Fibro Co-Illnesses

From early on, I felt like all these symptoms had to be connected somehow. But most of the doctors (I went to many) would only look at one problem at a time. I remember I went to one doctor and decided that if I wrote down all the symptoms maybe he would recognize a pattern and figure out what the source of the problem was. He got irritated and wouldn’t even look at the list saying that we can’t possibly work on everything all at once. He missed my point of the list.

Finally one day, my gastroenterologist mentioned, almost in passing, that, though he didn’t know why, very often these problems were all found together. If a person had one, they were much more likely to have the others or at least one of the others. I thought that was comforting news. I wasn’t just slowly falling apart from everything that came along. There is some rhyme and reason to it all. But I still didn’t know the rhyme. So it was still a puzzle that needed to be put together.

I had heard of fibromyalgia but never thought I had it because my symptoms didn’t match that of the three or four others I had met with fibromyalgia. Or so I thought! I seldom had the extreme fatigue. I considered myself to be motivated and active. Also, not everyone with fibromyalgia has fatigue – at least not all the time. I was very fatigued at times and then other times I had energy. So it took years for me to finally put a name on what was causing the problem.

You may feel like you are trying to put pieces of a puzzle together too. It is not easy to continue on like nothing is wrong. Yet you are expected to go on with life. If you are like most with Fibromyalgia, you don’t ‘look’ like anything is wrong with you. You ‘look’ healthy. That actually adds to the frustration of dealing with so much pain and exhaust.

There are a few dozen illnesses that are considered to be fibro co-illnesses. Any combination of these may be found in those with fibro.

Some of the most common related illnesses include:

• Food Sensitivities

• IBS – Irritable Bowel Syndrome

• Raynaud’s Syndrome

• Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome

• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

• Endometriosis

• Orthostatic Intolerance

• Intermittent Insomnia

• TMJ - temporal mandibular joint dysfunction

• Anxiety

• Depression

• Tachycardia – occasional rapid heart rate

• Migraines

• Restless Leg Syndrome

• Chemical Sensitivities

• Allergies

• Costochondritis

• pH Imbalance

• Candida (yeast overgrowth)