Musings From A WOMI

I’ve been reading.
Mostly cosy mystery type books – they’re easy, quick, and helpful for those days when you just can’t muster up the energy for too much…
Which brings me to the book I’m reading at the moment.

It’s an interesting read.
The author is writing from the perspective of a WOMI (Woman with a Mysterious Illness) and her long fight to find out what’s going on and what to do about it. I haven’t finished reading it, so I don’t know yet how that turns out… She comes from a family of doctors, and has great respect for doctors as a whole, but there’s the acknowledgement that mainstream medicine has no protocol for the myriad of “mysterious illnesses” that are suffered mostly by women, and therefore tends to dismiss any mysterious symptoms as psychological or just “women’s stuff”.
I was recently diagnosed with fibromyalgia, although I’m not sure what that actually means in my case – I’ve been dismissed from the hospital clinic that gave the diagnosis as they can’t do anything for me. Whether the medical establishment mean it or not (and in my experience over the years, some definitely do mean it, and verbalise it freely) these types of symptoms/diagnoses come with a mental eye roll and a sense that you’re just whining and need to sort yourself out.
In the bit I was reading today there was a list of common symptoms found in WOMIs, some of which I hadn’t realised could be linked to the others.

I can check off 50 from that list.
Thankfully they generally don’t appear together, and not necessarily severely – some more than others. There never seems to be a time when I’m not experiencing some combination. Some days are really bad, some are bearable – and I think over the last year or so I’ve learnt how to ignore some things enough to function. I’m certainly not in as dire a state as some people I know, and I am grateful for how well I can function.
But sometimes, I get tired…
And it’s very discouraging, when you’ve had stacks of tests and you still feel generally horrible, to be told that – good news! – there’s nothing wrong with you!
Yay? 😥

The book discusses nutrition and alternative medicine, and sees it as a positive thing. I know that watching what I eat and keeping up with vitamins/herbs etc helps me quite a lot. These can be restricted by cost and sometimes the difficulty in using them (if something requires preparation and it’s a bad day, it’s not going to happen). I would recommend finding a good practitioner. But also realising that there’s no magic pill/herb/concoction. Sometimes, it’s just a balancing act.

I’ll have to finish reading to find out how it ends…