I stopped gaming when the fibromyalgia became strong. The wrist and hand pain was too extreme, especially if I wanted to continue my career. That pain has improved significantly since then and I have have started to game again. I started off light with turn based games, such as Endless Legends, and the city builder Cities Skylines. I will easily lose myself in one of those games for hours, completely losing track of everything else, hyperfocus (an ADD/ADHD trait) is a curse and a blessing. I have tried some 3rd person shooters, I cannot play those nearly as long before my wrists need a rest. Most recently I started using a controller for racing games, allows me about an hour of game play before I need to rest.

Six months ago I wasn’t even able to use controllers. Within a few minutes my hands would become too stiff, and if I tried to push through, they would become weak. There have been major changes in my life since then, mostly exercise and treatments. The following has helped:

• Yoga shoulder stretches to relieve tension
  • I found three stretches that help me, I encourage people to find ones that work well for them.
  • Be cautious if you have hypermobile joints, it is easy to overstretch and hurt oneself.
• Icing the muscles
  • I ice my shoulders, arms, and wrists, multiple times per day, often working from home on days where I need it more often.
  • I don’t use an actual ice pack, but a cold pack that I keep in my fridge. Ice itself is too cold and will cause more harm than good.
  • 15-30 minutes seems to be a good length for keeping a coldpack on.
• Therapy
  • Chiropractic and massage therapy, seeing my chiropractor has helped me significantly. I went without a chiropractor for two years and it was steadily downhill. Restarted chiropractor therapy and my body is much happier for it.
  • TENS Unit – Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation – I have two
    • Electronic Pulse Massager – inexpensive, but is very useful for spot therapy.
    • Quell – a wearable, I keep it on 24/7 except to charge it. This device helps my entire body, and while expensive, it is worth it to me. It runs an one hour long session every other hour. It communicates over bluetooth with my smart phone, allowing me to change settings see basic statistics. There are negatives, it takes at least a month before it’s completely effective. It also doesn’t work for everyone, but it the company website reports that it works for around 80% of the users. If an inexpensive TENS unit works for you, then a Quell or similar device should also.
  • Medical/chemical
    • This requires a doctor and lots of experimentation. This is not easy, but a good doctor will help. Mine prescribed me a muscle relaxer that I take as needed (usually not more than a couple times per month). Sometimes my muscles will become tensed up and never relax, they forget how to un-tense. The muscle relaxer un-tenses them, allowing the muscles to remember how to be relaxed. This is not a preferred therapy choice as it also relaxes the brain, fogging my thinking, but sometimes it is necessary.
• Ergonomics (with hypermobility in mind)
  • Monitors at eye level, keyboards at the correct height, and a decent chair, all help a little.
  • As a software engineer I’m on the computer all day long, a good ergonomic keyboard is necessary to reduce the wrist motion. While I use the ergo keyboard for programming, I still use a standard keyboard for gaming.
  • Minimizing laptop use as looking down at the screen is not ergonomic.
• Rest
  • Many days I am unable to game, probably the majority of days, and that’s okay. I rest on those days so that I can game or pursue personal coding projects on others.
  • A good pillow. Mine came from my chiropractor, it has helped significantly and I tend to sleep an hour longer with it.
• Exercise
  • When my shoulders and wrists don’t feel strained I am slowly building strength by lifting dumbbells. I just got a new set that allows me to increase weight by 2.5lbs. Small increments are crucial.
  • Walking, I power walk. Power walking is great cardio, but I have to be careful as the arm motions can worsen the shoulder and arm pains. Walking in general helps to build the core and may reduce joint hypermobility.

A few weeks ago, while out for one of my morning power walks, I slipped on wet grass and fell hard. I was trying to avoid a women and her dog, and didn’t realize that I would have no traction on the curb. I did not need help getting home, but it would have been better if I did. I limped for days after the fall, and my hands were in extreme amounts of pain, but I still managed to work.

Now, nearly three weeks later, I still have dull hand pain from that fall. Each day it feels a little better and I expect it to be completely faded the next day, instead the pain just becomes a fraction of one point less. The doctor I see to help with my scoliosis and shoulder/neck pain informed me that I’m experiencing a minor whiplash.

Since the fall I’ve slacked on my exercising. Some stretches, yoga here and there, a little tai chi, but no cardio. Monday night I started cardio exercise again, with some light DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, a video game that uses a dance mat). I felt great that night, but the next day my body was in all sorts of pain, especially the hips and thighs. I still have some of that stamina I’ve been building, but my muscles have weakened and are now out of shape.

Building myself back up, rebuilding what I lost over the few weeks, will not be hard, but there will be pain and aches. The hard part is not over-exercising, which I always seem to do. I’m also hoping that as I rebuild what was lost, my hands will continue to improve. The better my hands feel, the more often I can update my journal. I have some fun hardware projects and software projects to talk about, plus updates to my Aerogarden projects.

There is a lot of research linking fibromyalgia to excessive stress, and I believe it is one of many possible factors. My fibro peaked when I became heavily traumatized a few years ago, but it started long before that.

— Please excuse grammar mistakes, this was originally typed on a mobile phone and hastily edited before bed.

