Separate your Pain from your Pain

My first lesson, and one I've learned rather fast if I do say so myself, is as follows:

Not everything is attributable to your disease.

Every corner of my body aches with delicious pain.  Every muscle strains as I move with the reminder of how hard I worked at yoga yesterday.  Can Fibromyalgia take this away?  No.  The syndrome adds pain, certainly, but it is a hurting kind of pain, a pain that puts one on alert and makes ones teeth grind.  This is the pain of exercise.  And I must know how to differentiate.

Learning one has a disease or syndrome can be the ultimate excuse for hypochondria.  Everything instantly becomes a sign of The Spread or The Worsening.  And do not discount this fear.  The constant questions of what body part will hurt next? How will my life next be altered? - these stay with a fibro patient for life.

As someone who has only lived in pain for a year and with a diagnosis for less than a week, I am not the be all of Truth.  But I do think this is a lesson best learned early on: separate your pain from your pain.  And I thank the Lord that, in theory, I understand it (emphasis on 'in theory').