Pain, Unfiltered

A lot of rain expected this weekend in New Orleans 😭😫😫

What If She Really Wasn’t a Princess? What If It Was Fibro All Along?

I owe the princess an apology.

All these years, I thought she was just dramatic.

You know the one. The Princess and the Pea. The woman who climbed into a bed stacked with mattress after mattress after mattress and somehow woke up the next morning complaining that she hadn’t slept because there was one little pea buried underneath all of it.

And apparently that proved she was a real princess.

Ma’am.

For most of my life, I would’ve called complete nonsense.

Then I got fibromyalgia.

And now?

I believe that woman.

Actually, I’m starting to wonder if she was even a princess.

What if sis just had fibro?

Because when you live in a body with fibromyalgia, you learn pretty quickly that “that shouldn’t hurt” doesn’t mean much.

There are times when just lying in bed hurts. My hip will start hurting from the pressure of lying on it, so I turn over trying to get comfortable. Then there’s this burning sensation in my legs that I only feel when they’re against the mattress. I can move my leg away from the mattress and the burning eases up. Put it back against the mattress, and there it is again.

Try explaining that to somebody whose body doesn’t do it.

“The mattress is burning my legs.”

Girl, I know how it sounds. 😂

But I also know what I feel.

And that’s what made me start thinking about that princess differently.

Everybody was so focused on how tiny the pea was that nobody stopped to think about what she was actually feeling.

Maybe that’s the part of the story I couldn’t have understood before fibromyalgia.

Everybody else sees the pea. Nobody else feels the pea.

There’s actually a name for pain caused by something that normally wouldn’t hurt: allodynia. Light touch, pressure, clothing against your skin, even lying against a mattress can hurt when your nervous system processes that sensation as pain.

Before fibro, I’m not sure I could’ve understood that either.

If you told me your clothes hurt, I probably would’ve wondered what you meant. If you told me somebody barely touching you hurt, I might have wondered how. And if you told me you could feel one tiny pea underneath a mountain of mattresses?

Girl, please.

Yet here I am.

Maybe She Wasn’t Being Dramatic

That’s the funny thing about living with fibromyalgia. It has made some things that once sounded ridiculous make perfect sense.

Maybe our poor princess wasn’t lying there being picky about the accommodations. Maybe she was flipping from one side to the other all night trying to find a position that didn’t hurt.

Her hip hurt, so she rolled over. Then her shoulder hurt. Then her leg started burning. Then the sheet touching her skin became irritating. Then the pillow she’d already adjusted five times suddenly wasn’t right anymore.

And somewhere around three in the morning, she was probably lying there wondering why she couldn’t just get comfortable like everybody else.

Girl. Come sit by me.

Because now I understand.

Everybody Else Sees the Pea

I think that’s one of the hardest things to explain about chronic pain.

People naturally look at what’s causing the pain and compare it to what they would feel.

They see something that wouldn’t bother them, and without necessarily meaning any harm, they wonder how it could possibly hurt you that much.

But they’re measuring your pain using their nervous system.

And that’s never going to work.

Sometimes I don’t understand why something hurts either. I’ve lived in this body for decades and it can still surprise me. I just know that it hurts.

Maybe that’s what we’ve been missing about the princess all these years. Everybody was examining the pea when the pea was never really the point.

She was the one feeling it.

And that’s the part I understand now.

Princess Fibro

So I’ve officially changed my position on The Princess and the Pea.

I owe that woman an apology.

Maybe somebody accidentally documented the world’s earliest fibromyalgia patient and we’ve spent generations calling that poor woman dramatic. 😂

Because I know something now that I didn’t know when I first heard that story:

Pain doesn’t have to look big to be real.

I don’t need somebody else to understand exactly how my body processes pain before I can trust what I’m feeling in it.

So, Princess, wherever you are…

My bad, girl.

I believe you now.

And if you need me, I’ll be over here adjusting myself in bed for the seventeenth time because my hip doesn’t like the mattress, my leg says the mattress is burning it, and somehow the comfortable position I found ten minutes ago is no longer comfortable.

Maybe you weren’t a princess after all.

Maybe you were one of us.

Fall is on its way that means pressure changes and pain