Both of my parents were abusive narcissists, they thought they were doing the right thing, what they needed to raise a strong child. Mom was the physical abuser, dad used mental abuse. Both got worse when they drank, occasionally starting verbal fights with each other. Both of them were strict, Roman Catholic, but not very religious, ex-military, and strength was very important to them. I was weak, often sick, and definitely not like the other children. They ridiculed me for that, almost nightly. We lived in a very liberal, open minded and accepting neighborhood, but I had to live heavily closeted, scared, and be someone I was not. My only hopes in life were to make my parents happy. My greatest fear was losing them, so I did everything possible to keep them happy.

I didn’t have allergies until I was eight or nine, they were triggered by renovation work my parents were doing. My parents didn’t have me wear a mask and I ended up inhaling renovation dust. That dust was one hundred year old victorian house plaster and dust, mixed with various animal hairs, mostly horse. Every couple of years a new symptom would show, usually around times of high stress. It wasn’t long after my allergies started to show  that time they had me start helping them with the family businesses. Weekends and summers were mostly spent cleaning apartments, moldy basements, attics, or yard work for the dozen or more properties we owned in our neighborhood. My parents would buy one or two home a year, and I worked on all of them. I never did a good enough job for them, a constant disappointment. Too often I would be sick the next day, suffering from allergy attacks or sinus issues. Some times they would just be too frustrated with how ‘slow’ I was. I would tell myself that would change after I became a successful engineer.

My asthma started when I was a senior in high school. I had an unfortunate incident with a jacuzzi in an unventilated room that left my lungs scarred. At first my parents didn’t believe me, they assumed it was a yearly wheeze that I had. So they sent me off to school. I pushed through the day even attempting gym class while wheezing for breath. After school was over I was driving and my car broke down, just down the hill from home. It was the longest walk I had ever done at that point, stopping every few feat to catch my breath. My parents still didn’t believe something was wrong and left me with two neighbor children to babysit. By the time my parents returned home I was in bed barely able to breath, the children half freaking out. My parents finally believed me when they had to half carry me down three flights of stairs.

Eventually I went off to college and learned what it was to be a teen and have fun. Fun is dangerous to have, it makes you crave more of it. During my college years I noticed I had a nervous stomach, cast iron unless I was anxious or nervous, useless most mornings. I also started having sleep issues. I would tell myself that was all part of being an adult. My final year of college I started having pains in my wrists, I assumed it was due to poor ergonomics, so I changed my posture, it helped. After college I started working a high stress, low pay, IT job. Some fun once or twice a week helped make it all worth while. I loved to throw a party, I enjoyed a concert every month or two, downtown with friends or coworkers on a Friday. While I was enjoying life, my relationship with my parents continued to disintegrate, and so was my health. As I approached my mid twenties pain continued to worsen in my wrists. My stomach issues started after a high stress month at work, the brain fog began within a year or two of that.

In my mid twenties I started trying to get healthy. I wasn’t sleeping, I was having trouble focusing, there was the increasing wrist pain, and brain fog was starting to become problematic. Doctors told me to exercise more, lose some weight. I really started to love the gym, going three to four times per week with coworkers. I loved that 20-30 minutes of cardio with the headphones in. I would zone out, it was meditation. Another 15-20 minutes of weights, then cool down. I would bike upwards of ten miles, inline skate all day long. I was designing and building new gardens, and learning autobody work. It was great up until the carpal tunnel pain became severe. This time nothing I did helped it improve.

This was my first full fibro attack, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was trying to keep my parents in my life along with being highly active with dozens of hobbies and interests, it was too much stress. At this point I was very successful. My job was a good career, I owned a beautiful house with gardens I loved, one nice car, two vintage cars, and a project in the garage. I had great friends and a recently completed Masters of Science. I was trying to communicate with my parents, yet they refused to listen. I honestly believe they went crazy around this time. They accused me of stealing money from them, lying about my carpal tunnel. This wasn’t what my parents wanted my life to be, they didn’t approve of my life, and within a year they disowned me.

Even disowned and depressed, I was still doing well that year. I was living my life and overall happy. The fibro pain was fading and by mid year I was almost myself again. I had a month a feeling fine (minor aches, nothing disrupting), when my mom sends me my childhood possessions, in pieces. Seeing the broken photo frames, damaged trophies, my childhood smashed, triggered the worst fibro attack. Bodywide pain, fatigue that had me stuck to the ground, and anxiety unlike any I ever experienced.

Within a year I had left my career of nine years, it had turned hostile when I asked for help during my recovery. It was only one person, but no amount they offered me would make me stay, it was time to move on. Packed most of my belongings into storage, then moved to tiny South Florida garden apartment, starting a new leg of my career. The anxiety I felt during the move, while trying to settle, and when attempting to maintain a life nearly crippled me. Three things kept me going, my new job, my boyfriend, and the plan to get better.

My new job is a dream engineering job for an internet company similar to Google. They expect me to get my job done, not be there certain hours. This allows me to work around the fibro and anxiety. I have a great manager who respects my efforts and a company that compensates me fairly. I’m a dedicated worker, and if it wasn’t for the fibro, I would be a much harder worker.

At this point it has been three years since I didn’t have daily pain. Fatigue was a daily problem until early this summer when I finally beat it. I only suffer fatigue if I push myself too hard or on bad fibro days. Anxiety has been nearly constant since I moved, South Florida is a cramped, high stress region, but slowly gaining control. I’m fighting to get better, to get stronger, and eventually move somewhere where I will have myself a home again and be at peace.