Right, time for part two of my epic post on physical sensitivity and all the things that are tangled up in that web. I’ll try and keep things… um… making sense and on track and stuff. {And by the way, I have no idea why this paragraph has gone all "reverse indent" on me, or how to fix it!}
Pain:
I have fibromyalgia – which I sometimes call hypochondriac syndrome. Basically, FMS (short for Fibromyalgia Syndrome) is something, like Aspergers, that you are born with. It’s Chronic Pain Syndrome – something to do with connective fibres and soft tissues, basically. Kind of a form of arthritis I guess, but not quite. I have found out, since I started looking into Aspergers and the online communities around, that quite frequently females with Aspergers also have FMS. I would say it’s a co-morbid possibility but… I have really lapsed on my AS research of late. It was an obsession at the start, back when The Aspie Bestie was diagnosed and I discovered Aspergers and the possibility I might have it, but then it… {I haven’t the words to put here, which is an unusual thing for me, especially when I’m writing. I just sort of stopped being so fanatically into Aspergers, after reading Aspergirls by Rudy Simone the first time. Also in late March I met a girl who described herself as ‘mildly’ aspergers, which made me thing “If she’s mild, I probably won’t even be a speck on the spectrum” and I went off it more, although I still wanted a diagnosis to be sure.}
Anyway, FMS is all about pain. So I have a lot of things that I always just attributed to that. Every so often I would have what I called “a bad fibro day” and on those days even the hairs on my arms moving (in the breeze, or being moved by clothes or people touching them, I don’t have sentient arm hairs) would cause enough pain that I didn’t want to function. I would have to get up in the night and shave my legs, and compulsively moisturise my entire body, because my leg hairs were irritating, and I could feel my skin dehydrating and it hurt. Not every night, just sometimes. Take now, for example. I can feel the cold seeping into my bones, my hips/pelvis near the base of my spine, and into the sides of my breast area. The cold is sharp and insidious and biting. The pressure on this bone/joint area – just from the weight of me sitting down – makes it worse. It’s getting so that all I can think of is this pain. If I didn’t have to be at work, for the money, I wouldn’t be sitting at all. I actually have a lot of days where I can’t sit for long periods of time, due to the FMS, and most of the time at home is spent in bed. Hoppy called me lazy but if you were in pain most of the time, wouldn’t you want to be lying down a lot?
Now, knowing what I know, I’m more inclined to attribute those days to Aspie Hypersensitivity. Or some of them at least.
Hypersensitivity to external stimuli would be a very reasonable explanation for the pain or discomfort I feel most of the time. Lights and smells and sounds can all cause irritation that is translated into a headache that won’t go away. When my sense of touch {for lack of a better thing to call it} is being hypersensitive, that will be the cause of the days where clothes irritate me and I can feel each individual hair being ruffled or my dry skin feels too tight, too dry to the point of pain.
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