two* docs tell you the same thing the same way. (In my experience, that usually makes for better medicine.) I was dx'd in 1995 by a male rheumy with FM himself, but I'm an exception. And we always recommend people after dx get Fibro for Dummies. In th emeantime, get *(everything* checked. Everything. Not just CBC, but also B12, iron, electrolytes, *anything*. Inflammatory markers are iffy even for those with a dx of an inflammation-causing illness. Spinal nerve injury can cause a lot, and tehre's reasearch into cervical spine issues related to FM right now. Just... Bug a neurologist, bug a rheumatologist. Those two are the specialties most likely to diagnose and treat FM.

Good luck, keep us posted, and purring healing to yoU!

Also, it's BS that it's a women disease. Women get dx'd with it more, but that's b/c in early days it was assumed to be female. We have *several* male FMers here on the board, all of them with the same darn symptoms, and often a tougher time getting a dx or treatment b/c Men Don't Get This. (Uh, yeah they do!)

I see, it seems like a pretty hard thing to diagnose then unfortunately. What kind of things did you do at that chronic pain place you went to Sony?

With the program that I followed had me visiting the hospital twice a week - three times in the beginning - for three to four hours. It was predominantly focussed on physical therapy. I was working one on one with an amazing therapist who helped me train up muscle strength in a gradual, controlled manner.

Pretty much all the other aspects were focussed on dealing with chronic pain without medication. Some psychological counsel offered, a ten week course in Mindfulness, a course dealing with relaxation techniques to help one sleep. There was also contact with a social worker specializing in what kind of government aide or whatnot you might be eligible for, but that wasn't much use to me at the time because of red tape malarkey.

Apart from teaching me how important a basic fitness level is for me, It mostly helped hammer into my head that ignoring it was no longer an option. I spent so many years ignoring any and all pain impulse that I still struggle to notice what is going on with my own health.

It's true that it's not an easy diagnosis. Given the fact that you have a medical corner in which to hopefully find your culprit, I hope it will be easier for you to find answers. I had no idea what might be wrong, and neither did any of my GPs. I'd never heard of fibromyalgia until I was handed a brochure after years of guff. The idea of EDS that got the ball rolling for me came from a random person I met and I pretty much ordered my GP to give me a letter of referral, which he blithely did saying he'd never heard of it.

I see, did it help at all? I talked to my doctor today and I mentioned the pain I've been having lately, I'm going to get blood tests pretty soon and I might see a rheumatologist based on what my doctor says afterwards about the results and what not. Hopefully I can find a way to help lower the pain at least a little bit pretty soon. I'm really tired of dealing with it like this. Sometimes I feel so exhausted after waking up I just want to stay in bed and sometimes I just feel so sore even though I haven't been doing much physical activity. It's really frustrating.

It made a huge difference for me personally. If I had to discover all of the pitfalls myself and try to keep a level head on how best to handle them, I'd be far worse off than I am now. I don't think I'd ever gotten out of the cycle of yielding to the pain and not doing anything physical. Plus, I really needed beating over the head to think in terms of what my body responds to, rather than what social convention would demand of me.

I think everyone here can relate to that feeling of feeling done with everything right after you wake up, sore and tired after mere seconds of being up. I hope your doctor will be able to help in good order, and that you'll soon feel that you're taking some positive steps to getting a handle on this. Try to keep an eye on the positive things and light-hearted distractions. :) I sometimes crack jokes to my life partner while all but writhing around in pain because I'll go mad if I have to take myself and my condition seriously, haha.