Warning: Don't read this if you don't want to hear me whine

My rotator cuff tendonitis coupled with my fibromyalgia has meant that this semester my normal levels of chronic pain have shot way up. It's bad when I just wake up--I spend about half an hour stretching gently in bed, and that helps, but the pain in my shoulder is acute, and doesn't respond to that. After five o'clock at night, I'm in agony. It's hard to be completely present to my child, continue working, or enjoy time with friends when you're in pain. Some things it hurts too much to do: tuck in my shirt in back, put deodorant on my left armpit, write on the blackboard, raise my right arm above shoulder height, carry things with my right hand or arm, put on and take off my clothes, doing dishes, carrying in groceries, carrying laundry downstairs, putting it in and out of the washer and dryer, getting dressed, wiping a counter. I'm turning fifty, not eighty, but my body feels old and crippled.
I'm going to ask the guys to clean my house as my birthday present. Isn't that pathetic?

I have been seeing a physical therapist, and that has helped a little, but the screwed-up thing about constant pain is that it wears down your body and then it wears down your spirit. I'm starting to get to that well-known point where I am having difficulty coping on a daily level. The shoulder pain has meant that the usual exercise that I do to manage the fibromyalgia pain is out, and the fibromyalgia means that I am hyper-sensitive to the shoulder inflammation and slow to heal. I hate the fact that it is preventing me from keeping my house clean (vacuuming is probably the worst for fibro), and it even hurts to write on the blackboard in class. About once a day, I manage to move my arm is such a way that the shoulder joint pinches the muscles and tendons so hard, I want to cry.

The shoulder pain has become so bad this week that there are times when I can hardly bear it. Icing, pain relievers, the exercises my therapist has recommended, all are a small help, but the need to work so many hours in the last several weeks has me feeling as if I'm sliding back rather than making progress. I'm starting to lose brain function from lack of sleep: I blank out on words, my memory is shot, I react sluggishly. Most distressing is that this kind of pain and fatigue can also kick me into a mental space that I've worked hard to leave: cranky, paranoid, snappish. That's scary.

Then there's the fact that the shoulder pain interferes more with sleep, which causes the fibromyalgia to flare up, so that now I have returned to the state where I feel as if someones has been beating me with a stick--everything hurts, all over, but my hands, arms, shoulders, neck, face and upper back are either aching all the time, or feel as if they are laced with barbed wire.

Ironically enough, I'm actually very happy these days. That's the paradox of the physiology of pain-induced depression; I love what I'm doing at work, my family is wonderful, I wake up thankful for my good fortune. But the pain acts as a curtain that I have to push aside, separating me from myself. I'm familiar with this cycle. If something doesn't happen soon to improve the pain situation, I risk falling into the hole of exhaustion and the effects on mood that this brings.

I don't have many people I can talk to about this because frankly, who wants to hear about it? I suffer from the hyper-competent single mother complex as well: if I don't do it, nobody will. That's not actually true, but it's hard to let go of that mind-set.

Coping strategies for the day: hot bath, walk around the neighborhood to buy birthday presents, gentle stretches, ice shoulder, eat healthy food, breathe, leave work until tomorrow. Long term: see my doctor again, try to get back to twice a week with PT, mental health therapist, massage. All those things take time from work. So I will need to talk with my department chair to document my situation, not something I look forward to doing.

Good news: I got a paper accepted to a conference in Ireland! Bad news: I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to write it.
/pity party>