fear of fibromyalgia

sometime at the end of the 90s i had a job printing stereoscopic photographs. it was really difficult and i only did it because jobs were incredibly competitive and i had just left a lame job as a stand against how they were treating one of my coworkers, ie. immediately. so i took what i could.

while there, i met several stereoscopic photographers and some digital artists who wanted to see their work in 3D. one guy, shawn, i dealt with only online. we emailed to communicate, and he put his work up on an ftp site for me to download. i enjoyed his work, so we talked art, but it wasn't long before he revealed to me that he had a severe case of fibromyalgia. ever since i've been very fearful of getting it. scientists don't know the cause and maybe that's what scares me. or it was his descriptions of how it felt.

he said that it was like his skin had been sewn in a repeated zigzag stitch to his musles in several places on his body, so that when he moved, it pulled. that the pain was so horrendous, that all he could do sometimes to feel better was sit in the sun because heat helped, but hot water hurt. that he couldn't take hot showers, or sleep. that he had become addicted to heroin for several years as a way to deal with the pain, but one day he gave it up because "that wasn't living." that his every single living moment is about dealing with a pain that spreads throughout his entire body every time he moves, or breathes, if he's in a certain position.

and there's nothing anyone can do. there is no treatment.

i only realized recently that this story has lived in me for years and has now become a full-blown obsession. it's because of my finger.

i cut my finger open and got three stitches about 2 months ago. the cut was perfectly situated right down a wrinkle of skin on my left index knuckle. paranoid of bacteria getting into the very deep cut, kept me extremely vigilant about bandaging. maybe too vigilant. i kept a bandage on it for 3 weeks, at which point the stitches were gone and i had gone swimming in the ocean, thus healing the last bit of sliced epidermis. after taking the bandage off, it was clear that i had consequently lost movement in the finger, due to knuckle skin flattening out. i could no longer bend my finger! at night it hurt especially when i would turn over and the finger would be forced to bend. this reminded me of "that artist, shawn" and his fibromyalgia. i imagined it to feel similar. a pain all of it's own, not one related to any other kind of physical pain.

while my sick mind thought up awesome torture techniques like bandaging all of someone's fingers straight for a month and rendering them essentially fingerless, i started to slowly stretch the skin, performing my own physical therapy, that, naturally, no doctor had pointed out that i would need.

now it's been two months and i still can't bend all the way, and truly, it seems that some of the skin has adhered to the muscle or bone, or whatever is directly underneath it. i have shown people, most of whom look at it cluelessly and shrug, but i have found one person who says yes, she has heard of skin adhesions and that it does look like there might be some adhesion action here.

i really have got to stop doing this to myself. this has happened before. i made something bad happen once with tampons because of a story i'd been told, but that's a story for another time. or never.