I want to talk about the fibro symptom that makes me laugh, despite the fact that it is painful. I don't know if it has a real name or not but I call it "Twinkle Pain." I have created the visual below to help you understand.
Twinkle, twinkle random twinge,
Like a troll bent on revenge.
Stabbing here and spasms there,
Twinkle pain is everywhere.
The gist of it is that I periodically have pains that jump around. If you think of my body like a christmas tree with a strand of lights wrapped around it, the pains pop up and die away much like the twinkling of a strand of colored lights. Sometimes the pain flashes quickly and sometimes it pulses slowly. It can be a sharp pain, a dull ache, a twinge, or a muscle spasm. Sometimes I twinkle for only a few minutes and other times it is on and off for a couple of hours, or even all day. I can be having a great Lavender day (remember that lavender, mulberry, amethyst scale?) when it suddenly seems like someone switched on the twinkle lights.
So what about this pain makes me laugh, you may be wondering? Well, it is the total randomness of it--I never know what's going to hurt. I've had pain in places that I didn't even know I had or thought could hurt. And sometimes the pain is in a place that I can't really mention to an outsider. The pain can hit me unawares and I utter a cry or an "ow" and then whomever I am with asks if I am okay. Not everyone would understand, "Oh, it's just a sudden, stabbing pain in my right buttock" or "There's a painful twitch near my left nipple." It's the kind of thing that makes having a good sense of humor essential. My former staff would laugh along with me some days; they would see me limping down the hall with leg pain one time and later in the day find me hunched over with upper back pain. When the pain is quick I can have a throb in my left big toe, a stab in my lower back, a twitch in my right eye, and aching in my pelvis all within 5 minutes. For the most part it's annoying more than anything. Not that the pain itself is anything to laugh at--feeling like you're being assaulted by a horde of gremlins armed with spears and arrows is certainly no picnic.
From speaking with friends with other chronic pain conditions, I get the impression that Twinkle Pain is fibro-specific. A good friend of mine who has MS tells me that her pain is almost always in the same area and is fairly predictable. One of the indicators of a fibro diagnosis is pain in all 4 quadrants of the body. It just doesn't always happen at the same time. I have a few areas that always hurt and areas that flare regularly. It's the out-of-nowhere pains that surprise me and can be tougher to deal with. I mean, how do you stretch out toe muscles when your feet feel all crampy and full of knotted muscle? And you can't exactly massage your butt while walking through Target during a Twinkle Pain attack. But like I said, if you can keep a sense of humor it's a little easier to cope with the pain.
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