Re: It's Charlie with enormous gratitude and thanks and a few questions.

[Guest guest]

Charlie,

At the end of the day the label does not define your wife. She can have

'galloping dog rot " and still feel crap.

I think the rest is more of a mentality than a " cure " . Today is one of my bad

days I am in bed, I can barely move it hurts so bad so my motto is 'feelings are

like the weather, they will change, just wait a while " . Yesterday I shopped and

did some painting today its books and movies and bed rest. I still fell like

crap, my world isn't going to change if my label changes and so I have 5 smiley

faces on my fridge and today I put the smiley face on 4 which means mum aint

doin much today.

Yesterday it was a 2 and I caught up on my chores. Pills are trial and error,

you try them if they work do it again, if they don't don't. The rest is all

about pacing, I used to run 3 meetings a day and jungle home schooling, study

and work and now I jungle less with twice the effort. In my head I know I can

achieve so much more but in my body I can't so one good day is followed by 2

down days and I just don't plan anything so its safe for me to rest without

feeling guilty.

I think from reading the posts that a lot of this depression comes from guilt,

this is a terrible disease and we all KNOW we can do better, that we were MORE

than we are now and that we are letting other people DOWN, but we just can't

help it. Just like depression no amount of " snap out of it " will make my body

do what my mind needs it too, so the first line of recovery is to forgive

yourself for not being supersonic. Your a person with a disease and how you

chose to manage that disease is more important than any label used to define it.

When I got divorced I took a 75% pay cut, my parents whinged " your always short

of money, you can't budget " . I took my account to the bank and he said 'how you

manage to pay all your bills is amazing, your doing a fantastic job " . The money

in the house is the same but the perspective is different. You can chose the

glass is half full or half empty either way this aint going anywhere and neither

are you.

My motto when I wake up " Your the strongest person who ever lived, get up'.

OK some days " get up means " read a book " but at least I am not beating myself up

over things I cannot change.

ease up on the guilt and the day will seem brighter, as far as negative people

in your life go get rid of them, you will feel heaps better afterwards.

Bonnie

It's Charlie with enormous gratitude and thanks and a few

questions.

Babs and I are so grateful to everyone who wrote back to us. Thank you all for

being so kind and gracious and comforting and for so many interesting stories

and great advice. I wanted those of you who see me as a good, concerned husband

to know that this is a second marriage for both me and Babs and that neither of

us was a particularly good or kind spouse when we were married to other people.

So there is hope for everyone. I was driven and selfish. Now I do non- profit

work and Babs still does some writing and we are on a very tight budget but our

values are much better. This is much of the reason for downsizing.

We do know about Ebay, have bought many things on there and made one attempt to

sell. I've tried to find someone local to help us with the postings while we

attend to the move. We'll see. May just store the good stuff at a friend's for

now and deal with selling later..

I admit to being quite confused and what is what. Babs is in great pain but what

bothers her even more than that is that she runs a fever many hours of the day

and her glands feel swollen, basically she feels fluish a lot and she hates it.

She tends to get extremely depressed when she runs a fever so this is

disturbing. She has chronic sinusitis and is quite allergic to dust mites.

Nothing touches the fevers, but taking acetominephen and trazodone seem to help

a lot.

B takes cymbalta, generic wellbutrin, trazodone to sleep (the only way she can

sleep) and lorazepam as needed. Are any of these bad for Fibro, does anyone

know, or are any of them good?

Is the fluish feeling part of Fibro or does it sound more like allergies or CFS?

She has not been able to get a concrete answer about anything but the Fibro and

that was a coincidence of being referred to the right allergist and mentioning

to him that she is a trauma survivor. I'm so angry that no one picked up on this

sooner since the not knowing was a bad piece of this.

Sorry for rambling on again and for not reading any other posts for now. I'm

hopeful that some of my questions may help others.

BTW, we have rain, ocean and bird sounds in our clock radio and also have a

sound machine, which I'm pretty sure we got on Ebay, with a huge array of

sounds. We mostly use the white noise but also enjoy the rain, etc.

bless you all. we are so grateful.

Charlie

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