During my first month with fibromyalgia, I lived in a daze. Bizarre new sensations were plaguing my body that I had never felt before. What, for example, were my fluttering heart and inexplicable new intolerance to the heat trying to tell me? Or the seismic waves of pain racking my body, my sudden apathy to sex and my new inability to digest previously loved foods? I initially attributed it all to the heat in New Delhi and carried on, hoping for the best.
But the rapid worsening of symptoms made it hard to ignore them. In the absence of an answer, I turned to the web, where WebMD suggested lung cancer and allergies with cheerful alacrity. I cheated on one doctor with the next, experimenting with one’s test and then another’s treatment, like physician’s roulette, but nothing worked. And then, one day, a wizened rheumatologist squeezed mounds of my flesh between the tips of his fingers and hmmed and ahhed before ruling me a survivor of the chronic pain syndrome, fibromyalgia.
As it turns out, I’m one in a vast pool of fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) sufferers. The condition affects 10 million people just in the U.S., and an estimated 80 to 90 percent of all diagnosed patients in the world are women. But the jury’s been out for decades on what causes it. Conjectures vary from family history of rheumatoid illnesses to childhood trauma and severe physical or emotional stress. To make matters more difficult, a general practitioner can't confirm or rule the condition out through bloodwork or an X-ray. “Widespread pain for over three months” — the key criteria for a fibromyalgia diagnosis — could also point to other conditions, all of which need to be laboriously ruled out before a patient receives the diagnosis.
