Describe your Fibro Pain | Arthritis Information
I was wondering if anyone could describe their Fibro muscle pain for me.
I have not really ever had a bout of fibro, until a couple of weeks ago, when I had that bad fibro flare, which to me it was just an RA flare.
Anyways...
I do not really have muscle pain like I have been reading about. My muscles are more sensitive to the touch. Like if someone grabs my arm and lightly squeezes or I push up against something, that area will feel like someone punched me there for hours and sometimes days. It is like my muscle is very tender. It hurts so bad that I will look at where it hurts and think "That's gonna leave a mark." But next day no bruise, nothing.
I also get a burning pain in some parts of my body. Mostly in between my shoulder blades, and it gets increasingly worse the more I use my arms, sit up or even stand. The burning goes from a warm feeling then if I do not lay down and stop what I am doing it will getting increasingly hotter to the point of feeling like a really bad sunburn. It hurts to lay on it when it is burning, so I lay on my side.
Does any of this sound like fibro to you?
It's all bad. I get tendons that actually stick out. Yes i can see my fibro sometimes. You can get nots in it. They get tight and shrink thats what fibro is a condition of the tendons and ligements. I have been all drawn up to one side before. Also sometimes my chest gets so tight i can not fit in it. My RA hurts to the touch more so than the fibro. I mean if you push really hard in the spots they do for the test it hurts. Well i take that back when i was at the RD he touched my back and i screamed. I was actually hurting before he touched it and wowwy!! He said have you had an mri of your thoratic spine. I said my whole spine that is actually an area with nothing wrong with it. It was awful and I already knew it was fibro. I thought it was funny he was like did you herniate a disk. It was all better about two days later. My fibro stuff either goes away faster or moves around faster then my RA stuff thats how i can tell when i am starting to swell because my pain is more continuous and lingers for weeks before i flare or while i am flaring then my fibro is worse. I can get fibro that last several days in one spot. Alot of time is like my foot, then my other leg then what ever and sometimes is in more areas then others. I noticed when my knees quit swelling then i had fibro for a few weeks on the outside of my knees. I do not know how to tell what is RA stiffness and fibro stiffness that is confussing to me. Also i noticed last flare that my chest even had some swelling in it and that really confused me. When i say my chest gets tight i mean it is like a bad bad girdle it is all around the ribcage. And i mean tight tight!!! ALso my chin and front of neck area gets all tightened up and i feel as i had a to tight face lift. And the tendon in the back of the neck gets so tight and goes up into the back of my head. It gets stiff and sticks out. Owy. personally disagree with your RD on the burning sensation I think that is more RA related. I live in this body and i think i have a pretty good idea of whats going on. But i could be wrong. For me if i am flaring i do not care the difference pain is pain. If i am sick and can treat that i can kick the fibro. If i am flaring i don't stand a chance it seems.
You talk about the tendon in the back of your neck gets so tight and goes up into the back of your head. I get something similar to that A LOT. I am just not sure if it is a tendon or a muscle, because it also effects my shoulder and collar bone.
It gets so tight it makes my head lean to the right. When I explained it to my RD and how stiff my neck was and how it was so painful that the pain went up the right side of the back of my head and just stopping a little before my ear, and the pain effects my eyes and feels like a REALLY BAD headache. Then she told me it sounded more like a migrain. I told her no, it only happens when my neck gets so stiff and tense like it has been. Then she said it was a really bad fibro flare, because of how my ribs hurt and how I just felt weighed down.
Then that is when I went into how I hear fluid "swishing" around in my neck when I move my head, and how it gets so stiff and painful, and how I had those 2 mini blackouts when I moved my head. She said it sounded like inflammation pressing on my spinal cord from where I forced my neck to move.
But the weird thing is... if it was fibro that was bothering my neck so bad, then why when I got put on the pred taper, my neck has been fine and not much stiffness or even being tense?
Now that I am down to 20mg of pred, I can hear the fluid "swishing" around in my neck again, and it is starting to get tense again, and the stiffness I can still work out by rotating my head, but when I do that... I can hear the fluid swish. When I say swish I mean it is almost the same sound you hear when you suck slobber thru your teeth. That is what it sounds like.
Oh well... maybe the x-rays I had took will help her to figure out what is wrong with my neck. I am sure hoping so... because those mini blackouts are pretty damn scary. One minute you can see the next second everything is pitch black and then everything starts to slowly fade back to being in light again.
Well thats because the RA swelling was aggravating something and still you can have fibro at the same time as RA. I mean both were bothering me last night. The RA swelling stirs up the fibro. And yes i wonder if it's not just the RA swelling in the joint to the upper back swelling causing that tendon to get so tight in the neck. Thats what i mean when i am flaring with RA i don't try to fiqure out the difference. Cause then my brain starts hurting from trying to figure it out and i have enough problems already. LOL
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