I’ve been quiet lately for no particular reason than I’ve been tired and the Fibro has been capricious. One day I’ll be fine a low grade 3 or 4 (where I normally cruise on the pain scale) and then I’ll have a day like yesterday where I was spiking at a 6 during work hours. I hate it when that happens during a work day. If I’m going to hurt like that, where I feel like I have to immobilize the offending area, it would be nice if I had the ability to lay down and do so. Today I’m down to a 4 or 5. I’ll take it.
Fibromyalgia, at least the way I experience it, has two pain components. There is the pressure point pain, where I have to be lightly pressed or rubbed to feel gasp-worthy pain, and the always present ache portion of the equation. That part of it is always there, to varying degrees. This is the (usually) dull or throbbing ache in various parts of my body, so many different parts that I usually just call it whole body pain. It’s either apparent while I’m at rest (either laying or sitting) or noticeable when moving or stretching doing normal daily activities like reaching for something at my desk, or bending over. Your instinctual reaction is to restrict your movements since they either hurt right away, or will hurt soon afterwards, and this leads to a gradual inflexibility and a loss of range of motion. The blackly comedic note here is that exercise is the most common recommendation from your doctor to combat this. Fibro’s final gift is exhaustion.
Yellow Squash in the making.
One way for me to combat my pathetically sedentary lifestyle is through my garden. I don’t care how I feel when I get home from work. I pick up the hose, water the flower bed, and then walk down to the raised beds. I water the plants if they need it, and make sure I grab every single weed I can find. Though the beds are raised, I don’t have a stool or gardening bench so I’m bending over and reaching around the 4×4 beds. By the time I’ve inspected all the plants and eradicated the weeds, I’m usually sweating from the sun and hurting. The process takes me roughly 10-15 minutes total. I put up with the discomfort because I love seeing how my plants have grown since the day before. My garden is exciting, even if the maintenance is painful at times. It got off to a false and poor start in the early spring, so who knows what my harvest will be like, but I don’t care. Each year I’ll learn something new and will, I’m sure, be better than the last.
Juvenile heirloom tomatoes (from a mixed packet, it's a surprise). How I wish I hadn't killed the first batch.
My evenings have been spent knitting away and I’m making great progress with the shawls. Not being a particularly fast knitter, it’s the consistency that wins the day for me. Think of me as the tortoise. If you go by the chart, I’m more than 2/3 done with both, and further along on the copper Flamenco shawl. Last night I did the math and found that I have 18 rows to go. Of course, each working row (knit side) takes me well over 30 minutes. It bears keeping in mind that I’m reading a lace chart and watching TV at the same time, which does require split concentration. Painted Sun would be just as far along, chart wise, but I added 20 rows to lengthen it. I haven’t been pushing to go faster because it’s far to easy to give yourself a knitting injury at the best of times, and two shawls are particularly demanding for someone with my limitations. In related good news, I’m not sick of either shawl yet, for which I am profoundly grateful.
Shawl in photo is larger than it appears.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t have to fight off the urge to grab a hook and start crocheting the Midsummer’s Night Shawl from the summer issue of Interweave Crochet. Click on the photo to see the project description on the Crochet Me website. That’s some strong juju there.
