it’s a car-crash life

Yesterday, after several months of research including various blood tests carried out through my GP, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia at our hospital’s Rheumatology Department.

The most common symptoms of this condition are:

• Pain and stiffness all over the body
• Fatigue
• Increased sensitivity to pain
• Tenderness to touch
• Difficulty sleeping/unrefreshed sleep – waking up tired and stiff
• Sexual dysfunction
• Mood disturbances
• Anxiety/psychological distress
• Problems with mental processes (known as “fibro-fog”) – cognitive problems including lack of concentration, temporary memory impairment and word mix-up
• Clumsiness and dizziness
• Dryness in mouth, eyes and nose
• Headaches – ranging from ordinary types to migraine
• Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) – a digestive condition alternating diarrhoea and constipation, sometimes accompanied by stomach pain, bloating or nausea
• Allergies and chemical sensitivities
• Hypersensitivity to cold/heat changes in the weather and to noise, bright lights, smoke and other environmental factors

And were it not for the fact that I was (very) late diagnosed with ADHD aged 58, and joined social media groups for support, advice and shoulders to lean on, I wouldn’t even have considered my ongoing aches and pains as anything but general ageing.

Or the way I slept. The way I sat. Even the ‘wrong’ footwear.

I must’ve spent a fortune in osteopath, chiropractor, acupuncture, hypnosis, inner soles and OTC pain meds, and the above list describes how I’ve felt to a tee. Not just now, but for many years.

Fibromyalgia can be triggered by trauma experiences such as sudden life changes including chronic illness, bereavement, divorce, redundancy, etc, and although I’ve experienced all of these, the one which stood out when I was researching it, was car accidents.

I even view my second marriage as a car crash.  

And, oddly enough, on our first wedding anniversary which we spent in Devon, my legs hurt so much that on one day we had to get a taxi back from a walk along a river. I remember feeling so embarrassed. A new wife who couldn’t walk. I had trouble sleeping because of the pain and it affected both our enjoyment of the break. When we got home, I was diagnosed with Trochanteric Bursitis which, over the course of 4 years, necessitated steroid injections in alternate legs every six months so I could get to work.

Then the following year I had two car crashes within the space of 16 weeks.

The first was a head-on, and to this day I can still smell my skin burning and feel the sensation of blood tickling my face as it slid from head to chin. I often believe my arms are covered with the white powder ejected with the airbags, and brush it needlessly away. 

The times that I drive (which are so rare I need to take a battery charger with me) I visualise it happening. I hear the sound of metal scraping against metal as the idiot teenager let his car careen into mine whilst texting his girlfriend with his head bowed.

I wish (now) I’d had the sense to have taken him to court to claim compensation. But I was in a state of extended shock. We ended up out of pocket due to our car being less than a year old, so lost the value of the loan we’d taken out for it.  Then we extended the loan for a second-hand car. My at-the-time-husband was practically useless and did nothing to look into any recourse we might have had to reclaim these financial losses. In fact, he expected me to be able to put the whole thing behind me after a month or so and move on.  

My daughter turned 16 three days after this crash, and my first thought as I stared at the smoke, the blood and the white powder (which had initially made me believe I was in heaven) was how I was going to pick up her cake now the car was wrecked. And in photographs of me at her party later that week, I’m standing with both my arms wrapped around my body (think straight-jacket but without the actual straightjacket), my mouth widened in a kind of smile-grimace. I look hollowed-out.

Afterwards I couldn’t drive to collect my daughter from places in the evenings, so my husband would, and I forced myself to go with him, hoping it might help overcome my fear of being in a car. But if I asked him to slow down because it was scaring me (in the dark, around unlit country roads) he’d laugh, tell me he wasn’t exceeding the speed limit and to just relax.

So I’d sit there, rigid with fear, my eyes clamped shut the entire time.

Sixteen weeks after the head-on, this car was also written-off…

…by a mother hurrying to the same school I’d just —thankfully—dropped my daughter off at. She sped out of a left-hand side-road and rammed into the passenger side of my car, crushing it and shunting me across the road into the path of oncoming traffic. A car thankfully braked before hitting me and I can still see the man’s face with his mouth open, staring at me through both his windscreen and mine, at what he’d just witnessed.

Now I’ve written that, it’s no bloody wonder I was a mess afterwards. Not just physically but mentally. And even though I had the regular 6-weeks NHS counselling for PTSD and my antidepressants kept being increased, nothing allayed the fear that this was going to happen again. That ‘things come in threes’ scenario played in my mind for a very long time.

I’d also only been married 2 years, and the aftermath of these crashes, I’m certain, were the largest nails in our matrimonial coffin. I think I even recognised this at the time but didn’t have the energy or conviction to say or do anything about it. All I knew was that I needed to keep going. For my daughter’s sake if not for the sake of this fledgling marriage which I really didn’t want to believe could be so easily broken.

I hadn’t felt any kind of strength or support from him following these crashes. If it hadn’t been for a one of my colleague’s suggestions, then the ‘No-Win-No-Fee’ compensation I got after the second crash wouldn’t have happened either. And I felt completely gutted when the No-Win-No-Fee solicitor told me the basic sum I could have been awarded for the first crash—a head-on, a speeding teen who’d just passed his test, who was texting and who’d subsequently had his license suspended—because it would’ve completely turned our financial losses around. I cried so hard when I heard the amount. It would have taken one phone call.

So, three car crashes in as many years might’ve gone some way towards the particular trauma event/s which could’ve triggered my Fibromyalgia onset. There’s no sure way of knowing, only of piecing together the past.

And there’s also the fact that it IS a comorbidity of ADHD, of course… the conditions of which exacerbate anxiety, tension, depression, cognitive impairment, fatigue, and the endless slew of other things which accompany neurodiversity.

I messaged a friend after I’d told my daughter that Fibromyalgia had been confirmed and she wanted to know what difference having a diagnosis would make. My response was the same as when I had my ADHD diagnosis: it’s good to be heard and to know I’m not going mad or making things up to get attention.

Because I never thought it was important, these pains and my suffering. Often, I actually believed I deserved it and didn’t think I’d be heard; I’d just be “making a fuss about nothing” and wasting a medical professional’s time. I have my parents to thank for instilling these terrible, damaging, automatic beliefs in myself.