Water for Muscles

The beginning of this summer was superb weather wise. People who own homes and grow gardens in this city were upset by the lack of rain because their lawns and plants were dying, but since I water my few planters in my bathtub, it wasn't that big of a deal. I really enjoyed the warm days and cooler nights that allowed me to sleep with my windows wide open and keep the air conditioning bill low.

In the last few weeks, however, we got the rain back and along with it some sweltering heat and humidity. For me, with varied temperature and weather systems comes pain from my fibromyalgia. And since this is the first time I've brought up fibromyalgia on my little blog here, I will tell you a little bit about it. Just a little.

I've had it for eight years (wow, that long already? crazy) and for me it's a cross between chronic fatigue syndrome and arthritis. In the early stages of my illness I had A LOT more symptoms, but that's a whole other post in itself. For now I'll just say that I have gotten over the cognitive issues (I'm pretty sure) and now I just have muscular pain from time to time and some fatigue. Mostly the pain comes with severe weather changes, especially during spring and fall.

It's a difficult illness, but certainly one I've learned to deal with. Although it is hard to have something physically wrong with you that people can't see. You look normal on the outside, but you're suffering on the inside. Also, it's really frustrating to have to leave early from events or not go out at certain times because of changes in weather. I once had to tell a friend that I had to go home early from her birthday party (that I had flown across the country to attend) because it had rained the day before. My body hurt so bad and I was so exhausted that I had to leave and go straight to bed. She understood, but still.

If you can remember back to what the pain from growth spurts felt like when you were a kid, then you have a good idea of what fibromyalgia pain feels like. It's a dull, but strong pain in the muscles, mostly legs and arms. It hurts and is uncomfortable, but after eight years I don't remember what "normal" feels like anymore anyway, so a dull pain is just the new normal.

Anyway, the whole point of bringing this up is that yesterday I had a hard time sitting through work because I was having severe leg pain and even though I took a couple tylenol, it didn't seem to do much good and I was having trouble sitting still at my desk. Thankfully my cousin Leslie called and asked if I'd like to go for a walk with her in the evening and I told her sure and to bring her swim suit if she wanted to head over to my outdoor hot tub afterward. Two of the best things I know of to help leg pain are exercise and hot tubs, so that's exactly what Leslie and I did. We went for a nice long walk and then went over to my pool/hot tub area and had a great time relaxing in the water and drinking wine. Swimming at night with the pool lights on made me feel like I was on vacation, which I enjoying pretending I was on.

But it rained all night and throughout today, so I was sitting at work popping tylenol and dreaming of hot tubs again. Thank God for wine and really hot water.


Picture via