How do you explain it?

How do you explain your ill­ness to those who don’t have it?

While I haven’t come up with a good way to explain chronic fatigue syn­drome, I describe fibromyal­gia as a full-body migraine. Any­one who has ever had a migraine under­stands imme­di­ately, and most peo­ple at least know some­one who does have dis­abling migraines.

If some­one wants more info, I can go on about the fact that fibromyal­gia is a neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­der and talk about recent research. If they’re really curi­ous, I can hand them a paper I wrote.

Help me out here, please? What’s the best brief, “gets to them” descrip­tion you know of for your chronic illness?

June 7, 2006   Posted in: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia

One Response

  1. Rachel - June 29, 2006

    I use “like being beaten up and then run over by a truck”.

    Stum­bled across the blog via Cynthia’s blog by way of the Stitch­ers Blog­gers Weekly Ques­tion. I passed it on my to my mom. I’m 23 and a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion suf­ferer who’s still fig­ur­ing out how to cope with it and keep work­ing for a while.

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