An Open Letter To the Families, Friends, & Lovers

Of Fibromites Everywhere.

Then understand how much I need you. Not just to help me pick things up, or dress, or clean my house and take out the trash. Understand I need your tender touch, gracious attention, your presence in my day.

Know that I am in pain. Constant, often agonizing, muscle splitting, limb stiffening pain. The workings of my heart have not changed though. I still have desires, I still have and feel love.

Just because you see me living in housebound isolation does not mean I choose it, it means, on most days I am ISOLATED, and therefore lonely. I’m not avoiding you, I need to see your face, I want to be with you. Even if it is only to nap in the knowledge you are here. To gently cuddle as I slumber.

*Normal* people, don't get it, think I may be a great sacrifice, duty or inconvenience, to come visit, to end my isolation from humanity, if but for a short time. Their schedules are demanding, they say, they have to rest, they say, they're working so much.

I understand.

My schedule is demanding too. In the midst of pain only diverted by distracting loving touch, I rise and meet my schedule of Dr appointments, medical tests, therapies, and agonizing bus rides to & fro. When not so engaged, I find the resulting fatigue demanding I rest too.

So we have a commonality, we meet life on life’s terms, the difference is you go out and meet life, I may be depending on you to feel really alive.

~M~7/18/05