Abigail's Anxieties

 I wear a corset for back pain and no...it's not painful It's no secret that I have many a medical health problem, I mean, they're the whole reason that Abigail's Anxieties exists in the first place, and one of those medical health problems is fibromyalgia. There are so many things about fibromyalgia that unless you have it you may not know about it, but one of the more widely known symptoms of this is widespread pain in the body with certain "tender points" being worse than the rest. For me, one of my worse tender points is my lower back. Sometimes the muscles in my lower back go into overdrive and spams, many times for hours on end and then sometimes it just decides to stop working and I'm stuck sitting/lying wherever I happen to be at the time. While I have taken medication in the past to try and help with it, and often find myself using deep heat/heat therapy on my back, I can't go around my everyday life putting on deep heat every hour or so, and ...

 What it's like to go through a costochondritis flare-up So as some of you know, as well as having an anxiety disorder and depression, I have a multitude of physical health issues, including costochondritis.  The  NHS website  gives good information about costochondritis along with another similar condition called tieze's syndrome, which doctors still can't decide if I have or not instead of costochondritis... For the past 3 years, I have been dealing with the pain that comes with the inflammation of the cartilage in my ribs and sternum (aka breast bone), with the pain being at a constant 2-3/10 at all times. And let me tell you that constant chest pain and a family history of heart issues doesn't really help my anxiety, especially when the pain was just starting and we had no blooming idea what was going on.   The reason I say doctors cannot decide which of the two conditions I have is because while I am under the age of 40, and my pain has lasted many yea...

Don't worry, I'm still here! Don't worry everyone, I'm still here, I'm still alive, it's just the case that the last year of my life has been rather action-packed and some things, unfortunately, had to go on the back-burner- including Abigail's Anxieties.    In the past year, I've been finishing my BSc (Hons) Food Development and Innovation degree, helping my family care for a member of the family who's had major surgery, dealing with my fibromyalgia that has been getting worse, dealing with many costochondritis flare-ups. Oh, and dealing with the multitude of changes that have come with this global pandemic while being an "at-risk" person living with another at-risk person. So you know...not much. In all seriousness, my family is starting to get into the swing of things with our "new normal" and having some adaptions in the house now that make life easier. In terms of my fibromyalgia, well it's affected my mobility with extre...

Leaving the house with fibromyalgia My tips and tricks As some of you may know, I have a pain condition called fibromyalgia (on top of a few other conditions but that’s for another time) and as a full-time university student, I often find myself having to leave the house on high pain days. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had days where I haven’t been able to get out of bed and I’ve tried to do learning at home, but sometimes the pain and fatigue has been so bad I can’t even work from bed. Those days are known as “write off days” in our household. But on other days the pain has been bad, but not bad enough for me to stay at home so I find myself having to get dressed and venture into the outside world. Over the past few years, I’ve been working out what can help me when I’m out on the go to help push through those few hours until I can get back to the sanctuary that is my bed with my heating pad and a mountain of pillows to support my back. And I’m here to share tho...

Feeling guilty for being chronically ill... But should I be? So in case you're new to this blog, I'm chronically ill in a few ways. A full list of medical conditions is as follows: Generalised anxiety disorder (GED) Moderate depression Asthma Fibromyalgia Costochondritis And unfortunately having the mix of all of these means that there are and many things I'm unable to do, not only for myself but for others around me. For example, I would often like to be able to carry things for my mum, but because of my fibromyalgia, I can't carry much with the pain in my back, shoulders and arms. I'm always being told it's okay that I can't do things like that, but it still doesn't suppress the guilt in me, especially when I see people struggling with something. As I write this, I'm in the tail end of a fibromyalgia and costochondritis flare-up. 24 hours ago I was in such pain that I just wanted to, unfortunately, end it all. I was also bu...

Yeah, I'm 21 and use a walking stick. So what? When you think of the usual person that uses a walking stick on a daily bases, I don't think that a 21-year-old university student who dresses in vintage style clothing is the first image that comes to mind. But it doesn't have to be, because I have in fact put that image just below for you. Here's the thing, for me, using a walking stick is part of my daily life, You see, I'm currently in the process of being diagnosed with fibromyalgia (in fact as I write this, I'm just over a week away from going to a rheumatology appointment to have some tests done to hopefully get a definitive diagnosis so I finally know what's going on) and my god do I have a lot of pain. My pain is all over my body but the number of intense pain points I have in my body is, in my opinion, stupid. Let's go through the list shall we: -neck -spine -right shoulder joint -left wrist (thank god I...