Today I found this article from the American Chromicle and thought that he summed up the problem with Fibromyalgia.?Ç Here is what he says…
The way I understand it, sleep is supposed to be the answer to replenishing your body?¢Ç¨Ñ¢s ability to deal with muscle repair among other things. When you stress your body with exercise or even the normal activities of the day, small micro-tears creep up in the muscle. Sleep fixes this.
Last night, after a movie and dinner, I almost fell to the ground trying to get down some stairs in one of Guanajuato, Mexico?¢Ç¨Ñ¢s tunnels. I stumbled. I wasn?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t hurt. A normal person would have gotten a good laugh at his lack of coordination and forgotten about it.
My body wouldn?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t let me forget. No, sir.
Exercise, carrying something heavier than you?¢Ç¨Ñ¢re used to, a fall in a ill-lit tunnel, can cause tiny, sometimes unnoticeable tears in your muscle. Usually, when you sleep, you body releases amounts of hormones that repair those micro-tears. In the body of someone with FMS, this does not happen.
Sleep disturbance is one of the features of this disease. We have what some experts call the ?¢Ç¨?ìAlpha-Delta Sleep Interruption?¢Ç¨¬ù. This is where someone with FMS falls asleep, and we go from the Alpha stage, or stage one, to the Delta stage, or stage four, something jerks us out of the much needed stage four sleep and back into one of the other sleep stages.
If you?¢Ç¨Ñ¢ve ever had surgery where they slip you something that just barely knocks you out and you can hear and sense some things going on in the operating room, this is what it feels like to be caught in this hideous state where you can?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t quite fall asleep. I cannot begin to convey to you the utter frustration I go through when I can?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t sleep.
Sometimes I wake from this trance and sometimes I don?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t. I just lay there knowing I can?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t sleep but in a sleep limbo.
People with FMS usually can fall asleep easily enough. That is how I am. I can fall asleep but when in an FMS flare-up, caused by a near fall to the ground, I usually wake up 3-4 hours later. I am wide-awake and have to get up. To lay there would cause my never-ending pain to get worse.
If this sounds like a confusing nightmare, you have no idea. When I fell last night, I knew that the fall I took would come back like a delayed fuse. And it did. It hit me a few hours later and roused me out of sleep. I had to get up and hunt for the pain pills.
This is the cycle: The pain prevents sleep. The sleeplessness produces more pain. This creates fatigue. The Alpha-Delta Sleep Interruption doesn?¢Ç¨Ñ¢t allow your body to repair, this produces more pain, and you are in a constant stage of fatigue, pain, and depression from it all. Sometimes you can hit a remission plateau of sorts, where you are feeling pretty good and then something happens. You ?¢Ç¨?ìover do it?¢Ç¨¬ù, like a near fall-on-your-face mishap, and it starts the cycle all over again.
It never ends.
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