The most annoying & frequent piece of advice I get from healthy people is “just be happy”. I usually reply with “I will as soon as you stop being stupid”. There are always lots of studies/books/rumors spread about pain & happy thoughts. One of the first books I read after getting fibromyalgia is “Love, Medicine & Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self Healing from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients” by Bernie S. Siegel M.D.  I liked this book because it was inspirational & was my first clue that Dr.’s were trained to be a little stand offish and not get emotionally involved with patients. 

Since then, I have grown to hate this book, the book in itself is fine, but when put in the hands of a healthy person it is a very dangerous thing.  It’s a given that anyone who has read this book, or subscribes to the idea of happy thoughts curing pain will become my enemy for life. I have to sit & listen to stories of a person dying from cancer being cured by watching the “Three Stooges” everyday.  Or the one about the little boy who’s chemotherapy never made him sick because his parents told him he wouldn’t throw up and he believed them.  Yes, the mind is a powerful thing.  However, these stories are the EXCEPTION.  See how I typed in all caps, that’s how important it is. There are many happy, chronically ill people who just have to keep going & living in pain.  The general misconception from these kinds of healthy people is I just don’t want it bad enough, or I like being sick.  Great support, that’s going to cure me.  Truth is, I am happy, but it’s very difficult to be bubbly when you haven’t slept soundly in 13 years, when whenever you figure out what you want you can’t accomplish most of it, when you have to nap 5 times a day, & walk like an 80 year old at 24 while everyone else your age is out dancing and even your eyelids & fingernails hurt.  So, I think that happiness probably won’t cure me, but it makes life worth it.  I don’t know if it decreases my pain level at all, but when I’m doing something I like, I’m generally a little bit distracted from it & that’s nice. It’s not like I’m losing anything by trying to be happy, happiness is the goal of most people, so even if I stay sick, I still will have done something that most can’t: be happy.  So, I will always share this theory with fibromites & always fight to the bitter end to the healthy people who ruin it for the rest of us.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Fibromyalgia Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.