I should probably work all of this out in therapy, but that’s expensive and time consuming and I don’t know if my insurance even covers it.

When the pain first started, I was bitter that it had happened to me but then I got pretty decent treatments that helped manage it well and at the time, I could still keep up with most of my hobbies like triathlons and knitting and I was just training for my first half-marathon.

When the fibromyalgia started, it was subtle at first and then suddenly I could barely get out of bed for days at a time because of the muscle pain and fatigue. And with it came the loss of all of the activities that kept me sane dealing with constant, unrelenting pain. I couldn’t do the marathon or triathlon training because walks around the block would leave me fatigued for the rest of the day.

I remember one weekend where I went to training, before I had a definitive diagnosis, and after completing an eight-mile walk/run I couldn’t get out of bed for almost a week due to the fatigue.

Now when I knit my hands and arms tire quickly and the pain sets in almost immediately. I’ve completed only a handful of projects in there four years since I was officially diagnosed.

Losing all of these activities along with the fact that even household chores leave me in extra pain and fatigue makes me angry. For the rest of my life and my kids’ lives we will never be the same because I can’t do all the things I used to do.

And it didn’t have to be this way. With the appropriate workplace accommodations I would have been better able to manage the existing pain so it didn’t have to develop into fibro.

Patients with an existing pain condition are more likely to develop fibro because their neural pathways are already screwed up.

One in fifty Americans have fibro. One in four suffers from chronic pain and it is the most common cause for those going on disability. More people have chronic pain than cancer, diabetes and heart disease combined.

We have a lot to be angry about. There aren’t many effective treatments for pain other than opioid pain medication and it’s not very trendy for research dollars.

In the aftermath if Joffrey’s murder, Sansa finally gets out if the city and is delivered to Lord Baelish. I wonder now if Lord Baelish is responsible for the death of Joffrey based on his comments that he made the necklace and then crushing the stone.

Poor Margaery. So close and yet so far from being queen. Her grandmother remains the smartest person in the whole kingdom.

Now to the elephant in the room – Cersei and Jamie in the sept with Joffrey’s body lying right there, arguing. And Jamie feels compelled to take what he feels is his due and rapes
Cersei on the floor with Joffrey’s body right next to them.

In watching this scene several times over the past week and reading what other bloggers had to say on this issue, I think Cersei’s main complaint isn’t that Jamie is trying to have sex with her but that he’s doing it in the room with Joffrey’s dead body. Nothing excuses rape. But her protestations are “It’s not right. It’s not right. ” meaning they shouldn’t be having sex in the sept with Joffrey’s dead body in the room. If he weren’t in the room, it probably would have been consensual. (And from what I’ve read, in the book it is.)

Aria is really learning fine negotiation skills but still seems so naive about The Hound and how he will behave. She expect him to have a firm moral compass and when he does stray from one of his “rules” she is completely outraged.

Some of these lesser plot lines are a little slow and a little boring and I feel like they add 2-3 minutes of these plot lines just because they have to but it doesn’t seem like they add much. However, I do like seeing the relationship that is developing between Sam and Gilly. I hope he is able to continue to build on the relationship.

Updated Sunday April 27th
The iPad has been found!!! Oliver found it under his bed!! (Even though we looked there twice it somehow got covered up by toy boxes.)

We have one iPad that the kids and I share. It was my 40th birthday present to myself because my ex had just moved out and I had expected that my 40th would be this big celebration. The boys and I have cherished this iPad. It has been a source of entertainment for them and for me. When they go to bed, I relax in bed with either a few different games, a magazine, a book or Facebook. My journal app is also on there.

On Friday April 11th the boys were playing with the iPad before going to their dad’s house and set it down somewhere when he arrived to pick them up and it hasn’t been seen since. I immediately uses the “Find My IPad/iPhone” app but it was “offline” so I put it in lost mode, added a password and my phone number and tore the house apart.

In the past two weeks we’ve torn apart almost every room in this house. The only thing I can think of at this point is that it sprouted legs and walked away because no one else has turned it on within the vicinity of a wifi signal. (If it were turned on then I would immediately receive an email and the iPad would be locked and show my phone number to call to return the iPad.

It is also engraved with my name! I know it is somewhere in the house and we have looked absolutely EVERYWHERE! Monkeyboy and I even looked INSIDE the couch in case it somehow slipped down the crack and got stuck down there. (No luck, wah!)

MonkeyBoy pointed out that if I get a new job I’ll be able to get a new iPad. But I’m rather attached to this one. This one saw me through the long period of unemployment, the death of my dad; it’s entertained my kids through hours in the car as we travelled to Utah to visit family and it’s been my refuge at the end of the day when I’m too tired to do much else. I don’t want another one – I want this one! This one is special and I just want it to show up!!!

I hate it when it’s flare up time. It means I have an increase in my fibro symptoms which means increased fatigue and muscle pain. The best way to describe it is imagine having the flu – not a cold but the real flu, every single day of your life. When you have the flu, you can barely crawl out of bed and you call in sick to work for a week or more because your muscles ache and you just can’t function. People even bring you meals because you are so sick.

Now imagine those symptoms never go away.

Imagine that the muscle ache and fatigue continues every single day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. And you can’t just stay in bed every day because you’ve got kids and dogs and responsibilities and you’ve got to work to support everyone so you’ve got to drag yourself into the shower and try to just make it through the day. Just put one foot in front of the other. Just keep going. Just keep trying.

And maybe the day will be busy and it will distract you and then you won’t be so focused on it. The day might fly by and soon it will be bedtime and then I can take the nighttime dose of medications and sleep, which is about the only time I don’t realize that I hurt so much. (I take half a sleeping pill to help with that – more than that and I’m too groggy the next day).

The next day, it starts all over again.

My boys are dying to have a big birthday party this year and my oldest, Bug, would really like it to be based on his favorite TV show Wipeout.  But throwing a birthday party for them has me really nervous about how long afterwards I’m going to have to pay for it.  A week?  Two weeks?  How much will I sacrifice for them to have the best birthday party they can have.  They already sacrifice so much because their mom is chronically ill; to miss out on having the birthday parties just isn’t fair.  I’m going to do my best and I’m going to call in all the help I can so that it isn’t quite so hard for me but in the end I will still pay.

Every once in awhile we have a really good day. A day where I’m feeling either decent or really good, the kids are behaving and things are just going well. Today is one of those days and I cherish it. There isn’t anything special about today – it’s just a random day at the end of spring break. But I managed to telecommute this week so that the boys wouldn’t have to go to daycare and I could save a few hundred bucks.

Today we sat around together and played cards – a game called “Kings in the Corner” which their dad taught them. We played for a couple of hours in a couple of chunks today and we had a great time! They kept exclaiming that this was the best fun ever and we should do this all the time and have scheduled game night.

I’m so glad for these moments and I cherish them because they don’t happen very often.