Hello everyone and welcome back. It’s been awhile since last time I was in here talking to you.

A few things has happend the last year. I have gone back to work after my maternity leave, it felt both good and difficult going back. I have also quit one of my jobs. That decision was a very difficult one since I loved that job and my coworkers, but it was necessary for my health. My health did hit a new low.

Back to me going back to work after my maternity leave and why it felt good and difficult at the same time. I stayed home with my son for 8 months living a good slow life with time to read, work out, being social with other people, and feeling pretty damn good healthwise, yet at the end I started to get a bit bored. So I started to look forward to getting back to work, meet my coworkers again and talk about things that where non related to my son and me being a first time mother. I also got a permanently part-time position at my second job. And in the beginning it was amazing, and I really did love working at my first job. Yet as the weeks and months started to go by I started to dread going to work, not because of my job or coworkers, but because I ended up in so much pain after.

It got so bad that I couldn’t do anything at home before work, I just lay on the floor watching my son play with his toys, and more often then not I had so much pain when I came home that I couldn’t lift my child and definitly not go upstairs to put him to bed. My energy also dropped significantly during these months, I stopped taking care of myself, when you looked me in the eyes you would see a veil covering my eyes and you could almost feel like I was gone. So after several talks with my man about this and me being reluctant I did eventually resign my position. When all of this was going on I started to have challenging thougths and feelings about the fact that I started to work again. And I still had my son at home with me during the day.

With everything that happend with my body and my energy being pretty much non-existent it affected my personallife more and more, I needed to take painmeds just to wash my hair and I had help from my man when I needed to wash my hair. If I put a load of dishes in the dishwasher I almost cried at the end of the day due to pain. I stopped living and was just existing. I was so exhausted at the end of the day that I slept so deep that I didn’t wake up when my son cried during the night (luckily I have a amazing man and father to my child so he did all the childcare during the nights). In the past when I was in pain and started to loose energy I would spend a few days just relaxing, sleeping, read and/or watch shows, and after a few days I would be back on “top” again.

However, this time around I didn’t have this choice, I had to get up everyday and be there for my son as he is not in kindergarten yet and his father is at work. I soon realized that my health may have been way worse then I thought it was before I had a child since I had my coping mechanism to handle my pain and everyday things. I can’t use those mechanism anymore without it affecting my family.

I did go to see my primary doctor and it turns out that I have fibromyalgia and as soon as she told me that everything started to fall in place, I finally had an answer to why all of my pain never dissapeared, why I at times get exhausted at the smallest things, why somethings always triggered pain and other things was easy to do. And it explained why I could do one of my jobs that has more hours per shift instead of the other one that was just a few hours per shift. It was never about the amount of time I used at each job, it was what I did at each job. I will talk more about my health and how it has and are affecting my life and how I look at my future in some future posts.

As of right now I am doing good, I manage pain pretty good, my energy is not where I want it to be but I am getting closer.

Love
Emilie Cathrin