Do you have fibromyalgia and would like to feel like you are making progress? Would you like to feel like you have some sense of control over your day to day life? Would you like to maybe even feel positive about life with fibromyalgia? Would you like to feel like YOU are winning the war?

Well, of course I can’t promise these things and I don’t pretend to know everything about fibromyalgia, not even close. But I can say, for real, that is how I feel. I can also say, I feel I know what it is that I do that makes me feel this way. I have had fibromyalgia since the summer of 2002 and I have never taken any ongoing medications to treat it.

However, I feel like I control it.

Now, I want to share with you the things I believe I’ve learned make me feel this way, in the hope that they may improve how you feel as well. I want to share what I’ve fought hard to learn (and continue to learn), through basically, trial-and-error-living with this very real and changing condition. It continues to be a work-in-progress but I feel I am winning the war, if not every battle.

I think it’s time I add my voice to the discussion and in doing so, possibly shed some light for you in your battle, maybe even be a catalyst in your struggle to gain control. Just maybe the things that work for me may work for you too, or at least supplement what you are currently doing to battle this very real and ongoing every day struggle that we face having fibromyalgia.

I guess a key thing to know about me is I still lead a busy life.

Over the years I have refused to let fibromyalgia stop me from doing the things I need and want to be doing in life.

I am an entrepreneurial business woman, working part-time in a consulting business with my husband, while I keep up a busy household of five that includes three grown sons in their early twenties, all still living at home attending university and recently graduated. I am up by 6:30 a.m. five days a week to work out before I start driving kids to work or bus stations, before I get on with my day of either business work or household work. Though I try for earlier, I usually don’t get to bed until 12:30 a.m. each week night when I’ve finished everything I want to get done.

Granted, I am not always going at the pace I’d like, and I have my impromptu naps and times I don’t get as much done as I’d planned… life with fibromyalgia can feel real tough. (It’s incredibly hard to believe some still ask “Is fibromyalgia real?”!) But what I know is real, is the fact that I am managing to keep all this up and feel a sense of control over my day to day life, is due to my constant efforts to manage my fibromyalgia with the knowledge of it that I have learned over the years.

I definitely don’t consider myself any kind of expert with respect to fibromyalgia, far from it. I speak only from my own personal experience with managing this condition and this experience is ever changing and evolving.

I am writing this blog in the hope that my story may inspire progress in someone else, maybe you. And just maybe, one more voice added to the discussion will help to enlighten others and perhaps aid in quelling that question we fibromyalgia sufferers find so very incredulous…”Is fibromyalgia real?”!

Thank you for taking the time to read what I know is real.